Hong Kong bookseller in the confessional during eight months of detention in mainland China
Video aired in Beijing shows Lam Wing-kee confessing to selling banned books on the mainland, while depicting him being treated well
It was not the usual videotaped confessions seen on Chinese state television.
On a room-wide screen installed in the heart of the mainland’s formidable public security complex, every bit of Lam Wing-kee’s life as a detainee – his food rations, haircut and medical check – was on display on Tuesday.
The bookseller who defied the mainland’s pre-trial bail conditions and spilled the beans about his ordeal upon returning to Hong Kong was, according to the video released in Beijing, remorseful for his crime of selling “banned books” that carried juicy, critical and, in his own words, “fabricated” details of the Communist Party.
“Hongkongers won’t read these books,” Lam, co-founder of Causeway Bay Books, told mainland interrogators in footage shot from an overhead camera. “Whoever reads them knows they are fabricated, mostly fabricated.”
The 16-minute video provided by the Ministry of Public Security was shown to Hong Kong journalists during talks between high-level Hong Kong and mainland officials on how to fix the mutual notification system that was supposed to have worked in a case like Lam’s.