Selling censored books to prove a point

One night in the fall of 2015, a bookseller from Hong Kong was blindfolded, handcuffed, and abducted to China, where he spent months in solitary confinement for selling controversial political books banned in mainland China. Four other booksellers met the same fate, and since then—despite mass protests over what happened—several bookstores have closed.

In a new pop-up bookstore in central Hong Kong, open on February 16 and 17, Amnesty International will sell more than 1,000 books with blacked-out passages to call attention to the censorship. Hong Kong, which is part of China but has a separate political system, has laws protecting freedom of expression.

The new bookstore points out how those laws are threatened, affecting both booksellers and the press. Read more here.