The Chinese language model of Jimmy Lai’s biography ‘The Troublemaker’ (C), authored by Mark L. Clifford, displayed at an unbiased bookstore in Hong Kong. File
| Picture Credit score: AFP
A rights group warned on Wednesday (March 25, 2026) that Hong Kong was changing into “more and more dystopian” after police reportedly arrested a bookstore proprietor and his employees, and seized publications just like the biography of imprisoned mogul Jimmy Lai.
Pong Yat-ming and three workers of Ebook Punch face allegations of promoting seditious publications below Hong Kong’s 2024 nationwide safety regulation, native newspapers South China Morning Put up and Ming Pao and broadcaster TVB reported on Tuesday (March 24), citing unnamed sources.
Officers searched the bookshop and seized numerous supplies, together with a biography of Mr. Lai, who was sentenced final month to twenty years in jail for nationwide safety crimes.
Human Rights Watch warned on Wednesday (March 25) that “Hong Kong has develop into more and more dystopian”.
“First, the authorities jailed the newspaper writer, then they arrested the individual promoting books about him. Who’s subsequent?” Elaine Pearson, HRW’s Asia director, mentioned in an announcement.
“It is going to be the strange individuals who undergo the results over time,” she added.
When requested by AFP concerning the bookstore arrests, police solely mentioned that they “take actions in keeping with precise circumstances and in accordance with the regulation”.
An AFP reporter noticed that Ebook Punch was shut on Tuesday (March 24), with a discover that learn: “Because of an sudden incident, closed for someday, sorry for the inconvenience”.
Mr. Lai’s biography, “The Troublemaker”, is authored by Mark Clifford, a former director of the 78-year-old mogul’s firm, Subsequent Digital.
It chronicles Mr. Lai’s immigration from mainland China to Hong Kong, the place he turned a billionaire dissident and founding father of the now-shuttered tabloid Apple Each day.
Urania Chiu, a regulation lecturer at Oxford Brookes College, known as the reported Ebook Punch case a “extremely regarding improvement”.
“Given the broad and malleable definition of seditious intention, it’s onerous to say that anybody can have certainty about what’s and isn’t seditious,” Ms. Chiu instructed AFP.
Hong Kong handed a homegrown nationwide safety regulation in 2024, which got here along with a broader regulation imposed by Beijing after democracy protests seized the monetary hub in 2019.
Revealed – March 25, 2026 11:11 pm IST