HONG KONG – In the latest crackdown on independent bookselling in the semi-autonomous city, Hong Kong police have carried out coordinated raids on two independent bookstores and arrested five people on charges of violating the 2024 national security law through the alleged sale of seditious publications. The operation, confirmed by police in an official statement Wednesday, marks the third round of arrests targeting independent booksellers since March this year, deepening concerns over shrinking press and publication freedoms in the former British colony.
Visual evidence from multiple local and international media outlets documents the raid on Have A Nice Stay, a bookstore founded by a group of former journalists, located in the busy Mong Kok district. Footage shows uniformed officers removing sealed boxes of materials from the store’s building and leading one bookseller into custody. Just a short distance away, a second raid unfolded at Greenfield Book Store, with video from online news platform The Collective showing law enforcement also seizing boxes of inventory from that location.
In their public statement, police confirmed the two Mong Kok locations were searched and that two men and three women were taken into custody on suspicion of violating the national security law. Investigators found the five suspects allegedly displayed and sold publications intended to stir up public hatred against Hong Kong’s executive government, judiciary and law enforcement institutions, the statement said. The case was originally referred to police by Hong Kong Customs, which discovered the allegedly seditious titles in a shipment arriving from overseas; police have not released the names of the publications in question.
Both targeted stores remained shuttered during their regular operating hours Wednesday, and attempts to reach ownership of Greenfield Book Store and the founder of Have A Nice Stay went unanswered. Notably, Have A Nice Stay had already publicly announced plans to permanently close its doors on August 30, citing unmanageable financial strain and the uncertainty of unwritten regulatory “red lines” that make operating an independent bookstore untenable in today’s Hong Kong.
For decades, Hong Kong built a global reputation as a haven for free expression and open publication, drawing Chinese mainland readers who crossed the border to access books and materials considered too politically sensitive for distribution across the mainland. High-profile cases targeting independent booksellers stretch back nearly a decade: Lam Wing-kee, owner of the iconic Causeway Bay Books, died earlier this month after making global headlines in 2016 when he revealed he had been detained by Chinese mainland authorities during a trip to Shenzhen in 2015. Four other people connected to Causeway Bay Books also disappeared in late 2015, a case that sent shockwaves through Hong Kong’s publishing community and raised urgent questions about the future of the civil liberties Beijing pledged to protect for 50 years after the 1997 handover.
Since the large-scale anti-government protests that roiled the city in 2019, independent bookstores have faced increasingly difficult operating conditions, with multiple crackdowns under the national security framework. Hong Kong authorities maintain that the national security legislation is critical to upholding long-term stability and public order in the city. Secretary for Security Chris Tang has previously stated the government will not publish an official list of banned books, arguing such a list would be unworkable in practice.
This week’s operation is the third targeted action against independent booksellers this year. In March, police arrested the owner and multiple staff members of Book Punch, another independent Hong Kong bookstore, on identical suspicion of selling seditious publications. Among the materials seized in that raid was a biography of jailed former pro-democracy media mogul Jimmy Lai, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in a separate national security case. A second round of arrests came in June, when two more booksellers were taken into custody on suspicion of selling seditious materials and receiving funding from foreign political organizations; all five people arrested in the March and June operations were later released on bail.