The curious, never-ending crackdown on Hong Kong’s booksellers A case of national-security theatre Jul 30th 2026 Evidently the officers in charge of the raid had not expected such a big haul, or they would have brought more bins. The last of it had to be carried out in a suitcase. After the contraband came the suspect: a bespectacled woman, with a T-shirt printed “I am a bookstore employee”. The raid on “Have a Nice Stay”, a bookstore in Hong Kong’s trendy Mong Kok district, on July 15th was part of the Hong Kong government’s campaign against retailers of the printed word. Since passing a draconian national-security law in 2020 authorities have gone after shops selling “seditious” texts. This was not even the day’s first operation. Outside the half-closed shutter of the nearby Greenfield bookstore, two plainclothes
police officers brusquely told your correspondent to shove off. At least 11 booksellers have been arrested this year. The government’s heavy-handed approach is puzzling. Any real danger from controversial texts is surely online, where they may be easily shared. And raiding bookshops looks patently repressive, especially to people in Taiwan who watch Hong Kong to see what Chinese rule might be like. Lam Wing- kee, an early casualty of the war on booksellers, died there on July 2nd. Why this archaic obsession with bookshops? It is not to keep provocative titles out of eager readers’ hands. The government will not say what is forbidden, so booksellers cannot know what not to stock. The day before the raids “Have a Nice Stay” said it was closing, as it could not navigate the government’s “unclear red lines”. The police’s enormous haul suggests they might not know where the lines are either. Rather, the war against words is theatre performed for three audiences. The first is the bookshops and their clientele. Many of them opened after the pro- democracy protests in 2019 that led to the national-security law. Some held related events or sold aides-mémoire with slogans from the demonstrations. Authorities want to “suppress the collective memory of what happened” and punish book pedlars for “not shutting up”, says Albert Wan, who closed his shop, Bleak House Books, in 2021. The second audience is ordinary Hong Kongers, says Bao Pu, a publisher whose history books were shunned on the mainland but stocked by Greenfield. It is an “exercise of hard power”, he says, targeting not books, but resistance. The raids send a message “that these are the bad guys”. The third is the boss. The police seem eager to justify the HK$18bn ($2.3bn) spent on national security since the law passed. And Hong Kong authorities want to please a watchful China. Wang Zhenmin, the former legal chief of China’s Hong Kong liaison office and an influential voice, said on July 14th that national-security risks were “rising significantly” and urged stronger “enforcement mechanisms”. Hong Kong’s national-security theatre may be on show for some time yet. ■
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Sex, blood and Communist Party virtues A gory film tests prudish government censors Jul 30th 2026 “Kill Bill” is among the most violent works in the bloodsoaked filmography of Quentin Tarantino. When the two volumes of the film are combined they form a four-and-a-half-hour gore-fest known collectively as “The Whole Bloody Affair”. The compilation has been hitting silver screens around the world this year and in August will be aired in China, where violence, cursing and sex are thoroughly scrubbed from all forms of entertainment. Mr Tarantino’s style seems like a bad fit for China, or at least for the Communist Party. The China Film Administration (CFA), part of the party’s propaganda department, regularly blocks the release of steamy films. Only one of Mr Tarantino’s flicks has made it to Chinese cinemas: “Django Unchained” in 2013. But its opening was abruptly cancelled; it was released
a month later, more heavily censored. Another, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”, was approved, then cancelled for unclear reasons. Fans have been thrilled by the approval of “The Whole Bloody Affair” but also curious about what they will not see. China does not have a content- rating system. The party’s longstanding policy on entertainment is that all content must be wholesome enough for universal consumption. (A four- year-old and a 40-year-old should be able to enjoy all the same films, thinks the party.) The CFA has therefore become adept at purging provocative elements from Western cinema by cutting sex and violence, digitally adding clothing to nudes and zooming in during tricky scenes to crop out all it deems improper. Whether the decapitations and eye-gougings in the upcoming release can be cut and still keep the plotline intact is anyone’s guess. Local film buffs also wonder if screening racier films this year is a response to dismal box-offices. Sales in the first half of 2026 dived by two-fifths on the same period last year, the lowest in a decade (excluding 2020 and 2022, when most theatres were closed due to covid-19). More than 550 cinemas closed in the first four months of the year. The release of Mr Tarantino’s picture along with a horror film called “Obsession”, which opened on July 24th, might be an attempt to boost audiences. It is far from certain this will work. Insiders have long believed it will take a real rating system to protect kids while also giving grown-ups the blood and sex they want. For now the party seems unwilling to budge. If its censors can turn “The Whole Bloody Affair” into a film the whole family can enjoy, perhaps they are deserving of an Oscar. ■ Subscribers can sign up to Drum Tower, our new weekly newsletter, to understand what the world makes of China—and what China makes of the world. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/china/2026/07/28/sex-blood-and-communist-party-virtues
The anti-abortion crusade’s new fight Donald Trump is warming to Volodymyr Zelensky How to turn solutions into problems The tide turns for a Florida darling and California loser Donald Trump’s food-stamp overhaul is beginning to bite The Michigan Senate primary is a fight for control of the Democrats
The anti-abortion crusade’s new fight With legal abortions on the rise, an aggressive battle is beginning Jul 30th 2026 ANTI-ABORTION ACTIVISTS once longed for the circumstances of 2026. Republicans control the Senate, House and White House. The Supreme Court is controlled by conservative justices and has overturned Roe v Wade, which had enshrined the right to abortion. Yet there are now more abortions in America than when Roe stood, as a rising number of women have abortions by pills received by post. Allowing women to choose an abortion, particularly early in a pregnancy, is consistently popular with voters. For those defending the right to an abortion, this is an unexpected success. For those who want to end abortion, it is inspiring a new fight. Lawyers are seeking to block access to abortion pills by post. Some politicians want to criminalise the women who take them, breaking a long-standing taboo for a
movement once eager to win broad support. That it is now being meaningfully debated shows the depth of frustration with the status quo. Abortion pills are “the biggest front for the pro-life community”, says Erik Baptist of the Alliance Defending Freedom, a law firm which helped argue the case that overturned Roe. Approved in 2000, the pills are used to end a pregnancy within its first ten weeks. Their use climbed rapidly after rules for their administration at home were eased during the covid pandemic. Four years ago, in the wake of the ruling overturning Roe, Massachusetts passed the first so-called telemedicine “shield” law, which gave providers of abortion pills in states without bans protection from criminal and civil charges. Seven states have followed. According to data from the Society of Family Planning, a non-profit group, by December 2025 almost 15,000 abortions were provided each month under shield laws. “In pro-life states such as Louisiana,” complains Mr Baptist, “they’re encountering 800 to 900 abortions each month, when that number should be zero.” So far legal challenges have been slow to progress. Louisiana has tried to extradite doctors from New York and California, but both requests have been blocked by the states’ Democratic governors, who refused to sign warrants. Ken Paxton, Texas’s attorney-general, who is running for the Senate, also sued a New York doctor, unsuccessfully. Although a case against shield laws is expected to escalate eventually to the Supreme Court, “some of [the cases] have just been caught in the traps that shield law has designed,” says Greer Donley, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh and one of the “proud” architects of the laws. For example, the constitution’s extradition clause was written to apply to fugitives who fled from one state to another, not to a local travelling no further than a nearby post office. Some anti-abortion activists are concluding that it may prove faster and more effective to go after the medicines directly. In 2025 Louisiana sued the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), claiming it was reckless when it allowed mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in a medical abortion, to be dispensed remotely. A federal appeals court will hear the case in September. In the meantime, campaigners want the White House to help. After much delay, the FDA is directly reviewing mifepristone’s safety record