Four Hong Kong booksellers have been arrested for selling “seditious titles.”

As the Hong Kong Free Press reported this morning, four booksellers in Hong Kong have been arrested on suspicion of selling “seditious titles.”

The store in question is Book Punch, a Sham Shui Po bookstore owned and operated by Pong Yat Ming. The offending titles center Jimmy Lai, the jailed media tycoon and founder of a recently shuttered pro-democracy newspaper.

Anonymous sources told the Free Press that in addition to the missing booksellers, the store has been raided, and titles like Mark Clifford’s The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic have been pulled from the shelves.

Jimmy Lai was sentenced ​to a 20-year prison term in February for sedition, in Hong Kong’s biggest national security case to date. And this is not the first time booksellers have been accused of the same crime.

In 2016, The Economist reported that Causeway Bay Books was the site of several kidnappings “by Chinese secret agents,” after five men connected with the shop—and its supplier, Mighty Current publishing house—disappeared.

This much publicized event became a bellwether for decreasing autonomy in Hong Kong, which, under the One Country, Two Systems agreement, is supposed to be free of direct cultural interference from the mainland.

Over the past ten years, that interference has been steadily increasing. In 2017, President Xi Jinping reaffirmed a commitment to cultural propaganda, declaring that all socialist literature published in China or Hong Kong must extol the Chinese Communist Party.

In 2018, Lam Wing-Kee, the formerly imprisoned proprietor of Causeway Bay Books, discussed the effects of this policy in The New York Times.

According to reporter Alex Palmer, Lam’s ordeal—months of detention for selling banned books—marked “the beginning of a Chinese effort to reach beyond the mainland to silence the country’s critics or their enablers.”

On the heels of 2019’s pro-democracy protests, Beijing has imposed even broader and more sweeping legislation to quash dissent in Hong Kong.

Mark Clifford, author of the seized Lai biography, told Reuters that he was not aware of today’s arrests. But says “it’s ‌a ⁠sad and ironic commentary that selling a book on a man who is in jail for his activities as a journalist, for promoting free expression, would be subject to sedition.”

Image of Pong Yat Ming in Book Punch via