📚 Banned & Targeted Books|禁書登記

Related: 📕 Book Censorship under the NSL | 🐑 Sheep Village

The Hong Kong government has repeatedly refused to publish a list of banned books — in July 2026 the Secretary for Security said it never would. So there is no official catalogue of what the city has tried to make vanish. This page is an unofficial one: a growing registry of the titles that have been declared seditious, pulled from library shelves, seized in bookshop raids or stopped at customs, assembled from the court cases and news reports that actually named them. Where a cover can be shown, it is — to help readers recognise a book and look it up. For the cases themselves, see 📕 Book Censorship under the NSL.

This list is partial and ongoing. It grows as new titles are seized, and much is never named publicly — the 60-plus Taiwan books taken from the Waiting Bird / As One group in 2026, for instance, were never itemised. If you can add a title, a cover or the case it belongs to, please contribute.

The landmark: the Sheep Village trilogy

The three picture books that became the first works a Hong Kong court declared "seditious publications" — the template for everything that followed. Published by the General Union of Hong Kong Speech Therapists; five of its members were jailed for sedition in 2022. The archive preserves all three in full — read them in the Sheep Village viewer.

Seized, pulled and prosecuted

Titles named in the bookshop raids and library purges of 2023–2026. Click a cover to look the book up in a library catalogue.

Cover images are low-resolution reproductions shown for identification (fair use), self-hosted rather than hotlinked; sourced from Open Library and, for the Sheep Village trilogy, the archive's own preserved copies.

Removed from the public libraries

Separately from the shop raids, Hong Kong Public Libraries cleared its own shelves after the 2020 security law. The scale is only knowable second-hand, because the Leisure and Cultural Services Department has never published the list: Ming Pao counted at least 195 Chinese-language hard-copy titles pulled over two years and — via Al Jazeera — put it at more than 40% of "political-theme" books and videos removed since 2020; The Collective found 255 Chinese-language e-books gone over three years; and HKFP had already found 29 Tiananmen titles axed by 2021. For several authors the libraries removed their entire output. The named titles below come mostly from HKFP's itemised reporting; where an author has a page here — such as Joshua Wong, or the Hong Kong 47 defendants Benny Tai and Albert Ho — it is linked. Original Chinese titles and covers can be added over time (see #38).

Title	Author	Year	Pulled
I Am Not a Hero · I Am Not a Kid (commentary collections)	Joshua Wong	2016	First round, Jul 2020
My Journeys for Food and Justice (travel writing)	Tanya Chan	2014	First round, Jul 2020
On the Hong Kong City-State (and five of his other titles)	Chin Wan (Horace Chin)	2012	First round, Jul 2020
On Hong Kong Nationalism	HKU Student Union	2014	Reported banned, 2021
The Future of Constitutionalism in Hong Kong trilogy — The Future of Rule of Law · …of Democracy · …of "Two Systems, One Country" (and all his works)	Benny Tai	2015	Second round, 2021
Beneath the Keystone – 18 Years in Politics (and all her prose and Jin Yong studies)	Margaret Ng	2018	Third round, 2023
The Politics of Emotion (and all his titles)	Hui Po-keung	2018	Third round, 2023
An Oral History of the Democratic Movement of Hong Kong in the 1980s (and all his work)	Ma Ngok	2012	Third round, 2023
Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Zhao Ziyang	Zhao Ziyang	2009	Tiananmen titles
Big Rivers Going to the East (memoir)	Szeto Wah	2011	Tiananmen titles
Hong Kong, the Light Soy Sauce · China, the Old Soy Sauce (and all ten of his cartoon books)	Zunzi (Wong Kei-kwan)	2019	2023

Books by former lawmakers Raymond Wong and Albert Ho were also pulled in the 2021 round, though specific titles were not named in the reporting. Aggregate figures and the named examples are documented by HKFP (which itemised the titles above); the broader purge, the "40% of political titles" figure and the Tiananmen removals are corroborated by Al Jazeera and RFA.

How this registry is built

Because no official list exists, this one is assembled from primary reporting and court records — each title is here because a named case, raid, removal or seizure put it there, cited on the main book-censorship page. It is deliberately conservative: a book is listed only when a source names it, which is why broad seizures that were never itemised do not yet appear. Submissions — a cover scan, a title, the case it belongs to — are welcome through the archive's submission channels.

Sources

• 📕 Book Censorship under the NSL — the cases each title is tied to, with their sources.
• 🐑 Sheep Village — the trilogy, the trial, and the preserved books.
• Open Library: Let Only Red Flowers Bloom (Emily Feng, Crown, 2025).
• Yang Du's The Unburned Book (未燒書) is discussed in Lingua Sinica.
• HKFP: 'Not recommended' reading — the books Hong Kong is purging from public libraries (26 May 2023) — the itemised source for the library removals above.
• Al Jazeera: Tiananmen books disappear from Hong Kong library shelves (18 May 2023) — the "40% of political titles" figure (citing Ming Pao) and the Tiananmen removals.
• RFA: Hong Kong libraries remove books for 'violating' national security law (24 Nov 2021) — the 2021 round.

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Backlinks

• 📕 Book Censorship under the NSL