Hong Kong's independent bookshops face closure as China tightens control

Chen Zhu makes the trip from Guangzhou to Hong Kong once a month, and she always knows where she's going. Hunter Bookstore sits wedged between fabric shops and garages on a crowded Sham Shui Po street, a modest storefront that has become something far larger in her mind—a place where the books authorities would never allow in mainland China sit openly on shelves. She has found accounts of Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement there, copies of George Orwell's Animal Farm, manga series like Attack on Titan that governments prefer readers not to think too hard about. For a 23-year-old university student curious about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, a subject erased from China's internet, these bookshops are passages into a world that operates by different rules.

When police raided Hunter Bookstore on June 24, Zhu learned the news and wept. The owner, Letitia Wong, 33, and a 32-year-old employee were arrested on sedition and money laundering charges, both later released on bail. They denied wrongdoing. But the raid was not an isolated incident. In March, authorities arrested the owner of Book Punch and three employees on the same charges, seizing copies of a biography about Jimmy Lai, the jailed democracy campaigner. On July 15, as the annual Hong Kong Book Fair opened, national security police searched Greenfield Bookstore and Have a Nice Stay, arresting five people for sedition. All were released on bail. By the end of July, Greenfield posted on social media that it would close after its lease expired, marking the third independent bookshop to shut within a month. The message carried the weight of finality: "Thank you for walking with us, through wind and rain, for 50 years since our opening."

Hong Kong's independent bookshops had flourished in the years after the 2019 pro-democracy protests, becoming gathering places not just for locals but for mainland readers hungry for books their own government would not permit. Li, 19, from Shanghai, described them as spaces where "existing ideas can be challenged." Another visitor, a man called K in his 30s from Sichuan, remembered when mainland bookshops themselves had been vibrant—until around 2015, when the tightening began. First it was books about the country's leaders that vanished. Then less obviously political titles started disappearing. Public events became rare. The atmosphere shifted. Now he watched the same pattern unfolding in Hong Kong.

Zhu had spent months searching for The Unburned Book by Taiwanese poet Yang Du, a reflection on pro-democracy protesters who went into exile. When the China-Hong Kong border reopened in 2023 after the pandemic, she made her way across to find it. That was when the city's independent bookshops were at their peak. There was Luck Win in Mong Kok, known for generous discounts. Greenfield, with its packed floor-to-ceiling shelves. Have a Nice Stay, founded by former journalists, which held late-night reading sessions. Book Punch on trendy Tai Nan Street, with its defiant motto: "one punch to wake the reader." Word by Word in historic Wan Chai. And Hunter, with a sofa outside where anyone could sit and rest. Zhu finally found her book at Hunter. She had tried other stores and failed. When she spotted it, the relief was real.

These bookshops had become more than retail spaces. They were refuges where mainland readers encountered a different kind of freedom. Li visited Hunter during Lunar New Year, months after a massive apartment fire in Tai Po had killed 168 people. She found a wall covered in black sticky notes—messages of encouragement left by visitors for those affected by the tragedy. "This sense of community is difficult to find in mainland China," she said. Back home, she explained, people "can only express themselves indirectly." She was struck too by small handwritten notes staff had left beside books, reflections on what they had read or passages they found meaningful. Such gestures seemed impossible in the mainland bookshops she knew.

But the freedom these spaces offered was always fragile, and it was contracting. Zhu began noticing government officials at bookshop events, sitting quietly and listening. She encountered authorities more often in Hong Kong than in mainland China. A bookseller who asked not to be identified said that even shops keeping low profiles—Luck Win and Elmbook, which rarely made public statements or organized events—had been targeted. In the weeks before the book fair, Beijing's state-controlled newspaper Wen Wei Po accused them of selling books promoting "soft resistance," including Chris Patten's The Hong Kong Diaries and essays by the late Apple Daily columnist Lee Yee. The newspaper itself had been shuttered; its owner, Jimmy Lai, was jailed for violating the security laws.

Uncertainty became its own form of control. "The authorities don't want people to know exactly where the boundaries are," said Tong Kin-long of University College London. "They want people to work out the red lines for themselves, or to censor themselves before crossing them." A week after Elmbook was excluded from the book fair, it announced closure in April 2025. Have a Nice Stay said it would close at the end of August, citing economic difficulties and unpredictable "red lines" over what material was considered problematic. Mainland readers who had relied on these shops now faced a different anxiety. K, returning from Hong Kong, chose busy border crossings, avoided books with politically sensitive figures on the cover, hid volumes inside his clothes. "In the past, people would simply think, 'If I can't buy a book in mainland China, I'll go to Hong Kong'," he said. "Now the feeling is different. You don't even know which bookshops will still be here the next time you come." Yet even as the walls closed in, some readers refused to stop. Chris, 20, was frightened after hearing about the arrests at Hunter. But he would keep going. "Buying a book has become a quiet way of showing support, and a quiet form of resistance."