Three years on from Causeway Bay booksellers’ disappearances, mainland Chinese traders of banned books say the business is like selling ‘cocaine at the price of cabbage’

Three years to the week after a bookstore in Hong Kong suddenly closed when its main owners disappeared in China, mainland traders T and H are hanging on to the banned books trade, risking their freedom despite a shrinking market.

“The demand is still there,” said T, who asked to remain anonymous given the sensitivity of his business of ferrying books not on sale in China and reselling them to buyers there.

“But the risk and the return are so out of proportion that an insider’s joke is we are selling goods deemed as dangerous as cocaine for the price of cabbage.”

In the city, the local publishing industry players say they still feel the chilling effect of the banned booksellers episode. The supply of manuscripts on political gossip has largely dried up and independent bookstores find it harder to maintain their commercial foothold with fewer mainland buyers keen on their wares.

T decided on his own risk strategy, cutting his customer base to only loyal and trusted buyers, reducing the amount of books he brings in and even setting up his own rating system to assess the risk of each book.

Almost to a man, they blame their predicament on the Causeway Bay booksellers debacle, the full details of which remain hazy to this day. Between October and December in 2015, five associates of the Causeway Bay Books and Mighty Current Publishing house vanished, one after another, from Thailand, Hong Kong and the mainland. Their unexplained disappearance sparked fears that they had been taken away by Chinese agents because of the salacious gossipy books about the Chinese leadership that their company published.