Walking out of one of Hong Kong’s last remaining independent bookstores, hands behind her back but head held high, the woman’s T-shirt was emblazoned with a simple slogan: “I am a bookstore employee”.
Escorted by police, the woman was among five people arrested during raids on two bookstores last week, suspected of displaying and selling publications with “seditious” content, a national security crime which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years.
Since then, the T-shirt phrase has spread far and wide on Taiwanese social media amid concern for the fate of Hong Kong’s booksellers.
Taiwan is now the only place in the Chinese-speaking world where people can openly express their feelings about repression by the Chinese government.
On the social media platform Threads, booksellers, lawmakers and activists shared the hashtag “I am a bookstore employee” to show their support for Hong Kong. Taiwan’s president, Lai Ching-te, also weighed in, writing on Facebook: “Ideas and words should never be silenced by political pressure”.
It is the third time in recent months that people in Hong Kong linked to independent bookstores have been arrested.
The Hong Kong authorities have not specified what the allegedly seditious books were in the latest raids. But after the arrest, Hong Kong’s security chief, Chris Tang, said that booksellers had a responsibility to ensure their books were lawful, “just like merchants selling food have to make sure their food won’t make people sick”. All five arrested in last week’s raids have since been released on bail.
The Hong Kong police declined to comment further, but reports that the offending books may have included Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping’s China, written by NPR journalist Emily Feng, prompted a run on the book in Taiwan.
The Taiwanese publisher, Acropolis Publishing, ordered an emergency reprint of 10,000 additional copies last week.
Sara Sung, a senior editor at Acropolis, said some readers were buying copies as “a statement of democracy and freedom”. “They’re showing that they will not be silenced or intimidated by censorship from China,” Sung said.
Chang Hui-ju, the owner of Touat Books, an independent bookshop in Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, said she was completely out of stock of Feng’s book. “Before this, hardly anyone paid attention to it,” Chang said. “But right after the incident, the book sold out everywhere.”
The ban ‘only made me more curious’
Another Taipei store, Kuo’s Astral Bookshop, also sold out of the book. One customer looking in vain for a copy, Wu Jia-xuan, said she was not normally interested in China-related books but that her interest had been piqued by the Hong Kong arrests. “The fact that it had been banned only made [me] more curious,” Wu said.
Feng’s book examines Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s ideological control over the country. One chapter, titled The Bookseller, focuses on the prominent Hong Kong bookseller Lam Wing-kee.
Lam was arrested by Chinese authorities in 2015 but later escaped custody and fled to Taiwan, where he re-opened his bookstore, Causeway Bay Books, in Taipei. Lam died earlier this month and the fate of his Taipei store is uncertain: the closed-up shopfront is covered with notes, flowers and cans of beer left by his supporters.
Lam’s story charts the uneasy and complex relationship that Taiwan and Hong Kong have with each other, as well as with mainland China.
Taiwan has never been part of the People’s Republic of China. But Beijing has long claimed the self-governing island as part of its territory and has vowed to unify it with China. One path to peaceful unification, suggested by Beijing, is for Taiwan to be ruled under a “one country, two systems” framework, similar to Hong Kong. Over 80% of Taiwanese reject that idea.
In Taiwan, politicians from the ruling Democratic Progressive party (DPP), which rejects the idea of closer ties with China, have pointed to Hong Kong as an example of the dangers of what happens under Chinese rule. Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong in 2019 has been credited with galvanising DPP voters to win the election for Tsai Ing-wen, Lai’s DPP predecessor, in 2020.
On Monday, discussing the Hong Kong raids, DPP legislator Wu Pei-yi accused China of “burning books”.
But in Taiwan, rhetorical support for Hong Kong has rarely been matched by practical policies, such as taking in refugees. For DPP politicians, “it’s very easy to use Hong Kong as a way to frame what will happen to Taiwan if the People’s Republic of China is able to ‘unify’ Taiwan,” said Lev Nachman, a professor of political science at National Taiwan University in Taipei. But actual support has been “shallow”, Nachman said.
For Chinese people, Taiwan is now the last place in the Chinese-speaking world where they can freely access books without the threat of Communist party censorship.
One student, originally from Fujian province, visited Touat Books on Sunday looking for a copy of Feng’s book. She’d read about the Hong Kong raids on social media, news which kept her awake until 2am. “In mainland China, none of this would come up on your feed … It was quite a shock,” she said. “This shouldn’t be happening. I think independent thought should still be allowed – at least in Hong Kong.”