By MICHAEL FORSYTHE and ANDREW JACOBS
HONG KONG — In a dimly lit industrial building in Hong Kong, hundreds of books wrapped in brown paper were stacked four feet high on shipping pallets. The books contained tales of sex, corruption and murder that would make even the most jaded reader of bawdy romance novels blush.
But these works, which mix rumor, speculation and outright fiction, spin stories about China’s elite. One book, “The General Secretary’s Eight Love Stories,” claims that President Xi Jinping of China has had a number of affairs, including one with a television presenter. Another says that Mr. Xi’s wife, angered by the affair, seized power from her husband.
Such books in the United States would be sold next to supermarket tabloids and consumed largely for their entertainment value. In Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, they are forbidden fruit, eagerly snapped up by travelers from mainland China longing for even the smallest nuggets of gossip about their leaders’ private lives.
These titles are the strange success story of the Communist Party’s suppression of speech. The books are banned in mainland China, where the message about politics and politicians is tightly controlled. Merely possessing the books can land people in police interrogation rooms.
But publishers in Hong Kong, which has a separate legal system from mainland China, have turned these illicit titles into a lucrative business. With a void of information on the mainland, they take on an aura of believability.
The party’s propaganda organs, for example, relentlessly portray Mr. Xi and his wife as a loving first couple. And the more the Xi love story is trumpeted in official media, “the more somebody might want to pick up this book that purports to talk about what’s really going on behind closed doors,” said Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor of Chinese history at the University of California, Irvine.
Now the publishers are caught up in a real-life thriller.
Since October, five associates of Mighty Current Media, which distributes the two books about the Xi family, have disappeared. One associate, a British citizen, was last seen in Hong Kong on Dec. 30, and the Chinese police confirmed weeks later that he was on the mainland.
The publisher and co-owner of Mighty Current, Gui Minhai, a Swedish citizen, also vanished. He reappeared three months later on state-run Chinese television, claiming that he had voluntarily abandoned his life at a resort condominium in Thailand and returned to the mainland to face punishment for a fatal 2003 drunken driving accident.
Three other booksellers who were last seen in southern China are now in police custody on the mainland, suspected of being involved in “illegal activities,” the Hong Kong government said on Thursday. It was related to a case involving a “person surnamed Gui.”
The disappearances have gripped Hong Kong. Authorities in the city have pored over grainy surveillance video and the last words of the vanished, looking for clues. Thousands of protesters have taken to the streets. Hong Kong’s leaders have been trying to assuage frightened residents demanding answers, while still appeasing their ultimate bosses in Beijing. Even the Obama administration has weighed in, calling on the Chinese government for answers this week.
Through it all, Beijing has remained largely silent, adding to the intrigue.
The precise motive of the disappearances is still unknown. Several prominent people in the industry and a political insider who often deals with mainland officials say the publishers were most likely spirited away by zealous security officials intent on guarding Mr. Xi’s reputation, though not necessarily with his knowledge.
“In the name of maintaining Xi Jinping’s authority, they are unscrupulous,” said Ho Pin, founder of the Mirror Media Group, which is based in New York and which also publishes the gossipy Chinese-language books that are sold in Hong Kong. “Those who nabbed Mighty Current’s people are of this sort.”
For Hong Kong, the stakes are bigger than the sales of some juicy airport paperbacks. Many worry about mainland China’s deepening influence in a city where people’s civil liberties, including freedom of speech and assembly, are enshrined in the Constitution. Four of the missing book publishers are Hong Kong residents.
“It may have already triggered a chilling effect on the community, especially the publishing community,” said P. Y. Lo, a council member of the Hong Kong Bar Association and an expert on the city’s Constitution. “That is not a good sign at all.”
The disappearances have also put Chinese human rights activists in the difficult position of defending publishers whose works they think amount to little more than salacious rumor. It is not unlike the way free-speech advocates in the United States pinched their noses to defend Larry Flynt, the Hustler publisher, when he battled the religious broadcaster Jerry Falwell before the Supreme Court in the 1980s.
“Unfortunately, people inside China do not have this kind of freedom of expression,” said Tienchi Martin-Liao, the former president of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, a writers’ group that has expressed alarm at the disappearances. “But if they are outside of China, some abuse their freedom of expression, and Gui Minhai is one of them.”
The business model for this niche group of publishers — Mighty Current, Mirror and Ha Fai Yi Publication — is pretty basic.
The paperbacks are printed with cheap bindings and sell for as much as $20 a copy. The titles dominate tiny stalls and bookstores catering to mainland Chinese visitors in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taipei, especially at airports.
They often come with head-turning covers. For the Mighty Current book on Mr. Xi’s wife, Peng Liyuan, the publisher superimposed her face over a portrait of the Empress Dowager Cixi, the formidable ruler of China during the final days of the country’s last imperial dynasty. Another depicted blood running down the front of the book, which claimed that Ling Jihua, who once served a post in Beijing akin to the White House chief of staff, was involved in a murder conspiracy in the United States.
The publishers hire writers to churn out the books, usually within one month and sometimes in as little as a week. Liu Lu, an exiled former human rights lawyer, has written about 30 titles, including the one about the murder conspiracy. Mr. Gui, he explained, would call him with an assignment, usually giving him a few weeks to write a book. The shortest deadline was 15 days, which he said left him sleep-deprived and aching from head to toe.
He said that he could earn $30,000 to $50,000 for a successful book, with royalties set at about 10 percent of sales. Once he was approached by a lawyer friend who offered him as much as $300,000 to not write a book about the Chinese president. He said he declined the money, although he was not writing such a book.
Mr. Liu said his books were fact-based. He scours the Internet for articles, documents and other published materials. But Mr. Liu said he did not conduct interviews and did not have sources.
He now worries about going to Hong Kong. “It should be safe here in the U.S. since they can’t just come on the U.S. soil to arrest or kidnap people,” Mr. Liu said. “The best they could do is to send some messages through some of my acquaintances, saying don’t do this or that.”
Mighty Current, Mr. Gui’s company, was far and away the most prolific publisher of this genre of political innuendo and intrigue, by most estimates accounting for more than half of such titles.
Despite the disappearance of almost all of its senior staff members, the company is still shipping books. At Mighty Current’s warehouse on a recent afternoon, a young man operating a pallet jack hauled out around 500 books for shipment to Hong Kong’s airport and a bookstore in Macau. Their retail value totaled about $9,000. Tens of thousands more books were stacked chest-high across the storeroom, blocking one of its two exits.
As a student at Peking University in the mid-1980s, Mr. Gui, who is known to friends as A-hai, was an aspiring poet. Like many of his generation, he got caught up in the excitement of a post-Mao China, as a flood of Western literature and political theories invaded Chinese campuses, according to a biography compiled by his friend, Bei Ling, who has known him since college.
“Poetry served as a kind of business card for young literary types, who produced poems as a job applicant produces a résumé,” Mr. Bei wrote in an account of Mr. Gui’s disappearance for the Independent Chinese PEN Center.
After graduating with a degree in history, Mr. Gui went to work for a state-owned publishing house. He left China around the time of the suppression of the Tiananmen Square student movement in 1989, obtaining Swedish citizenship in the 1990s. He went on to earn a Ph.D. at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, where he continued to focus on literature, as well as the comparative history between China and the West.
By 2006, Mr. Gui had turned to publishing lurid books on Chinese politics. A prolific writer, he could produce a book a month, plying visiting mainland sources for information over dim sum in Hong Kong restaurants, Mr. Bei wrote.
Mr. Gui helped found Mighty Current in 2012. Two years later, the publishing company acquired one of the city’s top retail outlets for titles on Chinese politics, Causeway Bay Books. In the five weeks since the British citizen who was an editor at Mighty Current disappeared, the store has been closed.
Publishers Start to Disappear
Warning signs of trouble for the industry surfaced years ago.
As Mr. Xi was preparing to take control of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, the government started a campaign to suppress the circulation of these political books on the mainland. Localities across the country, from Inner Mongolia in the north to Guangdong in the south, issued reports describing how they were cracking down on the distribution of the Hong Kong books.
In late 2013, Chinese authorities arrested Yiu Mantin, another publisher, while he was traveling on the mainland. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2014 for smuggling what authorities said were illegal chemicals. He was planning to publish a book critical of Mr. Xi, Mr. Yiu’s son said at the time.
A book taking aim at Mr. Gui and other writers, called “Whirling Shadows of Spies,” was published in Hong Kong in October, the same month four Mighty Current associates vanished. The book accused several of the writers of being agents for foreign governments.
The book said that Mr. Gui was “second to none when it comes to making exorbitant profits” by writing gossip books on Chinese politics. The book also said that Mr. Gui falsely claimed that he was involved in the 1989 Tiananmen student movement, as a way to secure refugee status in Sweden.
A group of those profiled wrote an open letter in December calling for “Whirling Shadows of Spies” to be pulled from store shelves. The publisher, Oriental Times, could not be reached for comment. Oriental Times uses a post office box for an address, and a phone number for the company, printed in the book, doesn’t exist.
Late last year, the publishers at Mighty Current started disappearing. Three employees were last seen in southern China in October and just turned up in custody on the mainland. In October, Mr. Gui vanished from his condominium in Pattaya, Thailand.
And in late December, an editor for Mighty Current, a British citizen named Lee Bo, disappeared from the streets of Hong Kong. Then just as suspiciously, he turned up days later across the border in mainland China. Friends and allies say that he was most likely abducted.
Mr. Lee’s wife, Choi Ka-ping, another co-owner of Mighty Current, received a letter, which she said was in her husband’s handwriting. The letter said that he was helping the Chinese police. After that, she called off her husband’s missing-person investigation in Hong Kong.
The explanation of his disappearance was met with disbelief by many people in Hong Kong, including pro-democracy lawmakers. Mr. Lee had left his travel documents at home. He had also recently told The South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong newspaper, that because he avoided going to the mainland, he felt that he would not meet the same fate as his colleagues.
The plight of the publishers has rallied people in Hong Kong. On Jan. 10, thousands of people converged on the Beijing government liaison office in Hong Kong to protest the disappearances. One bound himself in a red nylon rope with a noose at one end, taping his mouth to symbolize the erosion of Hong Kong’s liberties.
“In the past, we were safe because we lived in Hong Kong instead of China,” Agnes Chow, one of the student leaders of the 2014 pro-democracy protests in the city, said in a video she posted about the disappearances. “We feel that Hong Kong is not Hong Kong anymore.”
Customers are still coming to the tiny bookstalls and stores that specialize in these books. At the city’s Star Ferry terminal in Kowloon, a bookseller named Mr. Chan said he sold about 15 books a week.
But the chill on the industry is perceptible, even if subtle. The new titles at Mighty Current have dried up. Neighboring stalls in the Star Ferry terminal, which carried the books only months ago, are no longer selling them. Mr. Chan, the bookseller, said, “Maybe they’re just sold out.”
A clerk at the People’s Bookstore, one of the best-known sellers of banned books in Hong Kong, said that business hadn’t fallen off since the Mighty Current associates disappeared. But the clerk, who gave her name as Ms. Bi, said many recent browsers appeared to be Chinese security agents. They are easy to spot, she said: “They’re tall, and never buy anything.”
Bao Pu, the publisher of New Century Press, which publishes more authoritative political titles that are also banned, said he might switch businesses, given all the pressures. Besides the disappearances, the Chinese government owns the city’s biggest bookstore companies, and they stock very few if any of the banned books.
“I think pretty much we’re done,” Mr. Bao said.
Comments are closed.