China targets high-ranking officials who read banned books

Read RFA’s coverage of this story in Chinese

China’s Communist Party is clamping down on the secret hobby of some high-ranking officials: reading banned books, a series of state media reports suggest.

Officials from glitzy Shanghai to poverty-stricken Guizhou have been accused in recent months of “privately possessing and reading banned books and periodicals,” according to state media reports, which typically surface when the officials are probed by the party’s disciplinary arm.

Senior officials have traditionally enjoyed privileged access to materials banned as potentially subversive for the wider population, via the “neibu,” or internal, publishing system, former Communist Party officials told RFA Mandarin in recent interviews. 

Now it appears that President Xi Jinping is coming for their personal libraries and private browsing habits in a bid to instill the same ideas in all party members regardless of rank.

During the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, any foreign book could be considered a “poisonous weed that promotes the bourgeois lifestyle.” 

Books banned since 2000 have typically been works about recent Chinese history or inside scoops on senior leaders, including memoirs from Mao Zedong’s personal physician, late ousted premier Zhao Ziyang and a book about the later years of Mao’s trusted premier Zhou Enlai.

Overseas publications are often banned or tightly controlled in China, either online, or via a complex process of political vetting by the authorities, including a 2017 requirement that anyone selling foreign publications in China must have a special license.

Wider knowledge makes better leaders

Former Party School professor Cai Xia said officials were generally allowed to read whatever they liked until the turn of the century. The arrangement encouraged officials to broaden their perspective, making them better leaders.

“Politics, like art, requires imagination,” Cai said. 

“Because experience shows that the more single-minded and closed-off the thinking of the Communist Party, especially the senior cadres, the narrower their vision and the poorer their thinking, and the harder it is for them to grasp the complex phenomena and situations that have emerged in China’s rapid development,” she told Radio Free Asia.

Wider reading encourages deeper thought, which helps China “to move forward,” she said.

Du Wen, former executive director of the Legal Advisory Office of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region government, said the purge of readers of banned publications is worrying.

“This phenomenon is so scary, because it sends the message that there is no independence in the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party,” Du said. “Even dialectical materialism and critical thinking have become evidence of guilt.”

Nearly 20 officials have been accused of similar infractions, Du said, basing the number on his observation of media reports.

Officials have been tight-lipped about the names of the books and periodicals these officials were reading, yet the accusations keep coming.

Those targeted

In November 2023, the party launched a probe into former Zhejiang provincial Vice Gov. Zhu Congjiu, accusing him of losing his way ideologically.

In addition to making off-message comments in public, Zhu had “privately brought banned books into the country and read them over a long period of time,” according to media reports at the time.

In June 2023, the Beijing branch of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection expelled former state assets supervisory official Zhang Guilin for “possessing and reading books and periodicals with serious political issues,” alongside a slew of other alleged offenses including “engaging in power-for-sex and money-for-sex transactions.”

Many of those targeted have been in the state-controlled financial system, while some have been concentrated in the central province of Hunan and the southwestern megacity of Chongqing, according to political commentator Yu Jie.

“Interestingly, a lot of officials in the political and legal system, national security and prison systems, which are responsible for maintaining stability and persecuting dissidents, are also keen on reading banned books,” Yu wrote in a recent commentary for RFA Mandarin, citing the case of former state security police political commissar Li Bin.

In Hubei province, the commission went after one of their own in party secretary Wang Baoping, accusing him of “buying and reading books that distorted and attacked the 18th Party Congress.”

“Monitoring what people are reading shows the authoritarian system’s determination and ability to maintain its power and to destroy any resources that could be subversive and any doubts about the legitimacy of the authorities’ rule,” Yu wrote in a Chinese-language commentary on May 28.

“Xi Jinping’s … goal is to turn more than 80 million party members into marionettes or zombies, and follow him, like the Pied Piper, in a mighty procession that leads to hell,” he said.

Categories

Zhang Huiqing, a former editor at the People’s Publishing House, told RFA Mandarin that “gray” books were allowed to be published under the watchful eye of the party’s Central Propaganda Department, which also reviewed and vetted foreign-published books for translation into Chinese, for distribution as “neibu” reading material.

Divided into categories A, B and C, where A was restricted to the smallest number of officials, “reactionary” books were those that could potentially cause people to challenge the party leadership, and they were once distributed in a highly controlled manner, Zhang said.

Du Wen said that while he was an official in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region government, he had access to a slew of foreign news outlets not usually sold on the streets of Chinese cities, including Bloomberg, The New York Times, The Washington Post and newspapers published in democratic Taiwan.

“These were all allowed because if you want to do research, you have to understand what’s going on overseas,” Du said. “How can you research something if you don’t understand the situation?”

Yet recent changes to party disciplinary regulations have brought more publications into the danger zone.

Nowadays, any publication not entirely in line with orthodox Marxism-Leninism or the official view of Communist Party history is likely to be seen as “reactionary,” as is any information about China’s highest-ranking leaders, both past and present, according to a senior figure in the Chinese publishing industry who spoke to RFA Mandarin on condition of anonymity.

“There’s a lot of randomness and contingency that affects whether something winds up being labeled as reactionary,” the person said. “It also depends on the level of understanding and personal ambition of the person in charge of an investigation.”

And times change, making it hard for officials to stay on the right side of the rules.

“A book that was reactionary yesterday may not be reactionary today, and vice versa,” the person said.

Public hotline

Typically, Chinese publishing houses take direct instructions from the General Administration of Press and Publication and its provincial branches about what they can and can’t publish.

But a public hotline and a highly cautious attitude in recent years has meant that a book can be banned on the basis of a single phone call from a concerned individual.

The senior publishing industry figure said one work of non-fiction was canned on the say-so of the widow of a senior cadre because she didn’t like the way her late husband was portrayed. The man had only played a minor role in the book.

“All of our editing, proofreading, binding, design, printing, marketing and distribution work was wasted,” the person said. “We had already printed several thousand copies of the book, but we had to send them to be pulped.”

The Chinese Communist Party’s internal rule-book entry on what constitutes a banned book offense has been amended three times since 2015, with categories being added each time.

Article 47 of the original regulations issued in 2003 warn: “Anyone who brings reactionary books, audio-visual products, electronic reading materials and so on into the country from abroad shall be criticized and educated; if the circumstances are serious, they will be given a warning or a serious warning; more serious offenses will be disciplined by removal from party post, probation or expulsion from the party.”

Since 2015, the rules have been updated three times to include anyone “reading privately, browsing or listening” to banned material, which now includes “online text, images and audiovisual material.”

Another senior media figure who requested anonymity said the key factor that makes a book reactionary these days is whether or not it tells the truth, especially about the Chinese government.

“Actually, the most reactionary thing is the truth,” the person said, “because the truth could shake the foundations of party rule.”

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Luisetta Mudie and Malcolm Foster.