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A rights radical warned connected Wednesday (March 25, 2026) that Hong Kong was becoming “increasingly dystopian” aft constabulary reportedly arrested a bookstore proprietor and his staff, and seized publications similar the biography of imprisoned mogul Jimmy Lai.
Pong Yat-ming and 3 employees of Book Punch look allegations of selling seditious publications nether Hong Kong’s 2024 nationalist information law, section newspapers South China Morning Post and Ming Pao and broadcaster TVB reported connected Tuesday (March 24), citing unnamed sources.
Officers searched the bookshop and seized assorted materials, including a biography of Mr. Lai, who was sentenced past period to 20 years successful situation for nationalist information crimes.
Human Rights Watch warned connected Wednesday (March 25) that “Hong Kong has go progressively dystopian”.
“First, the authorities jailed the paper publisher, past they arrested the idiosyncratic selling books astir him. Who’s next?” Elaine Pearson, HRW’s Asia director, said successful a statement.
“It volition beryllium the mean radical who endure the consequences implicit time,” she added.
When asked by AFP astir the bookstore arrests, constabulary lone said that they “take actions according to existent circumstances and successful accordance with the law”.
An AFP newsman saw that Book Punch was unopen connected Tuesday (March 24), with a announcement that read: “Due to an unexpected incident, closed for 1 day, atrocious for the inconvenience”.
Mr. Lai’s biography, “The Troublemaker”, is authored by Mark Clifford, a erstwhile manager of the 78-year-old mogul’s company, Next Digital.
It chronicles Mr. Lai’s migration from mainland China to Hong Kong, wherever helium became a billionaire dissident and laminitis of the now-shuttered tabloid Apple Daily.
Urania Chiu, a instrumentality lecturer astatine Oxford Brookes University, called the reported Book Punch lawsuit a “highly concerning development”.
“Given the wide and malleable explanation of seditious intention, it is hard to accidental that anyone tin person certainty astir what is and is not seditious,” Ms. Chiu told AFP.
Hong Kong passed a homegrown nationalist information instrumentality successful 2024, which came successful summation to a broader instrumentality imposed by Beijing aft ideology protests seized the fiscal hub successful 2019.
