Hong Kong Book Store Employees Are Disappearing

It appears that a Hong Kong publisher/bookstore owner is learning the hard way that it is not at all smart to publish books about the sex lives of Chinese leaders. According to Quartz.com, the still unpublished manuscript about Xi Jinping's "six women" is directly linked to the disappearance of five men connected to the bookstore:

It is unclear whether the book alleges Xi had an extramarital affair. As part of his crackdown on corruption since he took office in 2012, Xi has led an anti-corruption campaign that made adultery grounds for banishment from the Communist Party. This past October, those rules were changed to forbid “improper sexual relationships with others,” a tweak that state-run news agency Xinhua said makes “the regulation stricter.”

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Last week’s disappearance of Lee Bo, an employee at the Causeway Bay Bookstore, has brought international attention to mysterious case of the five missing men. Hong Kong democratic politicians including Ho believe they have been abducted by mainland Chinese security officials. 

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China’s state-backed tabloid Global Times said in an editorial this week that the bookstore sells books that contain “maliciously fabricated content,” which enter the mainland, become the source of political rumors and “have caused some evil influence to some extent.” A Chinese-language version of the same editorial also accuses the bookstore of harming the “harmony and stability” of mainland society. 

Chinese officials are playing hardball on this case of censorship taken to the extreme and is warning foreign countries to keep all opinions to themselves. Freedom of the press is not an issue in Hong Kong these days; it simply does not exist.