Police in Hong Kong arrested five bookstore workers on suspicion of breaches of the territory’s national security laws during raids on two independent shops after customs officers seized a consignment of books shipped from overseas. File photo by Leung Man Hei/EPA-EFE
July 16 (UPI) — Police in Hong Kong detained five bookstore workers on suspicion of breaches of the territory’s national security law during raids on two independent shops.
The two men, aged 37 and 57, and three women, aged between 30 and 59, were arrested in the Mong Kok district of the city on Wednesday on suspicion of “intention to commit sedition” under the 2024 Safeguarding National Security Ordinance, Hong Kong Police Force said in a news release.
They said the five were being detained under investigation. If convicted, they face a maximum prison sentence of seven years.
Police accuse the suspects of displaying items with seditious intent and selling publications with seditious content, specifically inciting hatred against the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government, the judiciary, and law enforcement agencies.
They said they seized books which they allege had “seditious intent” from the shops during the raid, which was mounted on a tip-off after customs officers intercepted a shipment of books allegedly containing seditious material. Police did not say which country the books were being shipped from.
Local media identified the stores as Greenfield Book Store and Have A Nice Stay, which is run by former journalists and specializes in books on democracy, authoritarianism and media literacy.
Photos circulating online show one young woman being led away from the Have A Nice Stay store in handcuffs and police loading plastic storage containers of evidence onto a truck.
The raid came a day after Have A Nice Stay announced on Instagram that it would be shutting its doors for good on Aug. 30. Apologizing, it said because it was losing money and was fearful of running foul of the law.
“The elusive red line is certainly a reason. The director has made it clear before that he will not explain what books cannot be sold. We are really limited in our ability to read every book or decide which are a ‘problem.’ For us, books are the space of knowledge and thought, and this space is supposed to be flawless… We lack the ability and courage to carry out our mission of disseminating knowledge through books,” the store wrote.
According to its Facebook bio, Greenfield Book Store specializes in literature, history, philosophy, art, society, and self-help books from Hong Kong and Taiwan with discounts offered year-round.
Human rights groups condemned the arrests.
“The use of ‘sedition’ offenses to target bookstores once again demonstrates how Hong Kong’s national security framework is being weaponized to silence dissenting voices and eradicate spaces for free thought and debate,” Amnesty International said in a news release.
It said increasingly ambiguous “red lines” for booksellers intentionally left publishers and authors guessing what material could render them liable to criminal investigation, arrest or closure, stoking fear and self-censorship with “devastating consequences for freedom of expression.”
Human Rights Watch said in a post on X that the targeting of and arrests of booksellers “exposed what the Chinese government fears most: free thinking.”
“Beijing is trying to impose a world where people think only what the authorities permit,” it wrote.
The arrests bring to 11 the number of bookstore workers arrested following raids on two other stores in March and June.
The latest crackdown came two weeks after bookseller Lam Wing-Kee passed away in exile in Taiwan. He ran Causeway Bay Books on Hong Kong island for two decades until he, Gui Minhai and four others associated with the business went missing in 2015.
Lam returned to Hong Kong eight months later, saying he had been abducted by Chinese security officials as he was returning from a trip to the mainland. He gave a press conference claiming he had been sent back to Hong Kong to retrieve a hard drive containing names of writers and customers. He then fled to Taiwan.
A Chinese court in Ningbo sentenced Swedish citizen Gui to 10 years in prison in 2020 for “illegally providing intelligence” to foreign governments after Swedish authorities concluded he was likely kidnapped while on vacation in Thailand in 2015 and may have been tortured while in custody.
Thai authorities had no record of Gui exiting the country.
