中共禁书：香港书商的摇钱树与惹祸根

choi

傅才德 and 杰安迪, 中共禁书：香港书商的摇钱树与惹祸根. 纽约时报中文网, Feb 5, 2016 (yes, two days in advance of teh English original)
http://cn.nytimes.com/business/20160205/c05hongkong/

, which is translated from

Michael Forsythe and Andrew Jacobs, The Disappearing Publishers. New York Times, Feb 7, 2016.

Quote:

"Liu Lu, an exiled former human rights lawyer [in US], has written about 30 titles, including the one about the [Ling Jihua's] murder conspiracy pin America]. Mr Gui [Minhai], he explained, would call him with an assignment * * * He [Mr Liu] said that he could earn $30,000 to $50,000 for a successful book, with royalties set at about 10 percent of sales. Once he was approached by a lawyer friend who offered him as much as $300,000 to not write a book about the Chinese president. He said he declined the money, although he was not writing such a book.

"As a student at Peking University in the mid-1980s, Mr Gui [Minhai] * * * was an aspiring poet. * * * Bei Ling, who has known him since college. * * * After graduating with a degree in history [from PKU], Mr Gui went to work for a state-owned publishing house. He left China around the time of the suppression of the Tiananmen Square student movement in 1989, obtaining Swedish citizenship in the 1990s. He went on to earn a PhD at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, where he continued to focus on literature, as well as the comparative history between China and the West.

"Despite the disappearance of almost all of its senior staff members, the company [Causeway Bay Books] is still shipping books. * * * [Yet] In the five weeks since the British citizen [LEE Bo] who was an editor at Mighty Current disappeared, the store pfront] has been closed.

Note:
(a) "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 p孟雪: 福建電視台主播]."

甄士揚, 總書記的8段情緣. 開益社 (also known as 玄黃社), 2014.
(b) "Tienchi Martin-Liao, the former president of the Independent Chinese PEN Center [(ICPC)] 独立中文作家笔会, a writers’ group that has expressed alarm at the disappearances."

廖天琪: "生于南京长于台湾，大学毕业后才离台赴欧" (in her own words); 台大外文系毕业, "七十年代跟德国汉学家马汉茂 [Helmut Martin (1940-1999), went to Taiwan an otained a master's there] 结婚后赴德定居" (quoting ICPC); conferred with master's from Ruhr University Bochum *German: Ruhr-Universität Bochum; public; 1962- ).   
(c) "The business model for this niche group of publishers — Mighty Current, Mirror and Ha Fai Yi Publication — is pretty basic."

For Ha Fai Yi Publication, see 夏菲爾出版. 前哨月刊, undated
frontline.sandhk.com/?page_id=113
("夏菲爾出版社是「六四」的產物；著名詩人、作家徐剛在六四後逃亡到香港找《前哨》的總編輯幫他在香港註冊一家出版社，與留在大陸的朋友一起在香港合作出書，以期在海外長期扎根耕耘。夏菲爾出版社，就是徐剛起的名字，取巴黎埃菲爾鐵塔的諧音。只可惜一九八九年註冊成立至今，徐剛一本書也沒有出過。夏菲爾出版社也是全港政治書籍最大的發行公司")
(d) "A book taking aim at Mr Gui and other writers, called 'Whirling Shadows of Spies,' was published in Hong Kong in October, the same month four Mighty Current associates vanished. The book accused several of the writers of being agents for foreign governments. * * * The book also said that Mr. Gui falsely claimed that he was involved in the 1989 Tiananmen student movement, as a way to secure refugee status in Sweden."

贾书祺, 婆娑谍影. Hong Kong: 东方时代出版 Oriental Times, November 2015.

(e) "A clerk at the People’s Bookstore, one of the best-known sellers of banned books in Hong Kong, said that business hadn’t fallen off since the Mighty Current associates disappeared. But the clerk, who gave her name as Ms Bi, said many recent browsers appeared to be Chinese security agents. They are easy to spot, she said: 'They’re tall, and never buy anything.' "
(i) cn.nytimes.com: "人民公社书店是香港出售禁书的最知名的商店之一。"
(ii) The official name, in Chinese, of the bookstore is 人民公社 (without 书店),, and in English: either "People Book Cafe 咖啡馆 · 咖啡店 · 书店" (Facebook)
https://zh-cn.facebook.com/peoplebookcafe

, or "People's Recreation Community" (website).
http://www.peoplebookcafe.com/