Book Censorship in Hong Kong
#6 in the Hong Kong Repression Monitor series
The Hong Kong Repression Monitor series provides overviews of indicators of repression in Hong Kong, based on research and data collected from 2019 to the present. For more information, see this introduction, which also provides a full list of entries in the series as they are published.
This article is #6 in the Hong Kong Repression Monitor series.
UPDATE, May 5, 2026: Pong Yat-ming, the owner of independent bookstore Book Punch, has been convicted of “running a public entertainment venue without a license” and fined HK$6,000 for hosting a stand-up comedy performance. This is his third conviction. He was previously convicted (see below) of “running an unregistered school” and four related charges having to do with the bookstore hosting a one-off Spanish language class, and “serving alcohol without a license” for allowing sake to be served during a reading of a book by a Japanese writer. He and others associated with Book Punch have also been arrested for “selling seditious publications,” the book in questioned apparently being a biography of Jimmy Lai. Book Punch has repeatedly been “inspected” by various government agencies in a harassment and intimidation campaign that has also targeted other bookstores, and Pong and other bookstore owners have been accused by CCP-owned media of engaging in “soft resistance.”
UPDATE, April 10, 2026: Pong Yat-ming, the owner of independent bookstore Book Punch, has been convicted of “running an unregistered school” and four related charges having to do with the bookstore hosting a one-off Spanish language class, and fined HK$32,000. He is also on trial for “running an entertainment venue without a license” for hosting a standup comedy workshop/performance (see below). He was previously convicted (see below) of “serving alcohol without a license” for allowing sake to be served during a reading of a book by a Japanese writer. Book Punch has repeatedly been “inspected” by various government agencies in a harassment and intimidation campaign that has also targeted other bookstores, and Pong and other bookstore owners have been accused by CCP-owned media of engaging in “soft resistance.”
UPDATE, March 24, 2026: Pong Yat-ming, the owner of independent bookstore Book Punch, and three employees have been arrested on charges of “knowingly publishing seditious publications with seditious intent.” Little is yet known beyond that. Neither Hong Kong police nor government have confirmed the arrests. Reportedly, books were seized at the shop including Mark Clifford’s biography of Jimmy Lai, The Troublemaker. When reporters went to the shop in the late afternoon, they found it closed with a sign outside reading, “Closed for a day due to unforeseen circumstances. Sorry for the inconvenience. This is the first time anyone has been arrested in Hong Kong for selling books since January 2023, when six people were arrested for selling books about the 2019 protests at a pop-up market in Mong Kok. Three of them were eventually convicted of sedition; two were sentenced to five months in prison, one to ten. Besides that, people have been arrested for publishing, importing and possessing seditious books—in all cases, Guardians of Sheep Village. As can be seen below, Pong Yat-ming is currently facing two separate trials for “operating an entertainment venue without a license” (for hosting a standup comedy performance and workshop) and for “running an unregistered school” (for hosting a Spanish language class). He’s previously been convicted for “selling alcohol without a license” for allowing sake to be served during a reading of a Japanese writer’s work. UPDATE: On Thursday, March 26, Book Punch posted that all four of those arrested—the owner, manager and two part-time employees—were released on bail Wednesday evening. This usually means the police and Department of Justice have decided not to formally charge them, at least not for the time being. Book Punch said, “Due to the need for new phones, computers, etc, we will take a break for a while. Scheduled events will be postponed and rescheduled. Looking forward to seeing you again!”
UPDATE, January 13, 2026: Pong Yat-ming, the owner of independent bookstore Book Punch, is charged with operating an entertainment venue without a license for hosting a standup comedy workshop/performance on June 29, 2025. He is contesting the charge and his next appearance in court is on March 3, 2026. (UPDATE: On March 3, he formally plead not guilty and will go on trial on May 5.) This is his third trial. He is also currently on trial for operating an unregistered school without a license for hosting a Spanish language class at Book Punch on April 23, 2025 (see below for details). He was convicted in 2023 of selling alcohol without a license for serving sake at a reading of a book by a Japanese author (see below for details). He has also faced various other forms of persecution including a raid of the store by police, incessant inspections of the bookstore by government agencies, and accusations by CCP-owned Wen Wei Po of engaging in “soft resistance” together with other independent bookstores. This is part of the regime’s ongoing campaign against independent bookstores, which it suspects of being loci of “soft resistance.”
UPDATE, November 20, 2025: Pong Yat-ming, the owner of independent bookstore Book Punch, is charged with running an unregistered school for hosting a Spanish language class at the store on April 23. The bookstore’s parent company, Active Experiential Learning Company (鳴動教育有限公司), also faces two counts: permitting an unregistered teacher to teach and owning a unregistered school. This is the second criminal trial against Pong. In 2023, he was convicted of “selling alcohol without a license” for serving sake at a reading of a book by a Japanese author. Apart from these criminal charges, Book Punch has been incessantly targeted for persecution. In August 2023, it was raided by the police during a talk by two pro-democracy politicians. Within two weeks in December 2023, it was “inspected” ten times by six different government agencies. In May of this year, the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department said it had inspected the bookstore ten times in a period of three months after having received complaints that it was “operating an entertainment venue without a license.” In July of this year, it was one of several bookstores accused by the CCP-owned Wen Wei Po of engaging in “soft resistance” for participating in an independent book fair. Details on all of these episodes can be found below. On January 8, 2026, Pong Yat-ming plead not guilty to five counts associated with the accusation that he and Book Punch’s parent company, Active Experiential Learning Company, “ran an unregistered school” when it hosted a teacher who taught a Spanish class. He faces three counts and his company faces two. The trial is scheduled for March 10.
UPDATE, September 18, 2025: Independent bookstore Book Punch posts to mark its five-year anniversary but also says it expects the number of events it hosts will decrease significantly. The reason for this is that in the past two months, a number of people who were scheduled to appear cancelled. It appears that anonymous complaints are lodged with organizations with which the guest speaker is affiliated, and, under pressure from them, the speaker regretfully informs Book Punch they cannot participate after all, giving Book Punch no other option but to cancel. In its post, Book Punch lists a number of types of organizations targeted: professional associations, universities, organizations that depend on outside funding, organizations that present awards, and businesses and service providers. Following Book Punch’s post, Hunter Bookstore posted that it’s experienced the same, adding that though the nefarious complaints appear to intend to target the independent bookstores, in fact the real damage they do is to the speakers, who avail themselves of appearances at the bookstores to gain publicity for their works in an environment in which it is not easy to alert potential audiences. The upshot is, this is yet another tactic being employed to further constrict freedom of expression and attack independent outlets of culture.
UPDATE, July 21, 2025: In a front-page campaign against “soft resistance” (「趕絕軟對抗」), the CCP-owned Wen Wei Po accused the Independent Book Fair (held July 17 to 20) of “inciting anti-China and Hong Kong chaos” (see also here). It said it conducted an “undercover investigation” and discovered evidence of “soft resistance;” namely, books on sale “contained a significant number of anti-China and Hong Kong-disrupting messages;” staff admitted participating bookstores would be selling a biography of Jimmy Lai; and cash boxes were set up to raise funds for the Hong Kong Journalists Association and were plastered with propaganda promoting black violence. Wen Wei Po and Ta Kung Pao regularly initiate campaigns accusing people in Hong Kong of various political offenses. This creates an atmosphere of intimidation and can lead to the authorities taking enforcement actions. In this particular case, the Wen Wei Po series followed statements by the Chief Executive John Lee on the fifth anniversary of the imposition of the national security law urging vigilance because “soft resistance is real” and national security threats are “pervasive.” The following day, on July 22, Wen Wei Po published another “exposé” about a “soft resistance gang” of shops near the Independent Book Fair in Sham Shui Po that it alleged are part of a conspiracy of resistance (see also here). It said that thanks to its initial article, the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department had conducted inspections the Independent Book Fair. (There has been a pattern of various governmental agencies inspecting and investigating independent bookstores—see below.) It further said that the area around the Independent Book Fair in Sham Shui Po was a “stronghold of the remnants of the black violence movement” and that more than 20 surrounding restaurants and retail outlets were part of cluster of soft resistance. Wen Wei Po identified these shops in promotional brochures handed out at the book fair and when it visited them found various materials it characterized as forms of soft resistance. Wen Wei Po’s campaign against soft resistance attacked not only the independent book fair and its supposed allies but others as well, including Liber Research Community and independent media outlets Witness, The Collective, and Channel WE HK.
UPDATE, June 30, 2025: Former pro-democracy District Councillor and the proprietor of the independent Hunter Bookstore (獵人書店), Letitia Wong, told AP that “her records show government authorities took measures against her shop some 92 times between July 2022 and June 2025, including inspecting her shop, conspicuously patrolling outside, or sending letters warning her of violations.” See below for more on Hunter Bookstore.
UPDATE, May 13, 2025: In response to a media outlet’s questions, the Hong Kong Food and Environmental Hygiene Department said that it had inspected independent bookstore Book Punch (一拳書館) ten times in a period of three months after having received complaints that it was “operating an entertainment venue without a license.” FEHD said it is continuing to investigate and may prosecute if evidence is sufficient. The owner of Book Punch, Pong Yat-ming, has already been prosecuted once (see below). In a post, Book Punch said that the FEHD inspections had to do with events the bookstore held related to the third anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine. It also mentioned that a team from the Education Bureau had recently visited and accused the bookstore of operating as “an unlicensed school” because it was used as a venue for Spanish language classes. On May 8, BBC released a documentary titled, “Rise of the Patriots: Hong Kong,” which, among other things, depicts the persecution of Pong Yat-ming and Book Punch. This kind of harassment and intimidation of independent bookstores has become an all too common feature of the censorship regime in Hong Kong in recent years.
UPDATE, May 9, 2025: Three independent book outlets in Hong Kong have had their applications for a stall at the upcoming official Hong Kong Book Fair in July rejected. Two of these, the publisher Bbluesky and Boundary Bookstore, had stalls at the official book fair in 2024. Their stalls were visited by representatives of the fair organizer, Hong Kong Trade and Development Council, and told to remove “sensitive” books. (See below for more on that.) Their rejection this year came without explanation. They believe it is because of those incidents last year. This is also against the backdrop of the government attempting to prevent independent book outlets from holding their own independent book fair or harassing those who do so while also persecuting independent book stores. (More on that below too.) All of this has the effect of repression of free speech and independent voices, which is seen in just about every other sector of Hong Kong society as well—media, film, libraries, universities, schools, etc.
The previous post in the Hong Kong Repression Monitor series was about film censorship. This is about book censorship.
In some ways, the crackdown on film in Hong Kong makes more sense. Hong Kongers love film. Film is influential. When, after the protests, Hong Kongers wanted to tell the rest of the world their story, to show the rest of the world what had been happening in Hong Kong, they promoted films like “Revolution of Our Times,” which can be regarded as a kind of national epic of Hong Kong.
On the other hand, Hong Kongers have never been renowned as big readers. Part of this has to do with the Hong Kong education system, which has always been and remains colonial to its core, as if designed to suppress the emergence of any kind of separate, strong Hong Kong identity. To the extent that young Hong Kongers are at all exposed to literature in schools, it is usually English literature in excerpt or classical Chinese poetry. On top of this, Hong Kongers have always existed in between languages, both spoken and written. There has never been a widely used written language that felt especially Hong Kongese. I’ve often compared this to Norway, a country with a smaller population than Hong Kong’s and fully independent for only a little more than one hundred years but with a very strong national identity, its literature being an important part of that. If you stop any young Norwegian on the street and ask him to name five Norwegian writers, he can do so in a flash. If you stop a young Hong Konger and ask the same, chances are you’d draw a blank.
So why, then, as part of its systematic crackdown, has the regime gone after books?
There are two ways of answering that question.
The first is to say, in a way, it hasn’t specifically targeted books. Rather it’s imposed an authoritarian system under the guise of “safeguarding national security.” This has unleashed massive forces of repression as well as huge resources, and these do what such forces do, simply expand and envelope ever more sectors of society. For the past four years, “safeguarding national security” has been the dominant political priority, so it’s no surprise that it’s seeped into every crack and crevice.
But look more closely, and you can see that there are indeed specific reasons for going after books. The nature of the crackdown on book culture has been quite specific, and it has proceeded in stages, albeit somewhat overlapping.
It started out with a purging of the shelves of Hong Kong public libraries. Starting not long after the imposition of the first national security law in mid-2020, reports emerged of first dozens and then hundreds of “politically sensitive” titles being removed. The Leisure and Cultural Services Department (LCSD), the governmental administrator of public libraries, has refused to reveal any detailed information regarding which titles and how many books it has removed. Instead, the purge has been tracked by various others (see below). The books tend to be about “sensitive” periods in Chinese history like the Tiananmen Massacre or by or about Hong Kong pro-democracy leaders or “sensitive” periods in Hong Kong history like the Umbrella Movement. In other words, it appears both author and topic were significant factors in deciding which books to remove.
Books, then, have been targeted because they act as repositories of memory and markers of identity independent of the regime. Indeed, one of the primary, overarching objectives of the overall crackdown in Hong Kong has been to impose a narrative of history that supports CCP rule; removing books from libraries that run counter to that narrative fits this authoritarian logic.
Around the time that the first big purge of libraries was being carried out, arrests and prosecutions for publishing, selling, importing and owning books began, all under the UK-colonial-era “sedition” law, which had never before been used in post-handover Hong Kong. As of February 2025, in all, 107 people were arrested for sedition since the first arrest in 2020. (A future Hong Kong Repression Monitor post will present the full data on sedition arrests, prosecutions, convictions and imprisonments.) Of those 107, thirteen were arrested in relation to books. In one of the most absurd of the many absurd political trials in the past five years, five young leaders of the General Union of Hong Kong Speech Therapists were convicted of sedition in September 2022 for publishing three allegorical children’s books and sentenced to 19 months in prison each. The books were about sheep trying to guard their village against attack by wolves. This was considered “incitement of hatred” toward the government and police. Six were arrested for selling books about the 2019 protests at a Lunar New Year market stall in Mong Kok in January 2023. Of those, three were convicted of sedition, one sentenced to eight, one to five, and the third to ten months in prison. In March 2023, a man was arrested for importing 18 copies of the Sheep Village books to Hong Kong from abroad. He was convicted and sentenced to four months in prison. Yet another man was arrested for possessing the Sheep Village books but never prosecuted.
Along with the library purges and sedition arrests and prosecutions, the next stages in the crackdown on books involved ensuring no books at which the authorities looked askance appeared at the official annual book fair, attempting to prevent the holding of independent book fairs, and a series of acts of harassment and intimidation by governmental agencies directed against independent bookstores.
Besides selling books, independent bookstores in Hong Kong often hold gatherings of various kinds including book talks, lectures, and other cultural events. In this regard, they act almost as community centers, giving like-minded people the opportunity to meet and talk. This is an especially important role at a time when independent civil society has been decimated and virtually no public gatherings let alone protests are allowed. As such, the regime regards independent bookstores as potential vectors of “soft resistance”—軟對抗, a phrase coined by the regime in early 2023 that it began to use regularly to signal that it felt confident it had wiped out “hard resistance” and was now moving on to focus on other areas.
An ironic outcome of the crackdown on books in Hong Kong is that it has actually revealed the power of the book, of book people and book culture in a place where books, even in comparison to other cultural forms, have often seemed relatively marginal. Books and book culture act as repositories of memory, expressions of identity, creators of community, and the backbone of an other, different way of living at a time when virtually every form of independent culture and civil society has come under attack.
What follows is divided into sections that look in greater detail at the different stages and facets of the crackdown on books outlined above: first, the purges of the public libraries, then the attempts to control independent book fairs and booksellers.
But before getting to that, I’d like to pay brief tribute to pro-democracy leader Shiu Ka-chun, whose funeral was held this past weekend in Hong Kong. He died all too young, at the age of 55, from stomach cancer in January. Shiu was known for many things. He was himself a political prisoner, among the first political prisoners in post-handover Hong Kong history who went to prison for their roles in the Umbrella Movement. He was a social worker, teacher, and an elected representative in the Legislative Council with a track record of focusing on the plights of disadvantaged and marginalized groups. With the mass political incarceration that followed the 2019 protests, he started Wall-fare (石牆花) to support and advocate for prisoners. It was eventually shut down under intense pressure. But Shiu was also a writer, an author and a book lover, a deeply peaceful, cultured man, and a defender of bookstores (see below for his association with Book Punch in particular). For him, there was little difference between his politics, his activism, and his love of the written word. He did much to support the HK literary community (including buying two copies of my first book about Hong Kong, on the Umbrella Movement!). So it was fitting that at his funeral, a new book was distributed—a compilation of pieces about Shiu himself by the many who knew and loved him.
The purging of public libraries
The Leisure and Cultural Services Department has refused to divulge any information regarding the removal of books from the library system. It said, “The LCSD does not make available the list of library materials removed from library shelves or withdrawn for allegedly breaching the National Security Law or other Hong Kong legislation or for being contrary to the interests of national security…because such announcement may lead to wide circulation of such library materials with malicious intent by other parties or organisations and is thus unfavourable to safeguarding of national security.” In other words, we can’t tell you what we’ve removed on national security grounds as to do so would be detrimental to national security. Talk about Orwellian.
An April 2023 Audit Commission report recognized that the LCSD had already removed books on national security grounds but said there was still a “need to step up efforts in examining library materials for safeguarding national security and taking follow-up actions.” By July 2023, LCSD had set up a new channel for patrons to report materials they considered illegal or inappropriate.
In the absence of any official list of books removed or even an accounting of the overall numbers, many others have been attempting to inventory the censored materials. When examining the evidence they’ve compiled, it’s clear that the upshot is that hundreds of titles have been removed.
A man named Teacher Sung set up a crowd-sourced list of removed materials. As of October 22, 2023, there were 334 titles on the list, though Teacher Sung emphasized that he himself had not verified all of the entries.
In May 2023, Ming Pao reported that of 468 books and recordings with political themes that it checked, at least 195 had been removed since 2020, 96 of them in the year before the report.
Radio Free Asia found that 149 books related to the Tiananmen Massacre and the 1989 pro-democracy protests in China had been removed.
In 2021, Hong Kong Free Press found that Hong Kong’s libraries had 392 fewer copies of books about the June 4, 1989 massacre than they did in 2009. 29 out of 149 books about the Tiananmen Massacre were removed from their shelves, a total of 263 individual copies. Of the 120 titles still stocked, just 26 were displayed on the shelves and immediately available for borrowing. The remaining 94 were only available on request, were stored in off-site book reserves, or were housed in reference sections where they could be read but not borrowed.
In September 2024, InMedia found that at least 21 books related to the Umbrella Movement had been removed from circulation.
In May 2023, The Collective found that of a total of 255 Chinese-language e-books removed from the library collection between May 2020 and May 2023, 100 (39.2 percent) involved Chinese, Taiwanese or Hong Kong politics or were written by “politically sensitive” figures. Most of the e-books that were removed from the shelves in 2021 and 2022 were written by figures from China’s 1989 Student Movement or the Umbrella Movement such as Liu Xiaobo, Wang Dan and Benny Tai.
A sample list of books found to have been removed from public libraries
Note: The list is far from exhaustive and is only meant to give examples of the types of books that have been removed.
by author: books by the following authors have been removed
Margaret Ng, barrister, long-time pro-democracy politician, former Legislative Council legal sector representative, and leader of Civic Party, arrested under the national security law for her role as trustee of 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund which helped arrested protesters
Roy Kwong, former Democratic Party Legislative Council representative and author of romance novels
Claudia Mo, former pro-democracy Legislative Council representative, currently in prison
Allan Au, former political columnist, arrested under the national security law
Hui Po-keung, academic, arrested under the national security law for his role as trustee of 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund
Gregory Wong, actor, currently in prison
Ng Chi-sum, host of political satire TV program “Headliner” that was forced to cancel for “insulting police”
Tsang Chi-ho, host of political satire TV program “Headliner” that was forced to cancel for “insulting police”
Ngok Ma, Associate Professor, Government and Public Administration, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Simon Shen, political scientist and columnist1
Szeto Wah, founder of Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China
Benny Tai, HKU law professor and pro-democracy activist, currently in prison
Albert Ho, former Democratic Party chair and head of HK Alliance, currently in prison
Bruce Lam, political commentator
Yu Jie, Chinese-American writer
Liao Yiwu, Chinese dissident writer2
Joshua Wong, pro-democracy activist , currently in prison
Tanya Chan, pro-democracy Legislative Council representative, currently in exile in Taiwan
Chin Wan, localist scholar3
Zunzi, satirical cartoonist4
Mak Hoi-wah, former standing committee member of Hong Kong Alliance
five titles published by Hong Kong Alliance
Xiong Yan, 1989 student leader in China5
by work: the following titles have been removed
Tour of Hong Kong, Sun Hsin-yu, a children’s book apparently removed because it contained one illustration that showed a demonstration in Causeway Bay and another that showed a departure gate with the number 64 at the airport.
Hong Kong Nationalism, Undergrad (seminal text by magazine of HKU student union)6
A Tiananmen Journal: Republic on the Square, Feng Congde
The Factual Account of a Search for the June 4 Victims (Vol. 1 - Vol. 2), Ding Zilin, founder of Tiananmen Mothers, plus two other titles by Ding
Witness Reports on the Democratic Movement of China ’897
More than 30 books that referred to Jimmy Lai or Apple Daily
People’s Republic of Amnesia, Louisa Lim
Mandate of Heaven, Orville Schell
On China and Hong Kong after Tiananmen, Lee Kuan Yew
Tiananmen Exiles, Rowena He
Prison Memoir, Wang Dan
The Power of Tiananmen, Zhao Dingxin
People Will Not Forget, Hong Kong Journalists Association
The Bloody Clearing of Tiananmen Square, Wu Renhua8
Attacks on independent book fairs
Every year, there is a very large official book fair organized by the Hong Kong Trade Development Council, a governmental agency. Initially, many independent Hong Kong publishers and booksellers continued to take part in the official book fair even after the imposition of the national security law in mid-2020. But it appears to have become a less welcoming environment for many. Some eventually shifted toward an alternative of holding an independent book fair, but they have encountered numerous obstacles in their efforts to do so.
In July 2021, Hillway Culture/Press received a warning from HKTDC that some of the books it was selling at the official book fair may violate the national security law.
In 2022, it was barred from participating in the official book fair. So it decided to organize its own independent book fair in July. Fourteen publishers had agreed to participate. But the day before it was to open, the venue’s owner pulled out. (This last-minute cancellation of venue is a phenomenon that pro-democracy singers Denise Ho and Anthony Wong have encountered, as well as the Democratic Party and the Hong Kong Journalists Association, among others.)
Then in August that year, Hillway’s co-owner Raymond Yeung was sentenced to nine months in prison for a protest-related offense. His “crime” was that he’d been shot in the eye by the police in a notorious incident on the first day that the police attacked protesters en masse, June 12, 2019.
In December 2023, Hillway Culture announced it was closing. (See below for more on that.)
In July 2023, Hunter Bookstore, run by former pro-democracy District Councillor Letitia Wong, took up the baton, and managed to hold an independent book fair without interference. Fourteen booksellers and publishers participated.
In July 2024, Hunter Bookstore again held the independent book fair, this time on its own premises. One evening, during what was billed as a private event, officers from the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department showed up and took photos. The FEHD officers claimed that it was just a routine inspection, but it was unusual that it was carried out on a weekend evening. At that event, Allan Au was scheduled to talk about his new book on journalistic ethics. Au was arrested for sedition in 2022 but never charged.
Meanwhile, over at the official book fair, held at the same time, reports were emerging that HKTDC was asking various stalls to remove books that may be in violation of the national security law. Boundary Books put up a “Pillar of Banned Books” listing the five books it had removed at HKTDC’s request.
In January 2025, ten different shops in the Sheung Wan area held an independent book fair involving twenty publishers. This made it harder for the authorities to crack down on one particular venue, but several dozen police officers showed up anyway around the neighborhood. They demanded IDs from attendees and checked their bags. Police later explained they and FEHD were checking for “illegal extensions,” but if that was the case, it hardly justified checking attendees’ IDs and bags.
Harassment, intimidation and closures of independent bookstores
Especially from 2023 on, reports began to emerge of similar tactics of harassment, intimidation and petty persecution targeting independent bookstores. Regulatory agencies were employed with even greater frequency.
Just to give some brief examples:
Prejudice Bookstore (偏見書房 ) reported being cited by the Lands Department for selling books from a warehouse space.
Hunter Bookstore (獵人書店, which was inspected by the FEHD during the independent book fair in 2024) received visits from the Companies Registry and the Mandatory Provident Fund Schemes Authority (MPFA).
On December 21, 2023, pro-democracy leader Shiu Ka-chun reported that just since December 6, Book Punch (一拳書館) had been visited ten times by six different government agencies, the Fire Services Department, the Companies Registry, MPFA, the Labour Department, Inland Revenue and the Department of Health.
This intense and incessant persecution lead to the eventual closure of Hillway Culture (山道文化) in December 2023 and Mount Zero Books (見山書店) in March 2024.
Hillway Culture’s initial announcement of impending closure in December 2023 made no reference to political reasons. It simply said one of the two people who ran the company, Sam, was leaving the book industry and moving abroad. But later, after leaving Hong Kong, Sam gave an interview to InMedia in February 2024 in which he said he left Hong Kong and closed Hillway because he didn’t want to feel fear anymore or worry whether he would be arrested for publishing seditious publications and imprisoned indefinitely.
When Mount Zero Books closed in March 2024, it got a big send-off, with hundreds attending its closing party. It obviously had immense community support and was much loved.
Even after it closed, Mount Zero went on being an important cultural space, hosting an online concert by Denise Ho, which she decided to hold after she was unsuccessful in securing any performance venue in the city. Of course, true to their role, police showed up in their dozens and interrupted the concert for some time, citing a noise complaint, before allowing it to continue until its end.
In the leadup to Lunar New Year in January 2025, police showed up at the store again, as it was being used by some “suspicious” types like former Civic Party leaders Audrey Eu and Margaret Ng to make fai chun and hand them out to their friends and supporters.
One of the bookstores which hasn’t received quite as much attention but has been among those hit the hardest is Book Punch (一拳書館). It’s mentioned above as the store that received ten visits from six different government agencies in the space of about two weeks in December 2023. But its troubles with the authorities actually started on September 2, 2022 when police raided the store during a reading of a work by the Japanese author Osamu Dazai and sake tasting with a sake expert. The event was billed as private and participants had to register beforehand.
Nevertheless, the police raided, and the owner, Pong Yat-ming (龐一鳴) was eventually convicted of “selling alcohol without a license” and violating pandemic prevention regulations and fined HK$12,000. It was noted that the day before the raid, Book Punch had published a link to the just-released report from the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights on abuses in Xinjiang, which asserted that crimes against humanity may have been committed by the Chinese government. This lead to speculation about whether the raid could have been a form of retaliation.
Then, less than a year later, police raided Book Punch again, on August 20, 2023. This time the event was a discussion by former pro-democracy District Councillor Derek Chu and pro-democracy leader Shiu Ka-chun about Shiu’s new book, Emotions in Prison. Police claimed they had received a report that acts violating the national security law may have been occurring. The cops ID’ed everyone before departing.
There have been hardly any reports in recent months of police and officers of government agencies showing up at independent bookstores. Hopefully that’s a sign that their mania for this type of persecution has subsided. Usually, though, the pattern since the start of the crackdown has been that “enforcement” actions only slow down once the authorities believe they have sufficiently tamed the forces they’re targeting. Most independent bookstores that continue to exist appear to have decided to keep a low profile, in the hope that this will keep them out of the regime’s sites.
Still, if you look back at the crackdown over the course of the past four years, from the purging of libraries to sedition arrests to the attacks on book fairs and bookstores, it appears to have had a profound effect. Of course, one of the things about censorship is that it can be hard to gauge just how impactful it is because that has to do with what was not said that might have otherwise been, what was not published, and that we will never know. It’s safe to say that all down the line from publishers to printers to booksellers, everyone in the supply chain must think twice about the decisions they make and the extent to which they may risk endangering themselves or others. That is hardly the mark of a free and flourishing culture.
Many Hong Kong writers have left Hong Kong and are publishing in Taiwan or elsewhere. When the Reverend Chu Yiu-ming published his memoirs in exile in Taiwan, he left pages blank, fearing that the information could be used by prosecutors in Hong Kong against himself or others, a sign of how the specter of persecution follows Hong Kongers wherever they go in the world.
It’s worth remembering that long before the 2019 protests, perhaps the single biggest incident that aroused the fears of Hong Kongers about the creeping intrusion of the Communist Party into their home and the erosion of Hong Kong’s autonomy was the case of the disappeared booksellers way back in 2015. What the five all had in common was that they had worked at Causeway Bay Books, a store that specialized in selling books banned in China mostly to Chinese tourists in Hong Kong. One of the booksellers, Lee Bo, was kidnapped in Hong Kong and brought to China. Another, Gui Minhai, was kidnapped in Thailand and brought to China, where to this very day he remains in prison.
One of those five booksellers, Lam Wing-kee, after escaping the clutches of Chinese authorities fled to Taiwan in early 2019 due to the specter of the extradition law, which soon millions of Hong Kongers would be protesting against. There, he opened a new bookstore, which he christened with the old name, Causeway Bay Books.
From this perspective, it can be seen that it has long been important to the Chinese Communist party to control books in Hong Kong. But while it has managed to clamp down on one part, another has continued, metamorphosing into something else, often in a different place, while those that remain somehow always manage to persevere.
All of the above found in this article, “圖書館下架多名傳媒人及政治學者近全部書 涉口述歷史、旅遊文集、親子漫畫等,” which appeared on May 13, 2023 in InMedia.
The names from Albert Ho to Liao Yiwu appeared in “Hong Kong pulls more books from library shelves citing security law concerns” in Hong Kong Free Press on 10 May 2021.
The names from Joshua Wong to Chin Wan appeared in “Democracy books disappear from Hong Kong libraries, including title by activist Joshua Wong” in Hong Kong Free Press on 4 July 2020.
“Books by satirical cartoonist Zunzi disappear from Hong Kong public libraries after paper axes comic,” Hong Kong Free Press, 12 May 2023.
“Exclusive: Hong Kong libraries purge 29 titles about the Tiananmen Massacre from the shelves,” Hong Kong Free Press, 21 November 2021.
“Hong Kong pulls more books from library shelves citing security law concerns,” Hong Kong Free Press, 10 May 2021.
Ibid, for titles from Hong Kong Nationalism to Witness Reports….
For People’s Republic of Amnesia to The Bloody Clearing of Tiananmen Square, see “Nine books that have been taken off library shelves in Hong Kong,” Washington Post, May 17, 2023.