Jeremy Ray Jewellby Jeremy Ray Jewell
語言:
English
Photo Credit: Iflwlou/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 4.0
WHEN HONG KONG national security police walked bookseller Mandy Lau out of Have A Nice Stay on July 15, she was wearing a black T-shirt printed with six characters: 我是書店店員, meaning “I am a bookstore clerk.” She was released on bail two days later. The words on the shirt were almost aggressively ordinary. Saying them out loud now takes a kind of nerve.
The phrase travelled quickly among Taiwanese readers and booksellers. Reports that one seized title might be Emily Feng’s Let Only Red Flowers Bloom sent stores scrambling to restock it. The book, whose Chinese-language edition was published in Taiwan, follows people the Chinese Communist Party cannot fit into a single authorized account of Chineseness.
Lau was one of five people arrested, including fellow journalist Sum Wan-wah, after officers searched Have A Nice Stay and Greenfield Book Store, a few streets away, and accused the group of displaying and selling publications with “seditious intention.” The offense comes from Section 24 of the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance, the Article 23 legislation passed unanimously in March 2024 and layered onto the National Security Law Beijing imposed in 2020.
Secretary for Security Chris Tang said the law was clear: booksellers, like food vendors, were responsible for ensuring that what they sold was not poisonous. Asked whether the government would publish a list of banned titles, he refused, arguing that publishing one would let people evade the law by simply changing a title. Have A Nice Stay had already announced its closure, citing financial difficulties and an “elusive red line” it could not locate in advance.
A blacklist, however repressive, at least tells you where the line is. Refusing to publish one makes every bookseller their own censor, forced to guess which author, subject, publisher, or historical episode might later become evidence against them. The safest inventory is not the one with known banned books removed, but the one narrowed until nothing resembling them remains. It also avoids advertising any single title: Emily Feng’s book, never officially confirmed as one of the ones seized, still shot to the top of Taiwan’s bestseller charts within a day of being linked to the raid, a small Streisand effect built into the same silence.
This was the third police operation targeting independent bookstores in four months. In March, police arrested Book Punch owner Pong Yat-ming and three staff, reportedly over Mark Clifford’s The Troublemaker, a biography of Jimmy Lai, the Apple Daily founder sentenced this February to 20 years for conspiring to collude with foreign forces and publish seditious material. In June, on the fifth anniversary of Apple Daily’s own forced closure, officers arrested Leticia Wong Man-huen, a former pro-democracy district councillor turned owner of Hunter Bookstore and editor of its magazine Status Quo, along with the bookstore’s other owner. Wong was accused of selling seditious publications and receiving money from foreign political organizations, allowing a wire transfer and a bookshelf to be read as the same offense.
Section 24 had already been used against clothing. In 2024, Chu Kai-pong became the first person sentenced under it: fourteen months in prison for wearing a T-shirt bearing a 2019 protest slogan and a mask printed with a protest abbreviation. The law now governing what bookstores may stock had already prosecuted a shirt.
This same uncertainty has already contributed to a bookstore’s closure, jailed a T-shirt, and made owning a printing press or hosting a reading group a risk to weigh in advance.
The clearest precedent is Causeway Bay Books. In 2015, five people connected to the shop disappeared and later surfaced in mainland China under circumstances indicating they had been taken there against their will. One, Lam Wing-kee, later described detention, surveillance, and a forced televised confession. He relocated to Taipei and reopened Causeway Bay Books there in 2020, keeping the shop and its books alive outside the jurisdiction that had made carrying them dangerous. Lam died in July, two weeks before police raided two more independent bookstores in the city he had been forced to leave.
The state does not need to abduct a bookseller every time it wants a shelf emptied. It only needs to do so memorably enough, then let uncertainty do the rest.
On July 4, 2025, a protest outside the Prairieland ICE detention facility turned violent. An Alvarado police officer was shot and survived, and defendants were later convicted of riot, explosives, material support for terrorism, and attempted murder. Defense attorneys disputed even those underlying charges: several defendants said they had never met one another before that night, and their lawyers maintained the gathering had been billed as a peaceful noise demonstration, not a coordinated attack. Daniel Sanchez-Estrada was not at the protest. After speaking with his wife, Maricela Rueda, who had been arrested, he moved a box of documents from their home. He was convicted of corruptly concealing evidence and conspiring to conceal evidence, then sentenced to thirty years.
The charge was concealment. Yet the government’s description of the box gave it political meaning. The Justice Department called its contents “Antifa materials”: zines, planning documents, and what it characterized as anti-government and anti-law-enforcement propaganda. The publications were not themselves prohibited, and Sanchez-Estrada was not charged merely with writing, owning, or distributing them. But the material let prosecutors read the box as evidence of motive, and the motive as evidence of an organization. A defendant convicted only of concealment-related offenses (not riot, explosives, or shooting) received nearly a third of the sentence imposed on the man convicted of attempted murder.
Other defendants in the same Prairieland prosecution were linked even more directly to political publishing. In the home of Elizabeth and Ines Soto, agents found a standard office printer, paper cutter, and book binder, which prosecutors characterized collectively as a “printing press.” The government argued that the Sotos used the equipment to produce anarchist zines for the Emma Goldman Book Club, to which they and some other defendants belonged. Prosecutors used all of it, the equipment, the zines, the club, as evidence for the material-support charge and the alleged Antifa cell.
That comparison became easier for the administration to construct after Donald Trump’s September 2025 executive order purported to designate Antifa a domestic terrorist organization. The order did not create the obstruction statute used against Sanchez-Estrada. What it did was give prosecutors a category: Antifa as a nationwide “militarist, anarchist enterprise,” which federal agencies were told to investigate and dismantle wherever they found it. They found it in a box of documents, and in a printer.
The category remains active. In June, federal prosecutors indicted fifteen members of Direct Action Minnesota while foregrounding alleged Antifa ties, even as the US attorney described Antifa as an umbrella term for a loose movement and said its precise definition went beyond the indictment. One defense attorney offered a more concrete description of the accused: members of the community, active in mutual aid, union members, workers, neighbors. China does something similar with ethnic identity: its Ethnic Unity and Progress Promotion Law, which took effect that same month, criminalizes “ethnic separatist activities” among Uyghurs and Tibetans, the overwhelming majority of whom belong to no organization at all.
Georgia offered an earlier version without the federal designation. In 2023, the state indicted 61 opponents of Atlanta’s police-training complex under its RICO statute, describing the loose network around Defend the Atlanta Forest as an “anarchist, anti-police, and anti-business extremist organization.” The indictment devoted extensive attention to anarchist zines and mutual-aid practices, presenting them as tools of recruitment, propaganda, and organization within an alleged criminal enterprise.
Judge Kevin Farmer dismissed the RICO charges in 2025 because Georgia’s attorney general had failed to obtain the required authorization from the governor, a defect he conceded outright. Five defendants still face separate domestic-terrorism charges, and the state’s appeal is pending. The dismissal did not address the merits of the prosecution’s ideological theory.
Hong Kong and Texas are not the same legal order. Hong Kong prosecutes the sale of books through a sedition law with no equivalent in American constitutional law. The United States prosecutes other conduct and uses literature to characterize defendants after a different charge has been filed, within a system that still offers jury trials, appellate review, and a free press. Sanchez-Estrada’s own trial happened in public, as did the reporting that questioned it.
But it is not the whole story. In both places, the state finds it easier to establish who a person is than what they did. A bookshelf becomes a confession; a zine collection, a charge sheet. Once that identity is set, everything else reads as confirmation of it.
Taiwan has reason to take both the difference and the overlap seriously. Responding to the July raids, President Lai Ching-te invoked the martial-law era, when censored publications and suspect reading habits could expose someone to state suspicion. Taiwan also faces real coercion, espionage, and political interference from Beijing. That is why identifying such threats must remain tied to demonstrable acts rather than inferred character. A democracy that treats someone’s reading list as proof of intention has borrowed the habit most worth refusing.
Taiwan is also increasingly where Hong Kong’s displaced political culture survives. Lam Wing-kee spent his final years ensuring that a shop, and the books in it, had somewhere to go when Hong Kong stopped being safe for them. Mandy Lau’s shirt makes the same argument in miniature: describing yourself accurately (bookstore clerk, book-club member, owner of a printing press) should not require courage. When it does, the description becomes worth repeating until it stops being remarkable again.