China's Bookstore
Why the Chinese-reading world still flocks to Hong Kong
by: Jonathan Cheng
HONG KONG -- This former British colony, famous as a global financial hub, is best known in Chinese political circles as something else: a supplier of the Chinese-speaking world's most sensitive books.
Even after returning to Chinese rule, Hong Kong retained its own laws, including generally wide-open rights to publish, other than some pornography restrictions. In China, by contrast, the government licenses publishing houses and has the power to censor or ban any book. So Hong Kong's bookstores attract large numbers of mainland Chinese travelers who use trips here to stock up on books they can't get back home, from virulent attacks on Mao Zedong to tomes on the three Ts of contemporary Chinese taboo: Tibet, Taiwan and Tiananmen.
Even Hong Kong's airport bookstores are stocked with shelves of books banned in the mainland, mostly purporting to spill the beans on top Chinese leaders. China also prohibits carrying banned books into the country, but with the volume of traffic at the border making detection highly unlikely -- and with the consequences generally limited to confiscation -- readers seem willing to risk it.
"My bookstore could only thrive in a place like Hong Kong," says Paul Tang, founder of People's Recreation Community, a bookstore cafe in downtown Hong Kong with a Mao-themed decor and a focus on political books, including a wealth of titles published in the simplified Chinese script of mainland China -- but banned there. Mr. Tang, a 34-year-old former Starbucks shop manager who started his business -- then mainly a cafe -- in 2002, says mainland Chinese visitors account for 70% of his sales.
Attendance at Hong Kong's bustling book fair, whose 20th annual edition opens next week, jumped nearly 18% after Beijing liberalized travel policies for mainland Chinese visitors to Hong Kong in 2004. It has grown steadily since, last year hitting a record 829,967 -- more than four times the 200,000 that showed up at the first fair in 1990.
The event regularly draws informal "tour groups" of politically savvy mainland Chinese to snap up copies of books they can't buy back home, and this year fair organizers, in addition to promoting the event in mainland China, have lined up travel agents in Guangzhou and Shanghai, as well as Taipei, to organize package tours.
"Hong Kong is a free society, and we don't have any censorship," says Raymond Yip, who oversees the fair for the Hong Kong Trade Development Council. "The book fair is a truly diversified event in terms of accomodating books from different backgrounds, views and orientations." One of the speakers at last year's fair was Chinese-born novelist Ha Jin, who now lives in the U.S. and some of whose books have been banned in China.
Dozens of Hong Kong publishing houses churn out everything from slapdash exposés of mainland corruption to autobiographies. Blockbuster Chinese-language editions first published in Hong Kong in recent years include "Mao: The Untold Story" by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday in 2006 and "The Tiananmen Papers" by Zhang Liang (a pseudonym) in 2001. And this year there were the secret memoirs of late Chinese Communist Party secretary Zhao Ziyang, smuggled out of mainland China on audiocassettes and published by Hong Kong's New Century Publishing in May. Mr. Zhao's memoirs, which tell of deep divisions in the Chinese leaders' handling of the 1989 student movement, sold out instantly in Hong Kong. (An English-language version, "Prisoner of the State," was published by Simon & Schuster in May.)
Hong Kong has long been fertile ground for political dissent. Anti-Manchu revolutionary Sun Yat-sen made a base here at the beginning of the 20th century, and every June since the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989 a candlelight vigil has been held to mark the anniversary; this year's drew tens of thousands of residents to a public park.
Hong Kong's freedoms set it as an island of contrast against mainland China's strict regime. Until the 1980s, even Taiwan banned works ranging from 1920s short stories by Lu Xun -- revered in mainland China -- to books and articles advocating independence for the island, including several written by Chen Shui-bian, who would later be elected president. (Even today, Taiwan's government screens and restricts certain political publications, though the scope is far narrower than it once was.)
For decades, that made Hong Kong the only place in greater China where literary heroes of both Communist and anti-Communist persuasion could be published. And the ability to publish sensitive books and magazines is seen as an important barometer of freedom in a city that is vigilant about any erosion since the return to China in 1997.
"Hong Kong is the region's central hub for the free flow and dissemination of information, and that to me is Hong Kong's most core value," says Ho Pin, a mainland-born businessman who in 1990 founded Hong Kong-based Mirror Publishing. "The fact that Mirror hasn't been subject to any overt political pressure in Hong Kong all these years is a testament to that freedom." His house has been responsible for some of the most explosive political memoirs of the past two decades, including the Chinese version of "The Tiananmen Papers."
That freedom includes the freedom to be politically neutral. Both Mr. Ho and Mr. Tang, the bookshop owner, say they aren't particularly motivated by ideology, and Mr. Tang, for one, is happy to offer books from across the political spectrum -- though his most popular titles tend toward unauthorized biographies of Chinese leaders like Zhou Enlai and exposés of the reportedly prodigious sex life of Chairman Mao (a subject that drives a whole cottage industry).
"It doesn't matter whether you're left-wing or right-wing," he says. "The books are all here -- whatever sells best."
From: WSJ
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