Hong Kong Police Raid Two Bookstores and Arrest Five in Widening 'Seditious' Books Crackdown

Hong Kong police raided two independent bookstores and arrested five people this week on suspicion of selling "seditious" publications, the latest move in an intensifying crackdown that has steadily narrowed the space for dissent in the semiautonomous Chinese city.

The raids on Wednesday targeted Have A Nice Stay, a shop founded by a group of former journalists, and the long-established Greenfield Book Store. Those arrested — aged between 30 and 59 — were accused of "displaying items with seditious intent and selling publications with seditious content," police said. Authorities alleged the material stirred up hatred against the city's government, judiciary and law enforcement agencies.

Police said customs officials had referred the case after discovering allegedly seditious books in a batch of goods shipped to Hong Kong from overseas, though officers declined to specify which titles were involved. The operation was the third round of arrests targeting independent booksellers in just four months. Have A Nice Stay had already announced it would close for good on Aug. 30.

The crackdown draws on a colonial-era sedition law that authorities have revived and expanded under the sweeping national security legislation Beijing imposed on Hong Kong in 2020, followed by a locally enacted security law in 2024. Together the measures have been used to prosecute protesters, journalists and activists, and to pressure the shrinking network of shops that still stock politically sensitive books.

A senior Hong Kong official warned booksellers a day after the raids that they bear responsibility for vetting what they sell, cautioning that ignorance of a book's content would not necessarily shield them from liability. The message landed hard in a trade already operating under near-constant scrutiny, with several shops reporting repeated visits from government inspectors responding to anonymous complaints. Owners describe an atmosphere of self-censorship in which titles are pulled from shelves preemptively, and in which simply stocking a book can invite a knock at the door.

The two shops raided this week are part of a dwindling handful of independent stores that once anchored Hong Kong's freewheeling literary scene, a world of cramped upstairs bookshops that trafficked in political memoirs, protest histories and works banned across the border. Many have already shuttered, and each new raid accelerates the exodus, leaving readers with fewer places to buy anything that strays from the official line.

Rights groups and Western governments have condemned the campaign as an assault on free expression, warning that it is hollowing out the intellectual openness that once distinguished Hong Kong from the mainland. City leaders reject that characterization, insisting the security laws restored stability after the mass pro-democracy protests of 2019 and that enforcement targets only genuine threats to public order. For the booksellers who remain, the raids were another signal that displaying the wrong title can now carry the risk of arrest — a reality one observer summed up as being "criminalized for what's on your bookshelf."