“Free Press is of particular concern to me because it is key to the democratization of authoritarian regimes such as China and Russia. Nurturing freedom of expression and responsible journalism, especially among developing nations, is the responsibility of every intellectual in the free world.”

Dr. Willy Lam is an Adjunct Professor at the History Department and the Center for China Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong. A Sinologist with 35 years of experience, he has written ‘Inside China’ for Geostrategy-Direct.com, published seven books about China, including Chinese Politics in the Era of Xi Jinping (New York: Routledge, 2015). His works have been translated into Chinese and Japanese.

His widely-read articles about China for Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post helped establish him as one of the world’s most authoritative China-watchers. A Beijing correspondent until the Tiananmen Incident in 1989, Dr. Lam continued to write as the newspaper’s China editor during the handover of Hong Kong by Britain to China in 1997. His departure from the newspaper in 2000 was regarded as one of the early warning signals of the impact Beijing’s sovereignty would have on basic freedoms in Hong Kong. It prompted a letter of protest at the time to the newspaper from the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club’s Freedom of the Press Committee.