Li Kwai-wah, senior superintendent of the Police National Security Department, poses with three children’s books that revolve around a village of sheep which has to deal with wolves from a different village in Hong Kong. Photograph: Vincent Yu/AP
Hong Kong: Two men were detained by the national security police for having children’s books that were considered seditious by the officials.
This is just the latest in a series of actions that highlight the precarious state of civil liberties in Hong Kong.
According to a police press release cited in the local media, the two men, aged 38 and 50, were detained after police and customs officers searched their homes and offices and discovered copies of “seditious publications” that were allegedly “incited hatred or contempt” against the Chinese and Hong Kong governments and the judiciary.
The books, according to the police, were connected to a sedition prosecution and were “seditious publications that could incite others to use violence and disobey the law,” they added.
The publications, according to the Chinese-language Mingpao newspaper, were sent from Britain to Hong Kong and included several copies of illustrated children’s books from a series that compared Hongkongers to sheep defending their village from wolves during the 2019 unrest, a clear allusion to the mainland Chinese authorities.
According to Mingpao, the two have been released on bail but must return to the police the following month.
Earlier, five speech therapists were sentenced to 19 months in prison for “conspiring to print, distribute, and display three books with seditious intent” after a high-profile trial in 2022 in which the books were deemed seditious by the court.
The books were “too radical and instilled in children the ideas to confront and resist the government,” police advised parents at the time, so they should be destroyed.
The sedition offence from colonial times was used in the convictions along with Beijing’s national security legislation to quell dissent.
One title – The 12 Heroes of Sheep Village, reportedly alludes to 12 protesters’ unsuccessful effort to leave Hong Kong in 2020. They were apprehended and put on trial in China for trespassing.
The two men’s arrests are thought to be the first instances in which police have detained citizens for having books labelled “seditious” by the government.
When the speech therapists were arrested in 2021, a top national security police official said he “could not see a problem” with them simply possessing those publications, which caused widespread alarm.
The police news release this time, however, stated that “possession of seditious publications is a serious crime” that could result in a year of imprisonment for first-time offenders and two years for repeat offenders.
Defense attorneys accused of violating the laws of the colonial period must also submit to a more rigorous national security bail assessment. Sedition cases are supervised by designated national security judges.
Incitement to violence, disaffection, and other offences against the government are prohibited by the sedition statute.
Over the previous week, national security officers had already made a number of arrests.
Last Wednesday a 23-year-old woman was arrested for reportedly posting internet messages calling for the independence of Hong Kong.
Veteran labour rights activist Elizabeth Tang was arrested last Thursday, suspected of “colluding with foreign forces” after returning from Britain to visit her husband, Lee Cheuk-yan, an opposition lawmaker, in jail.
The national security legislation, which China enacted to put an end to the months-long and occasionally violent anti-government demonstrations that began in 2019, stipulates severe penalties, including life in jail, for crimes like secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces.
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