The tiny book stall next to the popular Star Ferry terminal in Hong Kong does a brisk business catering to the thousands of visitors from China who pass by every day.
About half of its books are political, including titles about the private lives, backroom politics and fabulous fortunes of the Chinese Communist Party elite. The other half are pornographic. Both types are banned in China.
“Political books and pornography books both have market value,” said the owner, Mak Kuen-tat, as he leafed through a tabloid about local celebrity gossip.
Illustration: Yusha
However, a few blocks away, a different calculus is at play. The Commercial Press bookstore does not carry the banned political books. Instead, the collected speeches of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) are prominently displayed, as are at least four biographies of former Singaporean prime minister Lee Kuan Yew(李光耀), who was widely admired by Chinese officials.
It is the same pattern in 13 other Hong Kong stores owned by the parent company of Commercial Press, Sino United Publishing, the biggest bookseller and publisher in the territory.
Despite the interest from Chinese tourists, books that paint Chinese politicians in a bad light are either not available or tucked out of sight on shelves far from heavily trafficked areas. As in the US, pornography is not found in most bookstores.
According to Hong Kong corporate records and one of the company’s top executives, Sino United is owned, through a series of holding companies, by the Chinese government.
The company’s dominant position in the territory’s publishing and bookselling industry is a major breach in the wall between China and Hong Kong, a former British colony whose civil liberties — including freedom of the press — were guaranteed by treaty for half a century after it returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.
It also illustrates how the central government in Beijing wields influence in the territory not through force, but through its financial clout.
That influence has become even more apparent in the nearly three years since Xi became the top leader in China.
The traditionally rambunctious news media in the territory faces growing pressure to soft-pedal coverage of Beijing and the Beijing-aligned Hong Kong government. Most of Hong Kong’s newspapers and television stations are independently owned, but often by pro-Beijing tycoons. In some cases, top editors who oversaw coverage critical of China have been shunted aside.
The two most vocally pro-Beijing newspapers, Ta Kung Pao and Wen Wei Po, are owned by the same government-owned holding company, Guangdong New Culture Development, that owns Sino United.
The market for books on Chinese politics, which have long been a fixture in Hong Kong bookstores that cater to Chinese visitors, has fallen on hard times. Interviews with booksellers and publishers say that market forces — rising rents and the advent of ebooks — play a part.
However, so does Xi’s government, which is increasingly intolerant of dissent and has warned Chinese tourists that they risk being punished if they return from Hong Kong or Taiwan with banned political books.
During Xi’s tenure, Sino United has curtailed its purchases of political books, said Bao Pu (鮑朴), publisher at New Century Press in Hong Kong, whose titles include the memoir of former Chinese premier Zhao Ziyang (趙紫陽). Sales of New Century’s books to Sino United have fallen by 90 percent since Xi took office, Bao said in an interview.
That hurts in Hong Kong, with Sino United’s position controlling as much as 70 percent of the market, Bao said. Last year was the first he failed to make a profit in more than a decade in the publishing industry.
“It’s an existential threat,” he said, adding that he was looking to branch out into graphic novels. “At best we can break even.”
Elvin Lee (李家駒), an assistant president at Sino United and the chairman of the Hong Kong Publishing Professionals Society, denies that political considerations play a role in the company’s decisions on which books to publish or sell.
“Business comes before any other concerns,” he said in an interview at Sino United’s Hong Kong headquarters, where the elevator lobby is festooned with pro-Beijing political posters. “Every brand gets to make their management decisions.”
The ultimate owner of Sino United is the Chinese Ministry of Finance, Lee said.
“But we make sure they are only a shareholder,” he said.
He said that the company faced the same pressures as other booksellers in Hong Kong. Each of its divisions operates independently and responds to its own commercial considerations, he said.
However, in 25 Hong Kong bookstores, including 14 under the Sino United umbrella, a pattern is noticeable.
In the Sino United stores, banned books, if they are available at all, are difficult to find, often in the back of stores. At stores owned by other companies, the books are more prominently displayed.
The contrast is greatest at the campus bookstores of two of Hong Kong’s top universities, both of which played outsize roles in the anti-Beijing protests last year that shut down major streets in central Hong Kong for more than two months.
At the campus bookstore of the University of Hong Kong, run by a rival bookseller, books highly critical of Beijing, including a Chinese-language biography of Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波), the imprisoned Nobel laureate, are displayed on a table at the store’s entrance. On the campus of Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Commercial Press bookstore does carry a few books banned on China, but they are on lower shelves in quiet parts of the store.
One of the biggest publishers of banned political books in Hong Kong, Ho Pin (何頻), founder and chief executive of the Mirror Media Group, says the real problem is not the Chinese government, but self-censorship by Hong Kong’s news media elite as they cozy up to Beijing.
Ho, whose company is based in the US, said he had never faced restrictions on his business in Hong Kong. Indeed, some Mirror Group books can be found in some Sino United stores.
One title, Xi Jinping’s Family, which details the wealth of Xi’s relatives, was available at Sino United’s large Commercial Press store in the busy Causeway Bay neighborhood, albeit tucked away on a shelf in the back of the store.
“No one took away Hong Kong’s media freedom,” Ho said. “Hong Kong’s people gave it up themselves. We’ve never been exposed to direct pressure from authorities. What we worry about is lacking the ability to attract readers.”
Yet there is evidence that indirect pressure — in the form of scaring off potential Chinese buyers — is having an effect.
Two Hong Kong bookstores that specialize in banned Chinese-language books say their business has fallen off substantially in part because Chinese tour groups are told by their guides that they are not allowed to bring banned books and magazines home.
Paul Tang, who owns one such outlet, the People’s Bookstore, said that he had not seen evidence of increased inspections for banned books at border crossings, but that people from China believed it to be true after being warned by tour guides.
“The brains are pre-washed before they come into the store,” he said.
Li Dan, owner of the 1908 bookstore, said that the message was effective among people taught to steer clear of subversive ideas.
“The Chinese people are trained to sense differences,” he said. “They don’t need to be told not to do something. They become cautious when they sense that something may be wrong.”
Additional reporting by Cherie Chan and Kiki Zhao
Apart from the first arms sales approval for Taiwan since US President Donald Trump took office, last month also witnessed another milestone for Taiwan-US relations. Trump signed the Taiwan Assurance Implementation Act into law on Tuesday. Its passing without objection in the US Senate underscores how bipartisan US support for Taiwan has evolved. The new law would further help normalize exchanges between Taiwanese and US government officials. We have already seen a flurry of visits to Washington earlier this summer, not only with Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍), but also delegations led by National Security Council Secretary-General Joseph Wu
In A phone call between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), Xi is reported to have stated that in his view, “Taiwan’s return to China” is to be considered an integral part of the post-World War II international order. Never mind that China under Xi has been trying to undermine the liberal post-war international order by setting up alternative organizations and schemes that are detrimental to freedom and democracy around the world. Its own repression of Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong are vivid examples. The “return to China” is the biggest misnomer: Taiwan has never ever been part
When the towers of Wang Fuk Court turned into a seven-building inferno on Wednesday last week, killing 128 people, including a firefighter, Hong Kong officials promised investigations, pledged to review regulations and within hours issued a plan to replace bamboo scaffolding with steel. It sounded decisive. It was not. The gestures are about political optics, not accountability. The tragedy was not caused by bamboo or by outdated laws. Flame-retardant netting is already required. Under Hong Kong’s Mandatory Building Inspection Scheme — which requires buildings more than 30 years old to undergo inspection every decade and compulsory repairs — the framework for
President William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced a plan to invest an additional NT$1.25 trillion (US$39.8 billion) in military spending to procure advanced defense systems over the next eight years, and outlined two major plans and concrete steps to defend democratic Taiwan in the face of China’s intensifying threat. While Lai’s plans for boosting the country’s national security have been praised by many US lawmakers, former defense officials, academics and the American Institute in Taiwan, the US’ de facto embassy in Taiwan, they were not equally welcomed by all Taiwanese, particularly among the opposition parties. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman
RSS