I saw an AP article recently. Kanis Leung, “Hong Kong’s independent bookstores, a refuge for Chinese readers, are under threat.” Published August 29, 2026. The byline says Hong Kong. The piece was written in Hong Kong, filed from Hong Kong, and published on the open internet where I read it this morning from my flat in Hong Kong. Nobody stopped her from writing it. Nobody stopped AP from publishing it. Nobody stopped me from reading it. And nobody is stopping me from writing about it now.

I want to start there, because the framing of every Western article on this subject implies a city where the walls are closing in, where the written word itself is under siege, where the act of selling a book to someone who wants to read it has become an act of resistance against an authoritarian machine. Leung’s article is accessible, in full, without a VPN, from any device in Hong Kong. So is every BBC piece, every Reuters dispatch, every Guardian op-ed that has spent the last six years writing this city’s obituary. I read them all. I am now writing a response. The authorities are not breaking down my door. Nobody has called. The building security guard downstairs asked me if I was going out this morning. I stood there for a second and thought about it. That is the most intrusive question anyone representing any authority in Hong Kong has asked me in the years I have lived here. Whether I was going out. I said yes. He nodded. I left

Four independent bookstores were investigated by police between March and July 2026. Book Punch in March. Hunter Bookstore in June. Greenfield Book Store and Have A Nice Stay in July. People were arrested. The word “arrested” in the Western press conjures handcuffs, a cell, a system grinding toward conviction. In Hong Kong, an arrest during an investigation means something more specific and considerably less cinematic. Under the Police Force Ordinance, the police can arrest a person they reasonably suspect of involvement in an offense. The person is brought to the station, given the opportunity to provide a statement, and the police then have 48 hours to charge, release unconditionally, or release on police bail pending further investigation. The AP article itself notes that “bail was granted.” The Book Punch founder was released on police bail. The Hunter Bookstore operators were released on police bail. The Greenfield and Have A Nice Stay booksellers were released on police bail.

Nobody has been charged. Nobody has been convicted. Nobody is in prison. An investigation is underway and these people are at home.

That distinction matters, not because arrests are pleasant, they are not, but because the Western press presents these arrests as though conviction has already occurred, as though the investigation is the punishment, as though the process itself is the proof. In any common law jurisdiction, police investigate possible offenses and sometimes arrest people during that investigation. It happens in London. It happens in New York. The question is not whether arrests occurred. The question is what the arrests were about.

In fact, it happens in London at a scale that would make Hong Kong’s bookstore investigations look quaint. In 2023, British police forces across England and Wales made over 12,000 arrests for online speech under Section 127 of the Communications Act and Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act. Over 12,000. That is more than 30 arrests per day for things people said on the internet. Most did not result in conviction. The people were arrested, detained, subjected to the process, and released into a world where their names had been through a police system for posting something a constable deemed offensive. 

During the 2024 summer riots, the UK arrested more than 30 people specifically for social media posts. Tyler Kay, 26, was sentenced to 38 months for a Facebook post. Jordan Parlour, 28, got 20 months for urging people to target a building housing asylum seekers. A 53-year-old woman in Cheshire received 15 months for suggesting on Facebook that a mosque should be blown up. A 34-year-old in Wales got three months for sharing a derogatory meme about migrants in a local Facebook group. Britain has also recorded more than 133,000 “non-crime hate incidents” since 2014, words that are not criminal but which the police officially record and hold against people, some of them children below the age of criminal responsibility. 

Freedom House, the American think tank, downgraded the UK’s internet freedom score in 2025, citing the “proliferation of criminal charges, arrests, and convictions concerning online speech, including speech protected under international human rights standards.” This is the country whose press writes headlines about Hong Kong’s crackdown on expression. The country that arrests more people for online speech than China does, per capita and in absolute numbers, according to the very datasets the Western press uses. Nobody calls Britain authoritarian for it. Nobody sanctions Britain. Nobody writes op-eds about the death of British freedom. The framing is reserved for Hong Kong, where four booksellers were arrested, released on bail, and sent home.

So what were the books?

The publications identified across the four operations include “The Troublemaker,” a biography of Jimmy Lai written by Mark Clifford, a former director of Lai’s company Next Digital. Lai was convicted in December 2025 of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces to endanger national security and sentenced to twenty years. His biography is not a neutral historical document. It is a sympathetic account of a man convicted under national security law, written by a business associate, published abroad, and sold in a city where the subject’s conviction is a matter of public record. At Hunter Bookstore, police seized cartoon compilations by the political satirist Zunzi. At Greenfield and Have A Nice Stay, the trigger was reportedly a shipment from Taiwan containing a book called “Let Only Red Flowers Bloom,” published by the Taiwanese press Acropolis, which police described as carrying seditious intent.

You can think the line is drawn too tightly. You can think these books should be freely available. Those are reasonable positions. But the characterization in the Western press, that Hong Kong is raiding bookstores for selling ideas, collapses the distinction between a book about politics and a book that the authorities allege incites hatred against the state. The distinction exists whether you agree with it or not, and collapsing it is not journalism. It is advocacy.

Now, the article references the 2015 Causeway Bay Books case, where Leung writes that bookseller Lam Wing-kee and four others “disappeared.” The word “disappeared” does an enormous amount of narrative work. It implies finality. It implies people who were never seen again. It conjures images of a regime that swallows its critics whole and never gives them back.

Four of the five came back to Hong Kong.

Lui Bo returned on March 4, 2016. Cheung Chi-ping returned two days later. Lee Bo returned on March 24. All three went to Hong Kong police, asked that their missing persons cases be cancelled, stated they did not require government assistance, and left. Lam Wing-kee returned in June 2016, held a detailed press conference in front of the international media, accused mainland authorities of scripting his televised confession, described his detention in granular detail, gave interviews to every major outlet that would have him, moved to Taiwan in 2019, reopened Causeway Bay Books in Taipei, and continued speaking freely and publicly until his death in July 2026. The man who “disappeared” spent a decade publicly criticizing the Chinese government and died a free man running a bookshop.

The only one who did not return to Hong Kong was Gui Minhai, the Swedish national. Gui disappeared from Thailand, not from Hong Kong. The Chinese government’s position was that Gui returned to the mainland voluntarily to face a 2003 drunk-driving conviction in which he had struck and killed a pedestrian and then fled the country before his sentence could be carried out. At least two people who knew Gui told NPR they had heard about the traffic accident before the Chinese government made its statement, suggesting the underlying incident was real. The Western press treated the voluntary return claim with skepticism, and maybe the skepticism is warranted. But they never mentioned the drunk-driving death at all. The audience was left to believe a man was snatched from his apartment for selling books. The possibility that a man who had fled a vehicular manslaughter case might have been brought back to face that charge, whatever you think of the method, was simply edited out of the story. Gui was eventually sentenced in 2020 to ten years for “illegally providing intelligence overseas.” Whether you believe the Chinese account or not, the omission of the original charge tells you how the narrative was managed.

Causeway Bay Books itself was not a literary bookshop. It was, by the BBC’s own reporting at the time, a shop specializing in “gossipy paperbacks that are highly critical of China’s leadership.” Its parent publisher, Mighty Current Media, was estimated to be responsible for 30 to 60 percent of the output of salacious political tabloid books about Chinese leaders. One of the titles reportedly linked to the disappearances was an e-book called “Xi Jinping and His Mistresses.” This was not Orwell being suppressed. This was tabloid gossip about the private lives of national leaders being mass-produced and smuggled across the border.

Of the five men, three were last seen in mainland China when they went missing. Only Lee Bo was last seen in Hong Kong, and his case generated genuine constitutional concern because he appeared to have crossed into Shenzhen without his travel documents. Hong Kong’s own Chief Executive at the time, CY Leung, said it would be “unacceptable” if mainland authorities had operated in Hong Kong. That is not a cover-up. That is the head of the Hong Kong government publicly stating that the Basic Law prohibits mainland enforcement in Hong Kong, and that if it happened, it was a violation.

The Causeway Bay Books case was troubling. I am not going to pretend it was not. But the way it is deployed in articles like Leung’s, as a single word, “disappeared,” without the fact that four of them came back, without the tabloid nature of the books, without the drunk-driving case, without the fact that three were on the mainland when it happened, without the fact that the Hong Kong government condemned any cross-border enforcement, is designed to create a feeling rather than convey a fact. The feeling is: China kidnaps people from Hong Kong bookstores and they are never seen again. The fact is that four of the five returned to Hong Kong, three cancelled their own missing persons reports, one held a press conference and spent the rest of his life giving interviews, and the fifth, a Swedish national who disappeared from Thailand, had a vehicular manslaughter charge hanging over him that nobody in the Western press wanted to mention.

And while we are on the subject of kidnapping people from Hong Kong.

When the Causeway Bay Books story broke, Western commentators warned breathlessly that the new cross-border rail link from West Kowloon would become a kidnapping pipeline, that mainland agents would snatch people from the station. Opinion writers treated it as a near-certainty. The rail link opened in 2018. It has been running for eight years. Not a single person has been abducted from it.

But there is a kidnapping story from Hong Kong. It just has the wrong villains for the Western narrative.

In March 2004, a Libyan opposition leader named Sami al-Saadi was transiting through Hong Kong International Airport with his wife and four young children. British intelligence, MI6, working with the CIA and Libyan intelligence under Muammar Gaddafi, forced the family onto a plane. They were rendered to Tripoli. Al-Saadi was imprisoned and tortured for six years. His wife was bound and hooded for the entire flight. His youngest child was six years old. Documents confirming MI6’s role were found by Human Rights Watch in Tripoli after Gaddafi’s fall. The UK government settled with al-Saadi in 2012 for 2.2 million pounds.

That happened at Hong Kong’s airport. Not in 1950. In 2004. Western intelligence agencies kidnapped a man and his family from HKIA and delivered them to a torture chamber. The feared Chinese kidnapping from the West Kowloon rail station never materialized. The actual Western kidnapping from HKIA did happen, was documented, was settled in court, and was never mentioned in the context of Hong Kong’s freedom again. One scenario generated years of hand-wringing and magazine covers. The other generated a check.

I have a book for sale in Hong Kong. It is called Hong Kong Belongs to Hongkongers. The title borrows a protest slogan from the 2019 demonstrations. It is on Amazon. I wrote it here. I promote it openly on LinkedIn. Nobody has asked me to remove it from sale. Nobody has asked me to stop writing. Nobody has shown up. I am pro-democracy. I am pro-free speech. That is why I wrote a book, and that is why I am writing this article. Both activities are legal. Both are happening right now, from the same flat, in the same city the Western press says is dead to free expression.

The difference between my book and the publications that drew police attention is not subtle. I am not calling for the overthrow of the Chinese Communist Party. I am not advocating for Hong Kong independence. I am not selling a sympathetic biography of a man convicted of colluding with foreign forces. I am exercising free speech and advocating for universal suffrage within a legal framework that has clearly defined boundaries, boundaries that I and everyone else in this city understand perfectly well.

The article quotes booksellers saying they “struggle to interpret the rules.” Secretary for Security Chris Tang responded that the law clearly defines seditious intent. If you advocate for the overthrow of the CCP or independence for Hong Kong, you get what you ask for. That is the line. It is not ambiguous. Every person in this city who pays attention knows where it is. Kanis Leung, who wrote the AP article from Hong Kong, clearly knows where it is, because she wrote 1,500 words about bookstore arrests and published it with her name on it and nothing happened to her. The booksellers who claim not to know where the line is are, in many cases, standing very close to it on purpose.

I want to address something else the article implies without stating, which is that China is uniquely hostile to books and ideas. The United States maintains full diplomatic and economic relations with Vietnam, a one-party communist state where the Communist Party controls all media, where independent publishing does not exist, and where political dissidents are routinely imprisoned. The US trades with Laos, another one-party communist state. American companies manufacture products in Vietnam, import goods from Vietnam, invest billions in Vietnam, and nobody writes op-eds about the death of Vietnamese freedom when Hanoi arrests a blogger.

And China itself is not really communist in any meaningful economic sense. It runs the world’s second-largest economy on a model that includes private enterprise, foreign direct investment, billionaires, stock exchanges, venture capital, and consumer capitalism at a scale that would make Milton Friedman blush. The Communist Party governs. The economy is not communist. The Western press knows this but continues to use the word as a rhetorical weapon, because “communist” activates Cold War reflexes that “state-capitalist single-party system” does not.

None of which is to say the bookstore arrests do not matter. They do. The chilling effect is real. Booksellers are cautious. Greenfield, a shop that operated for fifty years, announced it would shut when its lease expires. That is a loss for Hong Kong. But the loss needs to be described accurately, not inflated into evidence that the city has become a surveillance state where the written word is contraband. It has not. I am writing the written word right now. You are reading it. The AP article exists. This article exists. My book exists, on Amazon, with my name on it. I am still here.

The real damage to Hong Kong’s bookstores, to its reputation, to its standing as a place where ideas can circulate, was not done primarily by the Hong Kong police. It was done by a Western media apparatus that has spent six years telling the world this city is dead, that has framed every enforcement action as proof of a thesis it arrived at before the evidence was in, and that has never, not once, provided the comparative context that would allow a reader to evaluate what is actually happening here against what happens in Singapore, in Vietnam, in the countries the West trades with cheerfully, in the countries where the Wall Street Journal has its offices and nobody writes an editorial about press freedom.

Leung’s article ends with a Hong Kong author who moved to Taiwan, identified only as Lee, comparing the collapse of civil society to “a boulder rolling downhill” and bookstores to “a small flower field where people could breathe.” The metaphor is beautiful. It is also the kind of thing you can say, from Hong Kong, to an AP reporter, and have published under your initial, and face no consequence for saying. Lee said it. AP printed it. I read it. I am quoting it now.

If the boulder had actually crushed the flower field, none of us would be having this conversation.

The next time you read a headline about Hong Kong, do not ask whether you believe it. Ask who wrote it, where they were when they wrote it, and what happened to them afterward. Then ask yourself what kind of authoritarian state lets its own accusers file their accusations from inside the city, under their own names, to a global audience, and never lifts a finger to stop them.

The answer is the kind that is not what you were told it is.