South China Morning Post · https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/3360514/story-ends-another-hong-kong-indie-bookshop-closes-amid-losses-red-lines
Five booksellers arrested, and no list of banned titles. The government wants fear to do the censoring. Scripture was written by men who knew that strategy from inside a cell.
I suffer hardship to the point of chains as a criminal. But God's word isn't chained.
2 Timothy 2:9
On Wednesday, July 15, 2026, Hong Kong police raided two independent bookstores: Have A Nice Stay, founded by laid-off journalists, and the decades-old Greenfield Book Store. Officers boxed up the stock and arrested five people on suspicion of selling seditious publications. It was the third raid on the city's booksellers in four months.
The next day, July 16, Secretary for Security Chris Tang told booksellers to make sure their shelves do not endanger national security, the way a grocer answers for poisoned food. A list of banned titles, he said, would not be published. The refusal is the mechanism. A list can be complied with; an unnamed offense must be guessed at, and a bookseller who has to guess becomes his own censor. Have A Nice Stay had already announced its closure, citing "an elusive red line." It was raided anyway.
Scripture has been on the receiving end of this policy. When Jeremiah's scroll was read aloud to King Jehoiakim, he sliced it apart a few columns at a time and fed the strips to the fire beside him (Jeremiah 36:23).
Jeremiah 36:27-2827Then the word of Yahweh came to Jeremiah, after that the king had burned the scroll, and the words which Baruch wrote at the mouth of Jeremiah, saying,28Take again another scroll, and write in it all the former words that were in the first scroll, which Jehoiakim the king of Judah has burned.
The scroll survived the fire. The king did not survive the scroll.
Seven centuries later a prisoner in Rome, chained and awaiting execution, staked his farewell letter on the same asymmetry. Rome killed him, then spent three centuries discovering that the letter was harder to kill than the man. The promise is narrow. Most banned books die banned. This claim is about one author. What God says, God keeps in circulation, past every fire, every index, every customs check.
The five arrested will probably make bail; everyone from the earlier raids did. The books will sit boxed in a police evidence room. God's word has gotten out of smaller rooms than that.