In China, Books That Make Money, and Enemies

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.”