Book censorship in Hong Kong's public libraries, with the Tiananmen Square Massacre being among those subjects that is increasingly hard to read about in them

  

A book no longer available in Hong Kong public libraries

(but copies of which do exist in private hands in Hong Kong)

 

The past few days have been full of news of a number of books no longer being found in Hong Kong public libraries.  This is in addition to works by satirical cartoonist Zunzi having disappeared from them in the wake of the news of Ming Pao having suspended (and, in all likelihood, ended the four decade run of his cartoon strip last week; with a search by the Hong Kong Free Press, "including for Zunzi’s real name, Wong Kei-kwan, [having] yielded no results on the public library’s official website on Friday". (More than by the way, here's a link to his final comic, entitled "Rain and shine together" and featuring a yellow umbrella, which came out on Saturday, May 12th.) 

In the wake of this development, people have been doing searches in Hong Kong's public libraries and found that works by other notable folks -- including Hong Kong sociologist Ngok Ma and Stanford University political sociologist Larry Diamond -- have also gone missing; even those, like Chinese author Xu Zhiyuan, whose books are not banned in Mainland China!  In the words of a now exiled Hong Konger, Galileo Cheng: "A censorship system is being revived and we are drifting back to the old days" (with the old days in question being pre-turn of the 20th century British colonial Hong Kong). 

These discoveries prompted another now exiled Hong Konger, lawyer-political commentator Kevin Yam, to Tweet the following: "Today it’s banning books deemed politically unacceptable, tomorrow it will be banning of books containing politically sensitive economic, business and financial knowledge. Free information flows is a lynchpin of business and finance, which Hong Kong is en route to destroying."  That was on three days ago, May 13th, and in the days that have followed, still more books have been found to have gone missing from Hong Kong's public libraries. 

 

Yesterday, Ming Pao political reporter Alvin Lum Tweeted that "Hong Kong's public libraries have shelved memoir and writings of late democrat Szeto Wah as part of [a] review under [the] National Security Law" and also books by lawyer Margaret Ng.  Re the former: as Hong Kong journalist Ryan Ho Kilpatrick (now exiled in Taiwan) observed: "Szeto Wah used to be considered the archetype of the loyal opposition, every inch a patriot as much as a democrat. Even Beijing recognised this, and appointed him to the Basic Law drafting committee in 1985. The fact [that[ his work is now being censored shows how far HK has fallen."

 

Re the latter: If Margaret Ng wasn't already among the most respected Hong Kongers alive before she made a great speech in court in April 2021, she has become so after that.  More than incidentally, I had included a link to that speech in my blog post about her.  Sadly, Citizen News is one of the Hong Kong media sites that has felt obliged to close down in recent years; so here's providing a link to her speech at was shared on another, this time out-of-Hong Kong website.

 

And today's been dominated by reports of books about the Tiananmen Square Massacre (such as Rowena He's Tiananmen Exiles, six copies of which were available back on April 23rd, and Louisa Lim's The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited) no longer being in the Hong Kong public library system.  Channel News Asia reporter Wei Du was moved to Tweet that: "In 2017, when June 4 was removed from HK textbooks, I asked Carrie Lam how was anyone supposed to learn about that history. She told me to go to the library. Plenty of books there, she said. Yet here we are."

 

But, as Hong Kong Free Press' chief editor Tom Grundy noted: This removal of books about the Tiananmen Square Massacre "has been going on for a couple of years. In 2021,[the Hong Kong Free Press] found that Hong Kong’s libraries had 392 fewer copies of books about the Tiananmen crackdown than they did in 2009."  And this is the thing: it's been a drip, drip process for some years now; one which too many people failed to take notice or seriously enough despite this and other examples of  "Mainlandization" having been talked and shouted about by pro-democracy activists and protestors for years before 2020, 2019 and even in 2014!  

 

As Bloomberg's Matthew Brooker more generally noted: "It should be remembered that the 2019 protests were in part an accumulated reaction to a slow squeeze on freedoms that had been going on for years. Now the govt presents 2019 as the reason for these changes, but the program has always been the program".  And should it not be clear: "The program being to erase Hong Kong’s autonomy and freedoms".

 

Returning to today: Chief Executive John Lee responded to the current hoo-ha by stating that "Titles removed from the shelves of Hong Kong public libraries can still be bought from bookstores".  Also in the same Hong Kong Free Press piece covering this: "Ming Pao reported that since 2020, around 40 per cent of books and recordings about political topics or figures had been removed from public libraries.  Of 468 political books and recordings identified by Ming Pao, at least 195 had been removed – 96 of them in the past year, the newspaper reported." (And yes, this is the same Ming Pao that has suspended Zunzi's cartoon strip!)

Among the reactions to John Lee's remarks is this by Renaud Haccart over on Twitter: "This is disingenuous: • this is censorship - making undesirable titles harder to get access to for the public (the role of public libraries!) • lots of stores are owned by the PLA and will screen for such books • independent booksellers have been under huge legal pressure".  

 

Re the last: miraculously, independent bookstores -- a few of which are "yellow" too -- do still exist in Hong Kong; and I've actually seen copies of Louisa Lim's The People's Republic of Amnesia in one of those that still are in operation.  But the other Hong Kong bookstore where I saw copies of that book for sale is no more; with the owner of Bleak House Book having been open about the state of politics in Hong Kong having been behind his decision to return with his family to the USA back in 2021. 

 

Something else worth noting: amidst it all, it's never been outright proclaimed that mourning, never mind discussing, the Tiananmen Square Massacre is illegal.  Just yesterday, "Secretary for Security Chris Tang evaded questions from a reporter on Monday over whether members of public mourning victims of the crackdown would be committing subversion or sedition, ahead of the June 4 anniversary of the incident.  

 

So... tell me: why have all those books about June 4th disappeared from Hong Kong's public libraries with a number of others that it's really quite difficult to look upon as national security threats?  And this especially when none other than the Hong Kong Chief Executive maintains that they're (still) okay to sell and buy in bookstores?!