The Chinese Communist Party is increasingly tightening restrictions on Hong Kong’s freedom to publish books banned in the mainland China, the October 17th issue of the New York Times reported on the front page.

According to the article, Shino United Publishing, a publishing conglomerate that controls about 70 percent of the publishing market in Hong Kong and runs 14 major bookstores, has refrained from displaying books banned in the mainland under pressure from the Chinese Communist Party. Also, as the tourists from the mainland are not allowed to buy banned books in Hong Kong and to bring them home, bookstores in Hong Kong that deal in banned books have run into financial trouble. Especially, New Century Press, a publishing company in Hong Kong that specializes in many political books banned in the mainland, has incurred losses because the company’s sales of books to Shino United have fallen 90 percent.

So far, the bookstores in Hong Kong have openly sold banned books that are not available in the mainland. So, for visitors from the mainland, the banned books that they got in Hong Kong have made popular souvenirs.

“China’s Godfather Xi Jinping”-A Controversial Biography That Squarely Criticizes Xi Jinping

One of the typical banned books is “China’s Godfather Xi Jinping,” a controversial biography highly critical of the Xi administration. The author Yu Jie is a dissident who defected to the U.S. in 2012. He has been active in the dissident movement since he was a student and Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned Nobel laureate, is his friend. When the Chinese government started to crack down on dissident intellectuals and human-rights activists, he received terrible torture from the authorities.

A Hong Kong publisher released “China’s Godfather Xi Jinping” in March of 2014, and it became a bestseller, but the authorities immediately banned the sale of the book in the mainland and strictly prohibited people from bringing it into the mainland. A Hong Kong publisher, who sought to release the book, was arrested in China and sentenced to 10 years in prison for smuggling. Even now, it is one of the books that the Chinese government is on the lookout for.

In the book, Yu Jie says, “The Communist Party is China’s biggest Mafia, and the party boss Xi Jinping is the Godfather of China. The ‘Chinese dream’ that the Communist Party advocates is ‘Xi Jinping’s ambition,’ and since Xi seized power, the Chinese government has been rapidly becoming a fascist regime”. Moreover, Yu likens the so-called Xi Jinpingism that is now spreading throughout China to Nazism, concluding with the prediction that Xi will follow the same fate as Hitler and other dictators.

When Hong Kong returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, China adopted “One Country, Two Systems” and ensured a 50-year autonomy for Hong Kong. Hong Kong Basic Law stipulates that the socialist system and policies from the mainland China shall not be practiced in the Hong Kong Special Administration Region.

We cannot overlook the Chinese Communist Party’s move to deprive Hong Kong people of freedom and to integrate Hong Kong into the mainland without regard to such promises. However hard the Communist Party may try to restrict people’s freedom and their right to know, it cannot take away people’s interest in politics, their desire for freedom, and their passion for political reform.