A Hong Kong bookstore that sold books critical of Chinese leaders, resulting in staff and shareholders being arrested by Beijing, would reopen in Taipei on Saturday next week, its former manager, Lam Wing-kei (林榮基), said on Saturday.
The new Causeway Bay Books store is on the 10th floor of a building near Exit 3 of the Taipei MRT metropolitan railway’s Zhongshan Station, Lam said.
“Public health and safety come first,” Lam said, adding that anyone who is interested is welcome to visit.
Lam raised nearly NT$6 million (US$199,316 at the current exchange rate) through an online fundraising Web site from September to November last year to fund his plan to reopen the bookstore, which he said would serve as a space “for free souls.”
He fled to Taiwan two months after the Hong Kong government proposed a controversial extradition bill in February last year, fearing he would be extradited to China under the bill to face charges of running an illegal business.
He was among five men connected with Causeway Bay Books who disappeared in late 2015. He reappeared in Hong Kong in June 2016 and said he had been abducted and then imprisoned by Chinese security agents.
He said he had been released on bail and allowed to return to Hong Kong to retrieve a hard drive listing the bookstore’s customers, but he refused to return to China and went public, detailing how he was blindfolded by police after crossing the border into Shenzhen and spent months being interrogated in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province.
There was no particular reason he chose April 25 to open the store, Lam said.
There would not be any special activities on the opening day to minimize the risk of overcrowding amid the COVID-19 outbreak, he said.
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