VITA VISSUTA

There are many ways to measure the health of a city.

Economists count GDP. Urban planners count skyscrapers. Tourists count Michelin stars and Instagram-worthy rooftops. But I have always preferred another measure: bookshops.

Whenever I return to Hong Kong, I inevitably disappear inside one. Not because I need to buy a book, but because bookstores reveal what a city still dares to say. Their shelves are conversations frozen in paper. Every title is an invitation to think differently. Every recommendation left by the owner is, in its own way, a declaration of values.

That is why the recent forced closure of two independent bookstores, Greenfield Book Store and Have A Nice Stay, feels larger than the loss of two small businesses.

It feels like another sentence added to a story that Hong Kong has been writing for several years.

In previous articles, I wrote about Jimmy Lai, whose imprisonment became a symbol of the shrinking space for independent journalism. I also reflected on the city’s cultural transformation, where libraries quietly removed books, artists reconsidered exhibitions, and journalists learned that silence had become a form of self-preservation. The disappearance of these bookstores belongs to the same narrative.

Modern censorship rarely arrives with dramatic gestures. It rarely burns books in public squares. Instead, it changes the atmosphere. It redraws invisible boundaries until people begin editing themselves before anyone else has to. Hong Kong has passed this, and watching live on media the arrests speaks by itself.

Hong Kong’s National Security Law, introduced in 2020, followed by the broader security legislation enacted under Article 23 in 2024, fundamentally altered the legal landscape. The laws were presented as necessary to restore stability after the social unrest of 2019. Beijing argued they would target only acts threatening national security.

Yet their impact has reached far beyond political activists.

Journalists have disappeared from newsrooms. Civil society organisations have dissolved. Universities have become more cautious. Libraries have quietly reviewed collections. Publishers have become selective. And now independent bookstores—those fragile spaces where controversial ideas once found a home—are finding it increasingly difficult to survive.

If they manage to survive, then they get closed as sharing “seditious” publications, as it happened a couple of days ago. That is what strikes me most whenever I walk through Hong Kong today. The skyline remains magnificent. The Star Ferry still crosses Victoria Harbour with reassuring regularity. Dim sum restaurants remain crowded, trams continue rattling across Hong Kong Island, and the city still moves with astonishing efficiency.

Everything appears unchanged. Except for the conversations.

The loud political debates that once spilled into cafés have faded. Protest art has disappeared from walls. Independent newspapers have vanished from kiosks. And now another pair of bookstores has quietly switched off its lights.

Cities do not lose their freedoms overnight. They lose them shelf by shelf. Conversation by conversation. Bookstore by bookstore.

Perhaps that is why I have always loved wandering through Hong Kong’s independent bookshops. They were never simply places selling literature. They were places where curiosity could still exist without asking permission. A bookstore represents something profoundly optimistic. It assumes that tomorrow’s reader deserves access to ideas they have not yet imagined. It believes that disagreement is not dangerous but necessary.

When those spaces disappear, something more than retail disappears with them. A city slowly loses its confidence in uncertainty.

Hong Kong remains one of Asia’s most extraordinary cities. Its energy, complexity and resilience are undeniable. I continue to return because I love walking its streets, photographing its neighbourhoods, and listening to the countless stories hidden between old tong lau buildings and gleaming financial towers. But each visit feels a little quieter than the last. And sometimes silence tells us more than words ever could. Perhaps that is the saddest lesson of all.

The closure of two bookstores will not make international headlines for very long. Yet history often remembers these seemingly insignificant moments better than political speeches. Because when future generations ask when a society began to fear ideas, the answer may not lie inside a courtroom or a parliament. It may simply be found behind the locked door of a neighbourhood bookstore whose lights never came back on.