Hong Kong police raided two independent bookshops on Wednesday, arresting five people suspected of selling and displaying publications deemed to carry "seditious intent" under national security legislation. The operation, carried out jointly by the city's national security police and customs authorities, targeted Have A Nice Stay bookshop and the nearby Greenfield Book Store, both located in the densely populated Mong Kok district of Kowloon. Those arrested — two men aged 37 and 57, and three women aged between 30 and 59 — are suspected of violating the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance by displaying and selling materials said to incite hatred against Hong Kong's government, judiciary, and law enforcement agencies. If convicted, they face up to seven years in prison.
Authorities said the operation was triggered after customs officials discovered books with alleged seditious content in a shipment sent to Hong Kong from overseas. Reports identified at least one of the targeted titles as a book about identity and belonging under Xi Jinping's era, published by a Taiwanese press. Officers were seen removing multiple boxes of material from both premises. Have A Nice Stay, founded in 2022 by a group of former journalists, stocks literature on democracy, authoritarianism, and media literacy. Greenfield Book Store, established in 1976, is one of Hong Kong's oldest independent bookshops and has long stocked history, philosophy, and literature titles from Hong Kong and Taiwan.
The timing of the raids carried particular symbolic weight. Wednesday marked the opening day of the annual Hong Kong Book Fair, held in the Wan Chai district — one of the city's most prominent cultural events. Neither targeted shop was participating in this year's fair. The raid on Have A Nice Stay came just one day after the shop announced it would close permanently in August, citing financial pressures and what it described as an "elusive red line" over which titles could be considered problematic. The shop said the inability to determine which books might draw official scrutiny had made operating sustainably impossible.
The arrests are the latest in a series of actions against independent booksellers in 2026. Two workers were arrested at a shop called Hunter in June, and four more were detained at Book Punch in March — bringing the total to at least eleven arrests across four bookshops within the year. The crackdowns have unfolded against a broader backdrop of closures and exclusions: two longstanding independent bookshops were disqualified from participating in this year's Book Fair before it opened, and several others have announced closures in recent weeks.
Hong Kong was once regarded as a regional hub for free publishing, but the city's legal environment has shifted significantly since the introduction of national security legislation in 2020. Amnesty International said the latest raids illustrated "the chilling reality of what the city has become," warning that vague boundaries around prohibited content had left booksellers and writers guessing which titles could trigger criminal investigation. The organisation said the uncertainty was fuelling fear and self-censorship across the publishing and bookselling community. Hong Kong's security secretary has previously stated publicly that authorities would not specify which books are forbidden to sell.