Five people arrested, materials seized, an independent shop shuttered. The book in question was, allegedly, seditious.
HONG KONG – On July 15, national security officers raided two independent bookshops, Remaining Bookstore and Books & Co., seizing materials and arresting five people on suspicion of possessing publications with what the government termed “seditious intent.” It was not a discreet operation. Officers escorted employees away for questioning in full view, part of what has become a familiar and now almost routine feature of life under the National Security Law: the treatment of bookselling itself as a potential act of subversion against the state.
Hong Kong’s Basic Law, the mini-constitution negotiated as part of the 1997 handover, explicitly guarantees freedom of speech, of the press, and of publication under Article 27. That guarantee has not been formally repealed. It has simply been rendered irrelevant by a parallel legal architecture, the National Security Law imposed directly by Beijing in 2020 and the homegrown Article 23 legislation passed by Hong Kong’s own legislature in 2024, both broad enough to criminalize an almost unlimited range of ordinary expression under the elastic banner of sedition. A bookstore stocking the wrong title is now, in practice, indistinguishable under the law from an actual security threat.
This is not an isolated incident. A previous raid targeted Book Punch, another independent bookseller, whose owner, Pong Yat-ming, appeared before the Kowloon City Magistrates’ Courts earlier this year. Hong Kong Free Press has documented a steady timeline of similar closures, raids, journalist arrests, and government tax audits disproportionately targeting independent media, forming a pattern too consistent to describe as coincidence or overreach by a handful of rogue officers. This is policy, applied with bureaucratic regularity, against precisely the kind of small, independent cultural institutions that any genuinely free society depends on to maintain a public conversation the state does not fully script.
The government’s own defenders will note, accurately, that the raided bookstores remain a tiny fraction of Hong Kong’s commercial life, and that most residents can go about daily business without direct confrontation with national security officers. That argument mistakes the purpose of these raids for their scale. A government does not need to raid every bookstore in a territory to achieve the chilling effect it is after. It needs only to raid enough of them, publicly enough, with sufficient legal cover, that every remaining bookseller, publisher, and writer recalibrates what they are willing to stock, print, or say. Judged by that standard, the July raids were not a failure of proportion. They were a success, on the government’s own terms.
Universities have not been spared this recalibration either. Hong Kong officials have mandated that curricula across the territory’s higher education system incorporate what is officially termed “national security education,” embedding the same expansive, state-defined boundaries of permissible thought directly into the classroom. A generation of Hong Kong students is now being formally instructed, as part of standard coursework, in the version of history and politics the National Security Law was built to enforce, a development that received considerably less international attention than Jimmy Lai’s sentencing but may prove, over a longer horizon, to be the more consequential one.
What makes the bookstore raids worth dwelling on, beyond the immediate harm to five arrested individuals, is how small and mundane the target was. This was not a major broadcaster or a wealthy newspaper tycoon with international profile and legal resources. It was two neighborhood bookshops, the kind of quiet, unglamorous institution that exists in every city and rarely makes international news at all. That the security apparatus considered them worth the resources of a coordinated raid tells you precisely how far down the chain of ordinary civic life this law now reaches, and how little is actually required to trigger it.
The five individuals arrested face potential prosecution under charges that carry serious custodial sentences, following precisely the same legal template that put Jimmy Lai away for twenty years and his former colleagues away for ten. There is no meaningful reason, based on the pattern established over the past six years, to expect their treatment through the courts to differ substantially from that precedent, regardless of how modest the actual materials seized ultimately prove to be.
Independent booksellers elsewhere in the region have reportedly taken note, with at least one Taiwan-based publisher confirming it has quietly stopped shipping certain politically sensitive titles to Hong Kong distributors altogether, choosing to absorb the lost revenue rather than risk exposing local partners to the same legal jeopardy. That kind of quiet, preemptive self-censorship, occurring entirely outside Hong Kong’s borders and without any formal request from Hong Kong authorities, is precisely the kind of far-reaching chilling effect these raids are designed to produce.
It is worth remembering that Hong Kong once had a genuinely thriving independent bookselling scene, one that served as a rare regional outlet for Chinese-language publications banned outright on the mainland, drawing customers from across the border specifically because Hong Kong offered access to material unavailable anywhere else in the Chinese-speaking world. That function, arguably one of Hong Kong’s most distinctive contributions to regional civic life, is now being systematically closed off, shop by shop, arrest by arrest.
For related commentary on how censorship regimes target small, unglamorous targets to maximize chilling effect, see How to Write Satire for the UK and British Onion, along with further analysis at Satirical Website.
Additional coverage at What Is Political Satire?.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/