Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang

Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang is a book by Zhao Ziyang. The source page records removal or withholding in public libraries amid the post-2020 tightening of Hong Kong's public reading infrastructure.

What makes it interesting is the prison-censorship logic: officials treat the book as a practical threat model and collapse the distinction between reading about something and doing it. As a book, it can be read not only for subject matter but for the way form, tone, and circulation make a text feel dangerous, intimate, or politically usable to anxious officials.

It also matters as part of a wider censorship history in Hong Kong. The present page is a dossier starter built from source-tracked ban records; the surviving note currently says: The source page records removal or withholding in public libraries amid the post-2020 tightening of Hong Kong's public reading infrastructure. More publication history, translations, and close reading can be added later.

Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang entered censorship debates as a book associated with circulation politics, institutional control, and risk knowledge. In the current dossier, the main state objections cluster around instructional harm, national security, political dissent, and public order.

The earliest event currently captured here is 2023-05-12 in Hong Kong, where Hong Kong public libraries and other government-managed collections removed from government-managed collections. The source page records removal or withholding in public libraries amid the post-2020 tightening of Hong Kong's public reading infrastructure. The source page records removal or withholding in public libraries amid the post-2020 tightening of Hong Kong's public reading infrastructure.

This entry is still incomplete: more jurisdictions, court orders, and translated justifications should be added over time.

This page is intentionally incomplete. The ban history is a starter dataset, not a final census of every jurisdiction or decree.

• 100 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature Nicholas J. Karolides, Margaret Bald, and Dawn B. Sova

  A compact reference on how censorship systems moved across states, churches, and courts.

• Banned Books: 387 B.C. to 1978 A.D. Anne Lyon Haight

  Useful for comparing older obscenity, heresy, and political bans with modern free-speech disputes.

• Wikipedia: Book censorship in Hong Kong reference partial
• Wikipedia REST summary API database partial
• 100 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature book partial
• Banned Books: 387 B.C. to 1978 A.D. book partial