MCLC: illicit dirt

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: illicit dirt
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (5/18/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/world/asia/exposes-of-chinas-elite-a-big-
lure-in-hong-kong.html

Hong Kong Shelves, Illicit Dirt on China’s Elite
By CHRIS BUCKLEY

HONG KONG — Visitors from mainland China climb the narrow stairs to a
cramped room here filled with forbidden delights: shelves of
scandal-packed exposés about their Communist Party masters.

The People’s Recreation Community bookstore and several others on Hong
Kong’s teeming shopping streets specialize in selling books and magazines
banned by the Chinese government, mostly for their luridly damning
accounts of party leaders, past and present. And at a time when many
Chinese citizens smolder with distrust of their leaders, business is
thriving.

“We come here to buy books that we can’t read in China,” said Huang Tao, a
salesman of nutritional supplements from southeast China, who picked out a
muckraking volume recently about corruption among senior party leaders.
“There are so many things that we’ve been deceived over,” he said, waving
toward books on the devastating famine of the late 1950s and early 1960s,
an episode that official histories have muffled in euphemisms. “We can’t
learn the truth, so black becomes white and white becomes black.”

Such publications smuggle corrosive facts and rumors into the bloodstream
of Chinese political life. The contraband flow is reinforced by a flow of
online publications and downloadable pirate copies. The trade shows the
thirst for information in a society gripped by censorship, and the
difficulties that party authorities face in trying to stifle that thirst,
especially when, people in the business say, officials are among the avid
readers of banned books.

“These books are playing a big role in raising the consciousness of the
Chinese people,” said a Beijing journalist who visits Hong Kong several
times a year and buys armloads of exposés. He asked that his name not be
used, fearing punishment. “It’s impossible to stop everything getting
through.”

They contain accounts of every conceivable scandal of the past. Then there
are the gloomy prophecies about China’s future. One book foretells a war
with Japan in 2014, another a toppling of the current leadership that same
year. The strongest seller among these feverish jeremiads, “2014: The
Great Collapse,” says the fall of the Communist Party is assured, citing
what it says are secret party documents. “This is not gossip or
soothsaying,” the preface declares.

“Some people take these books very seriously. I had a phone call just
yesterday for 20 copies of this book. He seemed to be a Chinese
businessman,” said Paul Tang, the proprietor of the store, which in
Chinese goes by the more ironic name of the People’s Commune bookstore.

“Right now, more than 90 percent of our sales come from mainland
visitors,” said Mr. Tang, 38, who formerly worked for fast food chains. He
and three partners opened the store in 2002 and two years later shifted
its focus to banned books for visitors from mainland China. “The most
frequently asked question is not about the content of books,” Mr. Tang
said. “It’s how they can get the books back to China.”

That game of hide and seek takes place daily, as Chinese travelers return
from Hong Kong and other destinations, sometimes with contraband. Customs
officers are sometimes instructed to stop particular titles, people in the
trade say, but often anything with a political edge that is discovered is
scrutinized, and decisions on what to confiscate are made on the fly.

Zhou Qicai, a businessman from northeast China, was lugging a suitcase
stuffed with 400 copies of a Chinese-language magazine from Hong Kong into
China in March when a customs officer inspected his luggage. The magazine,
Boxun, had a report about court officials in his hometown who are
suspected of being corrupt that he wanted to share with friends.

“He took one look at the magazines and said, ‘These are reactionary
publications, they’re illegal,’ ” Mr. Zhou said. The officer seized the
magazines, took down his personal details and warned him not to smuggle
again. “That didn’t matter,” Mr. Zhou said. “I came back and tried again a
couple of days later and brought in 93 copies without a problem.”

A former British colony, Hong Kong became a self-administered region of
China in 1997, and despite pressures from Beijing, remains free of state
censorship. In 2012, Hong Kong hosted 34.9 million visits by Chinese
nationals, many on shopping sprees.

Chinese customs officials often confiscate publications about forbidden
themes. But prosecutions of caught travelers are virtually unheard-of
these days, because the government would have difficulty explaining its
secretive censorship practices, even before tame, party-run courts, said
Bao Pu, the head of New Century Press, a Hong Kong publisher of many books
by ousted and retired Chinese officials.

“They can never openly justify their rules, because there’s no public list
of banned books and these people make their own arbitrary decisions,” said
Mr. Bao, the son of a purged Chinese official. “There would simply be too
many people to prosecute; there would be a backlash.”

The illicit flow includes memoirs and studies of events and people that
the Communist Party would rather forget, like the Great Leap famine and
brutal Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong, and the upheavals that
culminated in the crackdown in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. Former
officials whose memoirs cannot be published in China, among them the late
ousted party leader, Zhao Ziyang, often turn to Hong Kong for an outlet.

Then there are the magazines and books offering salacious accounts of
party officials’ private lives. Few members of China’s political elite
escape having a book, or at least a chapter, devoted to their suspected
plots, mistresses or ill-gotten fortunes.

Some of the hastily written potboilers appear fanciful, even by the
generous standards that China has recently set, with a real-life scandal
involving a Politburo member, Bo Xilai, who fell from power after his
wife, Gu Kailai, was arrested on charges of murdering a British
businessman.

“It’s like when your National Enquirer becomes your only form of political
discussion,” said Geremie Barmé, a professor at the Australian National
University in Canberra who studies Chinese culture and politics. “This is
a tragedy that the party has generated for itself. Its processes are all
cloaked from the public.”

Yet many readers of banned publications from Hong Kong are themselves
Chinese officials, often eager for gossip that can help them navigate
treacherous political shoals. The books and magazines are surviving the
onslaught of online material in part because so many of their readers are
officials who fear using the Internet to look at forbidden material or
lack the skill to thwart censorship, said Mr. Tang.

“You don’t have to read the People’s Daily, because that won’t tell you
what’s really going on, but you have to read these,” said Ho Pin, an
exiled Chinese journalist who runs Mirror Books, a company based in New
York that publishes muckraking books and magazines in Chinese. Chinese
officials visiting Hong Kong often buy them as gifts for fellow officials,
he said. “In the past, you’d give a mayor a bottle of liquor. But that’s
nothing these days, and so is a carton of cigarettes,” Mr. Ho said. “But
if you give him one of our books or magazines, he’ll be very happy.