BEIJING ― Authorities in China have ordered books by Chinese-American scholar Yu Ying-shih to be removed from sale, as Beijing expresses its displeasure with writers showing support for pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong and elsewhere, bookstores and publishers said.
The ban, which has been widely reported on Chinese social media since Saturday, also restricts the publication or sale in stores and online of books by several other authors, including liberal economist Mao Yushi, constitutional law professor Zhang Qianfan, Taiwanese writer Giddens Ko and Hong Kong critic Leung Mao-tao.
The directive is believed to have been issued by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, a government regulator, but such directives are usually issued orally and are almost impossible to be confirmed directly. Repeated calls to the agency rang unanswered Tuesday.
“It appears that Yu has been the primary target, as we have been told his books by two major publishing houses must be removed from the shelves,” a bookstore manager in the eastern city of Ningbo said Tuesday on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
In Beijing, two of three major bookstores said they no longer carried Yu’s books.
“Yu Ying-shih is a sensitive scholar. We tried hard and were under great stress to publish his works earlier this year. We are so sorry about the ban,” an unnamed publisher told the Hong Kong-based English-language newspaper South China Morning Post.
While not confirming the ban, the state-run Global Times newspaper sought to explain why the authors might have been targeted in an editorial Monday.
