Hong Kong police have detained Leticia Wong, a former district councillor and the owner of the independent bookstore Hunter, on suspicion of sedition and money laundering. Authorities raided the establishment late Wednesday night in the working-class neighborhood of Sham Shui Po, seizing books that allegedly incited hatred against the government and the judiciary.
Wong, a former member of the Civic Party—once one of the city’s largest pro-democracy groups, which has since dissolved—and another detained man face charges of sedition and money laundering for allegedly receiving financial transfers from “foreign political organizations.”
The independent shop had been under intense government scrutiny for months. In 2025, after organizing an independent book fair, pro-government media accused the venue of practicing “soft resistance,” a term increasingly utilized by the executive branch to target non-violent forms of cultural or ideological dissent.
The bookstore first drew significant police attention in 2024 when it challenged an unofficial veto on historical memory by selling candles and displaying posters reading “35/5″—a veiled reference to the 35th anniversary of the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square military crackdown, whose annual vigil was for decades the greatest symbol of freedom in the semi-autonomous territory.
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This prosecution reflects the sweeping impact of the National Security Law imposed by Beijing in 2020 following massive pro-democracy protests, alongside new domestic national security regulations enacted in 2024. Both legal frameworks have fundamentally redefined legal boundaries in the financial hub by criminalizing political offenses like sedition, with penalties carrying sentences up to life imprisonment.
As a result, Hong Kong’s publishing ecosystem has faced systematic suffocation. Public libraries have purged hundreds of titles, while the independent sector has denounced a consistent pattern of harassment through continuous inspections and aggressive new licensing requirements.
These dynamics, industry insiders alert, have instilled permanent legal insecurity and deep psychological exhaustion among creators in the former British colony.
