Chinese authorities arrested two men who owned a children’s book that officials described as “seditious”.
Police and customs officials arrested the men, aged 38 and 50, on March 13 after searching their homes and finding several copies of the book, which describes how sheep keep wolves out of the village. The wolves want to take over a village and eat the sheep and urge the sheep to fight back against them.
Authorities have interpreted the book as referring to Hong Kong and Beijing. According to QZ, officials relied on a colonial-era law to justify sending the men to jail.
Both men have been released on bail but will have to report to police next month, the BBC reported. The police confiscated several copies of the books during their search.
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Hong Kong’s Chief Superintendent Steve Li of the city’s new National Security Police unit holds up a children’s book after five members said it was trying to explain the city’s pro-democracy movement and became a Hong Kong pro-democracy union at a police news conference in Hong Kong July 22, 2021 arrested for sedition for publishing the titles. (Daniel Suen/AFP via Getty Images)
The book, one of three in a series entitled Yangcun, caused an uproar last year when a government-appointed judge ruled it had “seditious intent” and sentenced five speech therapists to 19 months in prison for publication condemned.
The court stressed that, according to The Independent, the penalty was for “damaging or risking damaging the minds of children” and the potential to sow seeds of “instability”.
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Children’s books are pictured during a news conference after five people were arrested on suspicion of conspiring to publish inflammatory material at Hong Kong Police Headquarters in Hong Kong, China, July 22, 2021. (Anthony Kwan/Getty Images)
“What the defendants did to children as young as four was actually a brainwashing exercise to get the very young children to accept their beliefs and values,” the judge said.
This week’s arrests would be the first for simply possessing the book, which critics say represents a serious degradation of freedoms in the country.
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Contents of children’s books are displayed on a television screen during a news conference after five people were arrested on suspicion of conspiring to publish inflammatory material at the Hong Kong Police Headquarters in Hong Kong, China, July 22, 2021. (Anthony Kwan/Getty Images)
Hong Kong remains a special administrative region of China with a “one country, two systems” agreement with Beijing, but the rights afforded to the island’s citizens have slowly eroded since 2020 with the implementation of a national security law aimed at cracking down to widespread protests.
The use of an even more outdated law and the vague interpretation of “seditious” showed how far Chinese officials will go to curb dissent, according to Prof Johannes Chan, a former public law chair at the University of Hong Kong.
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“If there’s a cartoon in it [a newspaper] considered inflammatory, any lone reader who kept a copy of the newspaper could be guilty of misdemeanor,” Chan, who is a visiting professor at University College London, told The Guardian.
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