Hong Kong Police Raid Independent Bookstores, Owners Arrested for Sedition as Third Shop Closes

Chen Zhu makes the trip from Guangzhou to Hong Kong every month for one reason: a bookstore.

Hunter Bookstore sits on a crowded street in Sham Shui Po, wedged between fabric sellers and garages. It stocks accounts of Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement alongside George Orwell's Animal Farm and other allegories on authoritarian control, according to the BBC. For Zhu, 23, the shop is a portal into ideas she can't access at home.

On June 24, national security police raided Hunter Bookstore and arrested owner Letitia Wong, 33, and a 32-year-old man on charges of sedition and money laundering, the BBC reported. Both deny the charges. Both have been released on bail. When Zhu found out, she cried.

That raid wasn't the first, and it wasn't the last.

In March, police arrested the owner of Book Punch along with three employees on the same charges and reportedly seized copies of a biography of Jimmy Lai, the jailed pro-democracy publisher, according to the BBC. On July 15, the opening day of the annual Hong Kong Book Fair, national security police searched two more shops, Greenfield Bookstore and Have a Nice Stay, arresting five people for sedition. They too were released on bail.

Days later, Greenfield announced it was shutting down when its lease expires. "Our store will be closing after our lease expires," the shop wrote on social media, according to the BBC. "Thank you for walking with us, through wind and rain, for 50 years since our opening." It was the third independent bookshop to close within a month.

A refuge that grew out of 2019

Hong Kong's independent bookstore scene expanded after the massive pro-democracy protests of 2019, the BBC reported. These weren't big chains. They were small operations run by people willing to stock material that wouldn't survive a mainland censor: Tiananmen Square retrospectives, biographies of jailed activists, manga like Attack on Titan that reads as an allegory for state control.

Beijing has defended its 2020 National Security Law as necessary to restore order after the 2019 unrest. Hong Kong saw sustained, sometimes violent street clashes for months, and any government has a legitimate interest in public order. But the law's application to booksellers, whose product is words on a page, is a different question than riot control.

Rights groups and many Hong Kongers argue the law has been used well beyond its stated purpose, according to the BBC, and thousands of residents, including former lawmakers and activists, have left the city in recent years as prosecutions under the law have mounted.

The mainland side of the story

The pressure isn't limited to what happens inside Hong Kong's shops. It follows the books across the border.

The Epoch Times reported that a mainland traveler was stopped at the Shenzhen Luohu checkpoint after returning from Hong Kong with seven books, even though Chinese customs rules allow up to 10 books per trip for personal use without duty. She said she'd carried six books through before without incident.

Chinese customs regulations bar material deemed to threaten national security, "defame" the Chinese government, or disrupt social stability, the Epoch Times reported. A retired Shenzhen customs official, identified only by his surname, Li, told the outlet that scrutiny of Hong Kong printed material tightened sharply after 2019, when officials worried travelers would smuggle in protest literature and photos. He said customs maintains an internal list of banned titles.

One frequent book buyer told the Epoch Times that customs officers X-ray all luggage and sometimes ask travelers to open books for inspection, even when the count is under 10. He said officers once confiscated a book about the Cultural Revolution and fined him 500 yuan, about $74.

What readers stand to lose

For 19-year-old Li, a Shanghai reader who gave only her first name, the shops are spaces where she "can see so many possibilities, and where existing ideas can be challenged," according to the BBC. Others describe the same thing: a sense of intellectual freedom and community that doesn't exist on the mainland.

No independent audit exists of how many Hong Kong bookstores have closed specifically due to national security enforcement versus ordinary market pressure like rent and declining foot traffic, and the sources here don't provide that count. What's documented is four raids since March, five arrests in July alone, and three shop closures within one month, per the BBC's reporting.

Letitia Wong and her co-defendant, along with those arrested at Book Punch, Greenfield, and Have a Nice Stay, are all out on bail. Whether prosecutors move forward with sedition and money laundering charges, and what evidence they present, will determine whether Hong Kong's national security courts treat bookselling itself as a crime or whether these cases stall out.