China targets high-ranking officials who read banned books

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.

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