The Hong Kong government has detained the owners of the Hunter Bookstore.
In addition to selling “seditious” literature—“publications including materials inciting hatred against the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government, the judiciary and law enforcement agencies”—the pair are also accused of receiving funds from “foreign political organizations” (Reuters, June 24, 2026).
The Telegraph reports:
The first charge, which carries a maximum sentence of 14 years, falls under Hong Kong’s safeguarding National Security Ordinance, commonly known as Article 23, which is widely seen as an escalated version of the Beijing-imposed National Security Law….
[Leticia] Wong and her business partner, who has not yet been named in media reports, ran the Hunter Bookstore in the bustling area of Sham Shui Po. The bookstore, which was opened in 2022, was known to stock riskier titles.
Since the National Security Law was passed, the city’s publishing sector has been hit hard by censorship. Books on sensitive topics like the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing or those written by pro-democracy figures have been removed from shelves.
But not at Hunter Bookstore.
At one point, the shop featured a biography of [Jimmy] Lai on one of its front tables, and stocked books such as Animal Farm and Attack on Titan, which are banned in China.
The arrests are one more stage in a long campaign of harassment. Last year, Wong (shown above), a former district councilor, reported that “government authorities took measures against her shop 92 times between July 2022 and June 2025, including inspecting her shop, conspicuously patrolling outside or sending letters warning her of violations. An anonymous letter sent to an organization that had planned an event at her shop prompted them to cancel the booking, she added.”
In January, Wong described her bookshop as besieged by regulators. “The Food and Environmental Hygiene Department checks crowd numbers, the Fire Services Department checks aisles, the Environmental Protection Department checks plastic bags. We might see five or six departments visit seven or eight times a week.”
Reuters notes that “Under Hong Kong’s Basic Law, the city is guaranteed a high degree of freedom for 50 years, including freedom of the press.” But in the wake of the 2020 National Security Law, “the freedoms promised to the city at the handover [in 1997] are disappearing,” at least according to “international criticism.”
