Hong Kong bookstore under attack in China reopens in Taiwan

part-owner of a Hong Kong bookstore specializing in texts critical of China’s leaders reopened his shop in Taiwan on Saturday after fleeing Hong Kong due to legal troubles, saying he was grateful for opportunity to make China’s Communist rulers “less than happy.”

opening and accompanying news conference came days after Lam Wing-kee was splattered with red paint by a masked man while sitting alone at a coffee shop in Taiwan. Lam suffered serious physical injuries and showed little sign of attack or than a red tint to his hair.

China’s leaders don’t want to allow a bookstore selling tomes that would “make m uncomfortable or impact on ir political power,” Lam told journalists.

He thanked supporters in both Taiwan and Hong Kong, a semi-automous Chinese territory, for opportunity to start over. “This makes (China’s leaders) less than happy,” said Lam, who raised nearly $200,000 through online fundraising to finance his new venture.

Commenting on Tuesday’s assault, Lam said Communist Party appeared to think it could stifle shop’s business in both Hong Kong and Taiwan by using “underhanded methods of all sorts.”

However, on a slightly pessimistic te, he added that China’s policies had left little room for idealistic young Hong Kongers or than ”into big sea.”

Lam was one of five shareholders and staff at Causeway Bay Book shop in Hong Kong, which sold books and magazines purporting to reveal secrets about inside lives of Chinese leaders and scandals surrounding m.

Along with ors, he was taken across border and put into Chinese custody in 2015, but was released on bail and allowed to return to Hong Kong in June 2016 in order to recover information about his customers stored on a computer.

After refusing to return to China, he went public with accusations that he had been kidnapped and brought to mainland, where he says he was interrogated under duress about his business. Following detentions, shop was forced to close while edgy political texts have largely disappeared from mainstream book retailers under pressure from Beijing.

Lam moved to Taiwan a year ago amid fears over proposed legislation that would have allowed suspects to be extradited to China, likely face torture and unfair trials. Concerns over legislation, which was later withdrawn, sparked months of sometimes violent protests in Hong Kong, a former British colony that has retained its own legal, political and ecomic system after being handed over to mainland in 1997.

Hong Kong police last week arrested 15 prominent lawyers and opposition figures over ir alleged involvement in protests, prompting furr concerns that city’s civil liberties are being eroded by China’s increasingly stringent political controls.

Although claimed by Beijing as its own territory, self-governing Taiwan, with its flourishing democracy and robust defense of civil rights, has become a safe haven for critics of Chinese government.

Two high school students who turned out for Saturday’s event at minuscule shop on 10th floor of a business building in Taipei’s Zhongshan District said y saw its reopening as a sign of both hope and defiance.

“It offers Hong Kong people a safe place to develop,” said one of students, Hsu Shih-hsun.

Taiwan’s own experience with dictatorship and martial law under Nationalist Party leader Chiang Kai-shek, who fled to island with his government ahead of Communist takeover of mainland in 1949, adds special resonance to values bookstore represents, said or student, Wang Tsung-fan.

“I think that this bookstore coming to Taiwan makes us Taiwanese extremely proud. We can give Hong Kong a helping hand,“ Wang said. “After all, our own freedoms were t easily won.”

(AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying)