Willy Wo-Lap Lam
Willy Wo-Lap Lam is a Hong Kong journalist, political scientist, and commentator on Chinese politics. He is currently a Jamestown Foundation fellow and an adjunct professor at the Centre for China Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Lam worked for the South China Morning Post until 2000. He was the paper's Beijing correspondent until the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and was China editor during the 1997 handover of Hong Kong. In 1995, he was described as the "quintessential China watcher"; CNN called him "one of the most plugged-in observers of Chinese politics in the world" in 1999. Lam was critical of Jiang Zemin at the time, saying that Jiang had "successfully consolidated his power" but "hasn't used that power to accomplish anything significant". He left the paper in December 2000 complaining of editorial censorship.
Lam has described the direction of Chinese society under Xi Jinping as "the closing of the Chinese mind".
