Video Report: It Starts..... Hong Kong publishers self-censor under new security law | Practice Source - Legal News and Views

In the last two weeks, Hong Kong publisher Raymond Yeung has hastily made changes to a draft paper copy of a book entitled “To Freedom,” replacing the word “revolution” with “protests,” tweaking a banned slogan and cutting passages that advocate independence for the Chinese-ruled city.

The changes were hard to make, he told Reuters, but impossible to avoid since China passed a national security law on June 30, making the broadly defined crimes of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces punishable by up to life in prison.

“This is really painful,” Yeung said as he flipped through pages of the collection of essays by 50 protesters, lawyers, social workers and other participants in the pro-democracy demonstrations that shook Hong Kong last year.

“This is history. This is the truth,” he said, holding up the book with blue sticky flags on many pages to mark changes made because of the new law.

Just as demand for political books was surging in Hong Kong after a year of protests, Hong Kong’s once unbridled and prolific independent publishers are now censoring themselves in the face of the new law.

Hong Kong authorities say freedom of speech remains intact, but in the past two weeks public libraries have taken some books off the shelves, shops have removed protest-related decorations and the slogan “Liberate Hong Kong! Revolution of our times” has been declared illegal.

Video Report: It Starts….. Hong Kong publishers self-censor under new security law