From Publishers Weekly:
We’re used to the notion that bookstores are quiet, welcoming refuges, not the focus of state-sponsored kidnapping and detentions. But the mysterious disappearances of five booksellers from Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay Books and its eventual closure are reminders of how powerful ideas in books can be.
In 2015, five publishers and booksellers linked to Causeway Bay Books quietly disappeared one by one. One was abducted at a beach resort in Thailand. Two were picked up at their wives’ homes just across the mainland China border from Hong Kong in Shenzhen. One simply vanished.
The kidnapping in Hong Kong of the fifth, Paul Lee, at the end of 2015 left no doubt that Chinese security agents were systematically picking up the owners of the Mighty Current publishing house and its Causeway Bay Books bookstore. In the case of Lee, he was pushed into a minivan when he was delivering books and taken across the border. And then there were none. This was the nightmare scenario many envisioned following the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China—the scenario in which people exercising their civil liberties within Hong Kong would be snatched.
The Causeway Bay cover-up unraveled when one of those detained, Lam Wing-kee, was allowed by mainland authorities to return to Hong Kong with the promise that he would retrieve information useful to security operatives. Instead, Lam held a press conference, during which he detailed his imprisonment and forced confession.
Until recently, Hong Kong was the freest city in China, and it had long been a beacon of hope in a bleak landscape. The city was home to a lively semi-underground publishing world that specialized in books on China. One of its prominent members was Jin Zhong, who arrived in Hong Kong from the mainland in 1980 and founded a pro-democracy magazine.
. . . .
“When I came to Hong Kong and found freedoms, I really wanted to enjoy those freedoms,” Jin told me from Brooklyn, where he now lives. “My mission in every article I wrote and in every issue of the magazine was to point out all the wrongs that had been done by Mao and the Communist Party.” The magazine thrived, and Jin set up a publishing house, becoming what was known as a “banned-books publisher,” specializing in books that could not be sold in mainland China.
After the Hong Kong handover in 1997, dissident publishers like Jin played a delicate game with security agents. Visitors from the State Security Bureau would ask him to join them for dinner. It was always cordial, free of coercion, but clearly an offer he could not refuse. The point was to let him know he was being watched.
“The idea wasn’t to make you do or not do something, but to break down your feeling of antagonism or resistance,” Jin recalls. “What happened to the Causeway Bay booksellers—those were the hard methods. For most people in Hong Kong, it was soft treatment.”
Tactics toughened when Jin prepared to publish a book in 2015 by Yu Jie, a Chinese American democracy activist, on Chinese president Xi Jinping. “They made it clear that this book was different,” Jin says. “It was clear that these instructions had come from a high level. If I insisted on going ahead with the book, they would have sabotaged it anyway.”
. . . .
Some years earlier, it had emerged that almost all bookstores in Hong Kong were secretly owned by mainland interests. This infiltration of the book business mirrors the secretive party tactics employed throughout Hong Kong.
Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly
PG has lived long enough to see a great many Communist governments come and go. One or two enlightened leaders grant more freedom, but a nation is only one dictator away from a complete lockdown.
As the OP demonstrates, Chinese President Xi Jinping is China’s latest leader for life and the crack-downs are coming at an increasingly rapid pace.
When Mao died in 1976, after a period of contention for power, Deng Xiaoping took over. He focused on economic growth under a “Four Modernizations” program and seemed to be a new type of leader. Under Deng, the planned economy loosened and China began to thrive materially. He negotiated the return of Hong Kong and its thriving economy from British rule.
Deng felt forced to take harsh steps after the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 due to substantial pressure from Communist hardliners. He told Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau that Communist factions were preparing to take control of substantial numbers of Red Army forces had he not taken the path he did.
Later that year, realizing that he had lost a great deal of power due to the Tiananmen Square protests and the hard-liners’ reaction to them, Deng resigned from leadership of the country and toured the country, giving speeches about economic reform. He died in 1997 without having had much more success.
Deng’s successor, Jiang Zemin, tried to steer a middle path, keeping the economy healthy as a “socialist market economy” while keeping the Party firmly in control of the levers of power.
In 1999, Jiang ordered a harsh crack-down on the crack down on Falun Gong, a religious/spiritual movement, arresting thousands of Falun Gong organizers and sending leaders and members to prison where they were subject to harsh reeducation regimes, sometimes resulting in death.
Jiang slowly relinquished leadership positions before 2005, when he pulled away from public life, but still exercised significant power behind the scenes.
Jiang was succeeded by Hu Jintao who ruled from 2004-2012. Hu reintroduced state control in some sectors of the economy that were relaxed by the previous administration and cracked down on ethnic and religious minorities. Hu and Vladimir Putin in Russia were described by a UPI reporter as “Tough and able authoritarians who had extensive experience of repressing dissent on their rise to the top.”
Hu managed not to screw up the Chinese economy and China’s exports continued to grow while he was in power. However, he was severely criticized for his violations of human rights of various minorities in China or areas subject to Chinese control.
In 2012, Hu was succeeded by Xi Jinping, who is, in PG’s opinion, a full-up serious Communist dictator of the worst sort. So far, Xi has stepped up censorship and mass surveillance and caused a substantial deterioration in human rights beyond what his predecessors were willing to support.
About a month ago, China’s Communist Party declared Xi’s ideology the “essence of Chinese culture”. This is the third fundamental resolution of the Chinese Communist Party since its inception. The first resolution was adopted in 1945 to increase and ratify the power of Mao Zedong.
Xi is different, however, in encouraging a cult of personality to develop around him (see also Mao). Xi also formally removed term limits to his leadership, so he’s in until he dies or someone forcibly removes him from power, a very tough, likely impossible, job.
About a month ago, China’s Communist Party declared Xi’s ideology the “essence of Chinese culture”. This is the third fundamental resolution of the Chinese Communist Party since its inception. The first resolution was adopted in 1945 to increase and ratify the power of Mao Zedong.
Hong Kong, which was originally viewed as a portal for China to do business with the capitalist world when the British ceded control to China is, in PG’s assessment, no different than any other part of China now. He hopes anyone who doesn’t want to live in a place that is like other parts of China is able to escape before it’s too late.
PG acknowledges Wikipedia as a source of many details of his commentary. You can donate to Wikipedia and Wikimedia as PG has just done, by going to Wikipedia and hitting the Donate Button.
The crackdown on Falun Jong, which was originally encouraged as an alternative to “western religions” was ordered because somebody decided its large number of followers rendered it a challenged to the official ideology of the CCP. The recent crackdown on uighurs, video games, and large corporation execs follows a similar logic. Too much success is a death sentence.
Under the uncrowned emperor “there can be only one” so heads must roll.
It’s an increasingly popular approach the world over: conform or be destroyed.
I remember the hordes of newly-prosperous Chinese tourists visiting the world pre-pandemic – and wondering how they were brainwashed enough to be allowed out of the country.
The can manage only so much by fiat – telling their people what to think as well as what to do – it wastes so much brain and production power to have one half of the people watching the other half.
The last couple of years show millions of Americans will leap to embrace whatever fiat the government or TV doctors tell them. We don’t have to look to the Chinese for that kind of behavior.
I suspect there is a huge portion of humanity that yearns for fiat.
No need to think or take responsibility for bad outcomes.
In ancient times it was the gods toying with humans.
After that, tests of the soul to be rewarded in a different plane of existence.
These days the rewards are expected upfront. Comply and we’ll shower you with goodies. Paid with the same money we extort from you.
Maybe supervillains are right.