The owner of one of Hong Kong’s last independent bookshops has been arrested and books including Jimmy Lai’s biography seized, local media have reported.
National security police arrested Book Punch’s owner Pong Yat-ming and three female staff on Tuesday, Ming Pao News, the South China Morning Post and TVB reported.
They were arrested for “knowingly selling seditious publications”, which carries a maximum penalty of seven years in jail.
Police searched the shop in Sham Shui Po and seized books, including a biography of jailed British media tycoon Jimmy Lai by Mark Clifford, a friend of Mr Lai’s and a former non-executive director of Next Digital, the media company owned by Mr Lai.
The 78-year-old billionaire was sentenced last month to 20 years in prison in Hong Kong for sedition, conspiring with foreign forces and conspiring to publish seditious material under the national security law imposed by Beijing in 2020.
A police spokesperson told local media the force “will take actions according to actual circumstances and in accordance with the law”.
Mr Clifford, who wrote The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became A Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident and China’s Most Feared Critic, said it was a “cruel irony” that selling a biography of a man “who is in jail for his activities as a journalist, for promoting free expression” would lead to sedition charges.
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“It shows how far Hong Kong has fallen from its tradition of free expression and free speech that providing a book could be considered a national security offence,” he added.
The author and president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong foundation said threats against bookstores are “not an aberration but part of a continuing crackdown” and are a breach of China’s promise to continue to maintain Hong Kongers’ freedom after the UK handed Hong Kong back to Beijing in 1997.
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Apple Daily, Mr Lai’s now defunct newspaper, was one of a few local papers to initially cover the 2015 disappearance of five booksellers at another bookstore, Causeway Bay Books, known for selling political books banned in mainland China.
It is widely believed they were detained in mainland China, with Guangdong authorities then confirming they had been taken into custody over an “old traffic case”.
Their disappearance shocked Hong Kongers, and then British foreign secretary Philip Hammond said it was a “serious breach of the Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong”.
One of the booksellers, Lam Wing-kee, returned to Hong Kong and said he had been held in detention for eight months and been forced into a confession, which made worldwide headlines. Mainland authorities denied the accusations.
A police spokesperson, when asked about the reported arrests, did not comment directly but told Reuters in a statement that police “will take actions according to actual circumstances and in accordance with the law”.
