Beijing opens a new chapter
When the intended publisher of Xi Jinping, China’s Godfather, a critical biography of the Chinese president, was jailed in China on smuggling charges in 2014, Jin Zhong stepped in and published the book himself.
Mr. Jin, the Hong Kong publisher of a string of sensitive titles about China’s top leaders over the past 30 years, saw no reason not to publish another.
However, the unexplained disappearance late last year of five booksellers from a Hong Kong store specializing in books banned in China, and the suspected role of Beijing in their fate, has changed his mind. Mr. Jin has pulled the publication of a follow-up title by the same writer, an overseas dissident, called Xi Jinping’s Nightmare.
“The situation now is very worrying,” he says. “My wife resolutely opposes me publishing this book. So I’ve decided to avoid the risk right in front of us.”
Mr. Jin, a writer who has been banned from the mainland since 1996, says the disappearances are a serious blow to Hong Kong’s boisterous trade in banned Chinese books. His view is echoed by Bao Pu, a Hong Kong publisher who helped to smuggle the memoirs of Zhao Ziyang, a deposed former leader, out of China. Mr. Bao says bookstores are increasingly reluctant to stock his titles.
A little more than a year after the end of the Occupy protests against Beijing’s refusal to give Hong Kong full democracy — demonstrations that at one stage brought the city to a standstill — many in the former British colony believe the disappearance of the booksellers is the most fla- grant example yet of the growing threats to their unique liberties.
From the government covering up British royal insignia on colonial postboxes to the purchase of the city’s daily English language newspaper by Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce group, and ever greater pressure on journalists to self-censor, Claudia Mo, an opposition member of Hong Kong’s legislature, says a trend of “mainland-ization” is taking hold.
The case of the booksellers — three of whom vanished while in mainland China, one from Thailand and the fifth from Hong Kong — has crystalized those concerns.
Activists believe they were taken by Chinese security forces extending a crackdown on the mainland, where hundreds are believed to have been detained, into Hong Kong and beyond.
Two of them — one British, the other a Swede — are European citizens and the UK government says it is “deeply concerned” about the disappearances. The worries about creeping mainland influence extend beyond the booksellers to Hong Kong’s vibrant media sector and its universities.
Philip Hammond, the British foreign secretary, says that if it is true that one of the men was taken from Hong Kong, this would be an “egregious breach” of the “one country, two systems” arrangement. That constitutional principle was established in 1997 when Beijing took back control and pledged to maintain the territory’s freedom of expression, legal independence and “a high degree of autonomy.”
While Beijing controls foreign policy, defense and national security, only Hong Kong agencies have the right to enforce the law in the territory. Beijing, however, maintains a large liaison office in Hong Kong , a secretive body tasked with influencing politics and civil society.
“There is a growing feeling in Hong Kong of greater mainland pressure on universities and civil society as well as a greater security presence from the mainland,” says Steve Vickers, a former head of the colonial police’s criminal intelligence bureau.
“The Hong Kong government appears to have considerably diminished autonomy and