These Bookshops Let Chinese Readers Question – Now Closing
Constantvpn.com – These bookshops let Chinese readers question their country in ways that mainland bookstores simply do not permit. For four years, a cramped storefront in Sham Shui Po — squeezed between textile wholesalers, auto-repair garages, and specialty coffee bars — has functioned as a quiet gateway for mainland visitors hunting titles that rarely make it across the border. Hunter Bookstore, founded by a former district councillor, built its shelves around works Beijing’s censorship machinery would flag: memoirs by pro-democracy figures, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and Hajime Isayama’s manga saga Attack on Titan. After a police raid in late June and a wave of arrests sweeping the city’s small independent bookshop scene, that gateway is shutting its doors.
The closures sit within a wider contraction of civil liberties in Hong Kong since the National Security Law took effect in 2020. Beijing presents the statute as essential for restoring order after the 2019 pro-democracy upheaval; rights groups and many residents argue it has effectively muzzled dissent. Thousands of locals — activists, journalists, former legislators — have emigrated in recent years as prosecutions under the new statutes produced convictions and lengthy detentions.
A Monthly Pilgrimage from Guangzhou
Chen Zhu, 23, lives in Guangzhou on China’s southern coast. Every month she crosses into Hong Kong with a single destination in mind: Hunter. The trip is geographically brief, yet for Zhu it marks a threshold into a space where questions left unanswered back home can finally find their answers. These bookshops let Chinese readers access histories and perspectives that the mainland’s tightly managed information environment does not surface.
When word reached Zhu in late June that police had raided the shop, her reaction was immediate and visceral.
“I was devastated.”
Zhu’s curiosity about chapters of Chinese history that remain officially suppressed — most notably the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown — deepened after she enrolled at university in 2021. The student-led demonstrations of that year ended in a military suppression whose death toll remains fiercely contested. Beijing’s official figure at the time was 200 civilian deaths; declassified British diplomatic cables, however, indicate at least 10,000 people were killed. Zhu tried to fill the gap through cinema, watching both the epic romance Summer Palace and the clandestinely shot gay drama Lan Yu, but neither satisfied her hunger for a more direct account.
She fixated on The Unburned Book, a bittersweet verse collection by Taiwanese poet Yang Du that reflects on protesters who later lived in exile. In 2023, the moment the China–Hong Kong land border reopened after pandemic-era closures, Zhu made the journey specifically to locate that volume. She arrived just as the city’s independent bookshop scene was surging in popularity, with readers sharing walking routes, neighbourhood guides, and curated shelf recommendations across social platforms.
A Month of Raids and Arrests
The enforcement pattern accelerated sharply in spring and summer 2025. In March, police detained the owner of Book Punch together with three staff members, charging all four with sedition and money laundering under the NSL. Officers reportedly confiscated copies of a biography of Jimmy Lai, the billionaire newspaper founder and jailed democracy campaigner.
On 24 June, officers entered Hunter Bookstore and took owner Letitia Wong, 33, and a 32-year-old associate into custody on identical charges. Both deny the allegations and have since been granted bail.
Then, on 15 July — the opening day of the annual Hong Kong Book Fair — national security police swept through two additional independent shops, Greenfield Bookstore and Have a Nice Stay, arresting five individuals for sedition. Those detainees, too, were later released on bail.
By month’s end, Greenfield posted a farewell message on social media:
“Our store will be closing after our lease expires. We thank you for walking with us, through wind and rain, for 50 years since our opening.”
It marked the third independent bookshop to shutter within a single calendar month. For readers who travel specifically to browse these shelves, the losses are acute. These bookshops let Chinese readers encounter ideas, histories, and voices that would be unavailable or suppressed on the mainland, and their disappearance narrows an already constrained intellectual landscape.
What the Closures Mean for Readers
The targeted shops have long attracted loyal followings not only within Hong Kong but among mainland readers who make the trip expressly to browse their shelves. For 19-year-old Li, a Shanghai resident who declined to give her first name, these spaces represent something harder to quantify:
“I can see so many possibilities, and where existing ideas can be challenged.”
Others value them as rare enclaves of intellectual freedom and communal belonging that they feel are absent from the mainland’s tightly managed information environment. Now, watching the doors close one by one, many of those readers face a future in which the questions they once carried across the border will find fewer and fewer places to be asked aloud.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are independent bookshops in Hong Kong closing? Following the imposition of the National Security Law in 2020, police raids and sedition charges have targeted several small independent bookshops. Raids in March, June, and July 2025 led to arrests at Hunter Bookstore, Book Punch, Greenfield Bookstore, and Have a Nice Stay, prompting at least three shops to announce closures within a single month.
Can mainland readers still access these titles elsewhere? With the physical shelves closing, readers who previously travelled to Hong Kong to browse independent shelves now have fewer options. Online platforms and mainland bookstores generally stock only titles that pass state censorship, so works flagged as sensitive remain difficult to obtain.
What happened to the people arrested in the raids? Owners and staff at Hunter Bookstore, Book Punch, Greenfield Bookstore, and Have a Nice Stay were charged with sedition and, in one case, money laundering. All detainees reported in these incidents have been granted bail and deny the allegations.
How long had Greenfield Bookstore been operating? Greenfield’s farewell message referenced 50 years in business since its opening, making it one of the longest-running independent bookshops in Hong Kong before its closure.
