This English version may have been machine-generated from the Chinese original and may not convey the original meaning accurately.
On July 15, Hong Kong’s national security police once again took action, conducting surprise searches of two independent bookstores, Left Book House and Garden Bookstore. Five employees were arrested under the “incitement” offense in Article 23 of the Basic Law, and several boxes of books and other items were removed at the scene. According to reports, this was yet another police operation targeting bookstores within a short period, following crackdowns on several other independent bookstores, including One Punch Bookshop and Hunter Bookstore. Notably, one day before the arrests, Left Book House had announced on social media that it would close in August, citing the “unfathomable red lines” that had left its operators at a loss as to how to proceed—a phrase that perhaps captures Hong Kong’s current predicament more precisely than any commentary could.
What do bookstores sell? Nothing more than paper and words—the vessels of ideas. Whether a bookstore can continue operating should depend on the market, its readers, and its ability to run the business, not on a department’s unfettered discretion over the word “incitement.” Yet under Article 23, the boundaries of “incitement” have become outrageously vague—it requires neither a specific act of violence nor clearly defined harmful consequences. It is enough for the authorities to determine that certain speech “might” undermine their rule for it to constitute a crime. The essence of this legislative technique is not to protect social security, but to place the interpretation of freedom of speech entirely in the hands of law enforcement. When even a bookstore owner cannot foresee which book placed on the shelves or which sentence published might cross the red line, the so-called policy of “governing Hong Kong according to law” has in reality degenerated into “using the law as a pretext to gag people.”
More worthy of reflection is why, within just a few years, Hong Kong has fallen from being Asia’s freest publishing hub to a place where bookstores are searched and closed one after another. The answer is not complicated: once a city loses independent judicial review and an elected legislature capable of checking executive power, any legal provision can be interpreted and extended without limit, and any expression of dissent can be swept up in the name of “national security.” The essence of the rule of law has never been merely that “there are laws to follow,” but that “the law itself is constrained by constitutional principles, and power itself is checked by an independent judiciary.” When the police can barge into private bookstores, take away employees, and remove books without fully transparent judicial procedures, this is no longer the rule of law, but administrative arbitrariness wrapped in the shell of law.
Taking a broader view, the fate of Hong Kong’s bookstores is in fact a microcosm of the extension of mainland China’s model of governance into Hong Kong. Under a system lacking the separation of powers, in which the judiciary cannot operate independently of the party-state system, no sphere—whether the news media, civil society, bookstores, or publishing—can escape being subsumed under the discourse of “national security” and arbitrarily curtailed by those in power. In such a system, the authority to define security, the authority to interpret the law, and the discretionary power of law enforcement ultimately all converge in a single center of power that is accountable to neither voters nor independent judicial review. This is where the root of the problem lies: it is not that any one law is too harsh, but that there is fundamentally no force independent of those in power capable of saying “no” to power.
The true way out has never been to urge law enforcement to “show mercy,” but to rebuild the system itself: only constitutional democracy can ensure that citizens are not arbitrarily convicted for exercising their freedom of expression; only the separation of powers can allow the legislative, executive, and judicial branches to operate independently and check one another; and only judicial independence can ensure that every arrest and every conviction withstands open and impartial scrutiny. Then bookstores can once again be merely bookstores, and readers can once again be merely readers, without constantly wondering whether “the book I bought today will become evidence of a crime tomorrow.” When reading itself becomes an act requiring courage, this is not merely a tragedy for bookstores, but also a warning that the civic consciousness and human dignity of an entire society are being systematically suppressed.
News background: The original report on which this commentary is based can be found at Radio Free Asia Mandarin.