Bao Pu

The publisher Wentian Yao, who was about to release a book on Xi Jinping, was arrested on phoney charges. For several years, Beijing has done everything it can to destroy books, stop publications, and censor newspapers and magazines in Hong Kong. Although the mainland appears to be winning this "war without explosion or smoke", its victory is but a veil hiding its real problems.

Whether under Imperial China or the People’s Republic, the state demands that the individual be sacrificed, this according to journalist and scholar Xiao Jiansheng. Given the subject-matter, mainland authorities banned his book ‘Chinese History Revisited’, and no one in Hong Kong dared to publish it. The author of this article, Bao Pu, is the son of Bao Tong, a top Chinese Communist leader and a former aide to Zhao Ziyang. Because of his opposition to the Tiananmen crackdown (1989), he spent seven years in jail and is currently under house arrest.