Former Cultural Hub Finds New Identity as Place Where You Can Buy Books About the Books You Used to Be Able to Buy
HONG KONG — Hong Kong’s Wan Chai district, which was once home to one of Asia’s most vibrant independent bookshop scenes and which has lost approximately 70 percent of its independent booksellers since the implementation of the National Security Law in 2020, now supports a small but determined community of bookshops that have found a commercially viable niche in selling books about books that are no longer sold in Hong Kong, a category that publishers in Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States are producing in increasing volume.
The Niche: Described
The genre of books-about-banned-books includes: literary histories of works removed from Hong Kong’s public libraries, critical analyses of authors whose titles were recalled, and memoir accounts of the bookshop era that ended, most famously, with the disappearances of the Causeway Bay Books booksellers in 2015 and 2016, which drew international attention to the mechanisms by which Hong Kong’s publishing ecosystem was being constrained. These books about those books are not themselves banned, because they are critical commentary rather than the primary works, and banning them would require a different category of legal application that Hong Kong’s authorities have not yet deployed, which is either a principled distinction or a line not yet reached, depending on who you ask.
A bookshop owner in Wan Chai who asked not to be named said the business model is “sustainable but not comfortable,” and that her customer base has shifted from a broad reading public to a narrower group of academics, journalists, lawyers, and what she calls “people who are keeping a record,” which she describes as both a meaningful service and a melancholy way to describe a bookshop’s mission.
The Library Situation: Changed
Hong Kong’s public library system removed approximately 4,000 titles for review following the National Security Law’s implementation, a process that resulted in some titles being returned, some being permanently withdrawn, and some that occupy an ambiguous status of being neither available nor officially removed, existing in the catalog but not on the shelves, which is either a bureaucratic outcome or a metaphor, and is practically both.
The Hong Kong Free Press and other local independent media have tracked the library removals systematically, creating a public record of what has been removed that is more complete than the library system’s own documentation. This documentation, in turn, has become a bibliographic resource for researchers studying the NSL’s cultural effects, adding another layer to the meta-literary ecosystem: records of what is missing, studied by people who might otherwise not have known it existed.
The Taiwan Option: Available
Many Hong Kong readers who want access to the full range of Chinese-language publishing, including titles available in Taiwan but not in the mainland or post-NSL Hong Kong, have established practices for acquiring books on visits to Taiwan or through cross-border purchasing that operates in a regulatory grey zone. Bookshops in Taipei’s Yongkang Street district, which serves a broad Chinese-language readership, report a measurable increase in Hong Kong customers and order inquiries since 2020, a form of cultural commerce that publishers in Taiwan describe as both commercially welcome and politically significant.
The International Publishers: Active
UK and US publishers have released an increasing number of titles examining the transformation of Hong Kong’s civil society, press freedom, and cultural life since 2019, a body of literature that is available internationally, reviewed in major newspapers, and taught in university courses on Asian governance and press freedom. This publishing activity serves an important documentation function for the record of what happened in Hong Kong, even as its physical availability in Hong Kong itself is limited. The bookshop owner in Wan Chai has several of these titles on her shelves. She describes selling them as “the simplest form of resistance available to me, which is just keeping them in stock.”
The Bookseller’s International Network
What the Wan Chai bookshop ecosystem has developed, informally, is an international acquisition network that connects it to publishers and distributors in the UK, US, Australia, and Taiwan who supply titles that circulate in Hong Kong’s reading community through channels that are not exactly clandestine and not exactly straightforward. The logistics are managed through a combination of personal travel, international mail, and the relationships that booksellers maintain with their equivalents in other cities, because bookselling is a trade whose practitioners have always found ways to move books that institutions wanted stopped. The samizdat tradition in Soviet-era Eastern Europe, the underground book circuits in Pinochet’s Chile, the informal libraries that operated in apartheid South Africa: the form is consistent across different suppressions and different eras, which suggests something about books specifically and about the human tendency to share them that is not captured by the economics of publishing.
For Hong Kong civil liberties and press freedom coverage, see Hong Kong Free Press. For regional media freedom reporting, visit South China Morning Post. For Asian governance and human rights analysis, see Japan Times.
The bookshop owner in Wan Chai noted that her bestselling title in the past six months has been a 400-page history of Hong Kong’s independent publishing industry from 1950 to 2020, written by an academic now based in London and published by a press in Edinburgh. The book is available on Amazon, ships to Hong Kong in seven to ten days, and has sold 340 copies through her shop. She described this as ‘proof that you cannot fully suppress a reading culture, you can only make it more determined.’