Hong Kong police have arrested five people working in two independent bookshops, invoking 'national security'. Other bookshops had already been targeted before them.
The crackdown by Chinese authorities on independent bookshops in Hong Kong is intensifying. On 15 July, the very day of the opening of the local Book Fair, five people working in the bookshops Greenfield Book Store and Have A Nice Stay were arrested on charges of selling subversive books. It had already happened in previous months, but in reality independent bookshops have been dealing with oppressive tax audits, closure orders and the arrest of their staff for years.
Local authorities are using national security laws to obstruct the circulation of books critical of the Chinese regime. But the latest wave of repression has triggered an unprecedented wave of international solidarity.
On 15 July, the Book Fair opened in Hong Kong, a cultural event that draws hundreds of thousands of visitors every year. For several years now, the city's independent bookshops have been excluded from the fair — a form of censorship that took hold following the street protests that erupted in 2019 and that led, in 2024, to the passage of a national security law that, among other things, has also struck the cultural industry.
This year, among the bookshops excluded from the Book Fair were Greenfield Book Store and Have A Nice Stay, but the repression did not stop there. On 15 July itself, as the doors of the Fair were opening, the police raided the two bookshops, seized several boxes of books and arrested five people working inside them. The charge is of having displayed and sold seditious material, though no further details were given as to which books constituted a problem. A reconstruction by the Guardian refers to the text "Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping's China", written by NPR journalist Emily Feng and focused on the repression of the Chinese regime, with a chapter devoted to the persecution of Hong Kong bookseller Lam Wing-kee, who later fled to Taiwan.
In a statement, police speak of publications that "incite hatred against the city government, the judiciary and law enforcement". The city's security chief, Chris Tang, declared that "if you are a bookseller, you have the responsibility to ensure that the books you sell do not endanger national security" and compared booksellers to food vendors who must guarantee that the products they sell "do not contain poison".
Last June, Chinese authorities in Hong Kong had arrested Leticia Wong of the Hunter Bookstore. In March it had been Pong Yat-ming's turn, from the Book Punch bookshop. In both cases the charge had been sedition, and the book displayed and sold that was deemed incriminating was the biography of Jimmy Lai, a prominent activist in the 2019 protests, founder of the independent newspaper Apple Daily — shut down by the authorities in 2021 — and now imprisoned with a twenty-year sentence under the national security law.
Apple Daily itself had published an investigation in 2015 revealing that Chinese authorities controlled the three main bookshops in Hong Kong and 80 per cent of the city's publishing market. That same year, five people linked to an independent bookshop who had worked on a book about Xi Jinping's life were arrested and spent several months in prison. Among them was Lam Wing-kee, the bookseller who later fled to Taiwan.
As the non-governmental organisation Human Rights Watch highlights, since the end of 2023 Chinese authorities have imposed tax audits on at least six independent bookshops, while this year the courts have fined the Pong and Book Punch bookshops. Other bookshops have closed altogether. This happened in 2024 to Mount Zero Books, which had long been under the crossfire of cease-and-desist letters from government bodies and anonymous complaints. It was about to happen to Have a Nice Stay, which, before the police raid of 15 July, had already announced the closure of the business within a few weeks, citing the very difficulty of navigating the restrictions imposed by the national security law.
"The escalating attacks on Hong Kong's independent bookshops lay bare the terrifying reality of what the city has become: a place where you can be criminalised simply for what you have on your shelves," denounced Sarah Brooks, Amnesty International's regional deputy director, who added that Hong Kong's authorities must stop using national security and sedition laws to criminalise the peaceful exercise of human rights and ensure that everyone in Hong Kong can access, publish and share ideas without fear of arrest.
The news of the arrests, however, crossed the boundaries of the city and of China and reached Taiwan, the self-governed territory over which Beijing has claimed control for decades. One of the women arrested at Have a Nice Stay was photographed being escorted out of the premises wearing a T-shirt reading "I am a bookshop employee". That same T-shirt has now become widespread in Taiwan, complete with a viral hashtag on social media. Bookshops in Taipei have seen a surge in purchases of the books subject to Chinese censorship and at the centre of the sedition charges against Hong Kong booksellers, to the point where reprints have been requested. During a public address, lawmaker Wu Pei-yi of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which is currently in government, also accused China of "burning books".