Photo from CPJ / AP / Chan Long HeiThe arrest last week of journalist and bookseller Leticia Wong Man-huen on sedition charges brings to at least 29 journalists who have been arrested in Hong Kong since China ordered its sweeping crackdown on the city in 2020. At least nine journalists and press freedom defenders are currently imprisoned, according to data compiled by press freedom organizations, including Jimmy Lai, the founder of the now-defunct Apple Daily, six of his former editors and executives, and additional journalists and editors such as those from Stand News.Wong, the owner of Hunter Bookstore, was arrested by National Security Police along with an unnamed 32-year-old male, reportedly her husband, according to news reports. Police said Wong, a former Sing Tao Daily political reporter and proprietor of Hunter Bookstore in Sham Shui Po in northwestern Kowloon, had been arrested for displaying items with seditious intent and selling publications that incited hatred against the Hong Kong government, judiciary, and law enforcement agencies. They were also accused of violating Section 25 of the Organized and Serious Crimes Ordinance for receiving remittances funded by foreign political organizations. Wong and her companion posted bail and were released from Sham Shui Po police station the next day. They must report back to the police on July 24. In addition to running the bookshop, Wong had been the editor-in-chief of Status Quo, a magazine that features interviews, essays, and reporting on Hong Kong society and culture. Among the allegedly seditious items and books that police seized in Wong’s shop was a copy of “The Troublemaker,” a biography written by former journalist Mark Clifford of Jimmy Lai, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in February 2026, news reports said. Clifford is now president of the New York-based Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, created primarily to try to free Jimmy Lai. “The arrest of a journalist and editor over items sold through an independent bookstore shows Hong Kong authorities are expanding national security laws ever deeper into the city’s publishing sector,” said Asia-Pacific Director Beh Lih Yi of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. “Authorities should immediately release Wong and stop treating publishing activities as threats to national security.”Beijing imposed the harsh national security law on the city in 2020 after months of virulent anti-government protests over China’s refusal to allow democratic processes to go ahead, as promised in the 1997 agreement between the UK and China that ended colonial rule, ​sparking international criticism that the freedoms promised to the city at the ​handover were being curtailed.Hardline Hong Kong chief executive John Lee Ka-chiu, a former police commissioner, and authorities in Beijing have ignored demands by the Group of Seven, the European Union, the US State Department, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and a long list of other international critics regarding what they describe as a severe and ongoing deterioration of civil liberties under the sweeping “patriots-only” law. The drumbeat of criticism from overseas has increased over the past couple of years as authorities have begun targeting the families and associates of exiled activists in an attempt to suppress overseas dissent, especially in the UK and the United States, where domestic authorities have arrested Chinese nationals harassing those who have left the onetime British colony. China consistently ranks as the world’s worst jailer of journalists, with at least 50 behind bars, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. In Hong Kong, despite international complaints, more than 60 organizations including unions, churches, media groups, and political parties, many of them decades old, have been disbanded, according to a study by the independent publication Hong Kong Free Press, which said the trend accelerated in the second half of 2021, with bastions of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement crumbling within months. The New York-based Human Rights Watch put the figure even higher, estimating that more than 100 NGOs, independent media outlets, and labor unions have been forced to disband or relocate entirely, resulting in the establishment of overseas advocacy hubs, adding to Beijing’s irritation.The crackdown has reduced what was once one of Asia’s most vibrant cities in regard to human rights and protest against the government to sullen conformity, despite upbeat pronunciations by local civic leaders and other boosters. Any criticism of the government, either in the press or among the civic organizations including unions and churches, has simply stopped. The American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong describes public sentiment as “mixed, marked by a contrast between a stabilizing macroeconomic environment and underlying social strain. While many appreciate the city’s strengthened physical security and economic resilience, residents continue to grapple with elevated stress levels and cautious public optimism.”“For months, authorities waged an administrative campaign against Hunter Bookstore co-owner Leticia Wong, hoping to exhaust her resolve to keep selling books Hong Kongers have a right to read, but the regime would rather they didn’t,” according to a statement by the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong (CFHK) Foundation. “They gave up the death-by-a-thousand-cuts approach and just arrested Wong, a former journalist and Civic Party district councillor, for alleged sedition and money laundering linked to remittances from foreign organizations.”In a statement to AFP, Clifford said, “When authorities target booksellers for carrying a biography, they’re sending a message that even peaceful ideas and documented facts are no longer safe. A government that fears a book fears the truth.”