Media in Focus: How Sino United Created a Publishing Monopoly
One company tightly bound to the Chinese state has a stranglehold on publishing and bookselling in Hong Kong and is now making inroads into news media.
Go book-shopping in Hong Kong and you may be surprised by the range of stores to choose from. Three local chains — JP Books (三聯書店), The Commercial Press (商務印書館), and Chung Hwa Book Co. (中華書局) — run up to a dozen locations each. Not bad for a city where book publishers and sellers are reeling from political controls and where only around 14 percent of residents, less than half the international average, say they like reading “very much.”
But all these are different faces of the same media empire: Sino United Publishing (聯合出版), or SUP. It is an empire that single-handedly controls over 80 percent of the local publishing market and runs over 50 retail stores territory-wide — a virtual monopoly. It is also an empire within an empire, owned and operated by the Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government (LOCPG), which is long rumored to run the Special Administrative Region from the shadows.
The revelation that Sino United is a front for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was headline news when Next Magazine (壹週刊) broke the story in 2015. A decade later, the organization has only become more secretive and more tightly bound to the PRC party-state. Independent publishing houses and bookshops have closed down amid an ongoing and ever-widening crackdown on Hong Kong civil society and pro-democracy political groups. Opposition news sources like Next and its sister newspaper Apple Daily (蘋果日報) have also disappeared.
Burying the Lede
While the Sino United Publishing group itself is barely 36 years old, the three companies that combined to form it in 1988 are older than the CCP and even the Republic of China.
Founded in Shanghai in 1897, the Commercial Press (商務印書館) claims to be China’s oldest modern publishing organization. The Chung Hwa Book Company (中華書局) also has a lineage reaching back into the days of pre-revolution Shanghai, founded by a former Commercial Press manager on January 1, 1912 — the same day Sun Yat-sen proclaimed the Republic in nearby Nanjing. The final component, Joint Publishing (三聯出版), was itself the product of an earlier merger between three famous Shanghai bookstores active in the 1930s and 1940s: Life Bookstore (生活書店), Yanshu Publishing House (讀書出版社) and Xinzhi Bookstore (新知書店).
The new company quickly became a government favorite. After Hong Kong’s handover to China in 1997, a security-focused subsidiary of the Commercial Press was awarded a contract to produce Hong Kong Special Administrative Region passports and other travel documents for the territory’s Immigration Department. When Macau became part of the PRC in 1999, they were awarded a similar deal producing passports for the new SAR’s Identification Services Bureau.
SUP’s majority shareholder since 1990 was known to be New Culture Development (新文化事業), a locally registered company majority-owned, in turn, by Guangdong New Culture Development (廣東新文化事業發展有限公司). It was no secret that the same company also had controlling stakes in three of the territory’s print dailies: the Ta Kung Pao (大公報), Wen Wei Po (文匯報), and Hong Kong Commercial Daily (香港商報) — three historically leftist newspapers long co-opted or founded by the CCP, known for fomenting deadly pro-CCP riots and bombings in 1967. Reporters for the newspapers, which combined to form the Ta Kung Wen Wei Media Group in 2016, behave more like agents of the state than reporters, intimidating and harassing journalists, politicians, and activists.
What was not known, until the Next Media bombshell in 2015, was that New Culture was wholly-owned by the Liaison Office. In present-day Hong Kong, where the national security crackdown has erased any meaningful firewalls between the Central Government and that of the Special Administrative Region, it may be difficult to understand why this was so controversial at the time.
Above the Law
According to the assurances offered to Hong Kong at the time of its retrocession, the LOCPG was to steer clear of local politics. According to Article 22 of the Basic Law, the mini-constitution that came into effect in 1997, "no department of the Central People's Government and no province, autonomous region, or municipality directly under the Central Government may interfere in the affairs which the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region administers on its own in accordance with this Law." This was prized as a guarantee for Hong Kong’s “high degree of autonomy,” although the line separating SAR and mainland authorities was blurred virtually from the LOCPG’s establishment in 2000, when it took over from the Xinhua News Agency that long served as a de facto liaison office.
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In 2001, for example, the Office mobilized support for Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa’s second term in office. Even members of the pro-establishment political camp criticized the LOCPG for circulating “recommendation lists” instructing electors on what local representatives to send to the National People’s Congress. As the Office began coordinating with the pro-Beijing DAB party and raising funds for campaigns at the local level, it attracted accusations of operating as a “shadow government.” The Liaison Office lobbied aggressively for the election of Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying in 2012 and impeded an investigation into Leung’s conflicts of interest. A day after his victory, Leung made a high-profile visit to the Liaison Office skyscraper in the Sai Wan neighborhood of Hong Kong island. Democrats began referring to this new state of affairs as “Sai Wan ruling Hong Kong” (西環治港).
What was not known, until the Next Media bombshell in 2015, was that New Culture was wholly-owned by the Liaison Office.
Only in 2020, however, did the LOCPG fully cast off the pretense of non-interference in local affairs, declaring that the Office is not subject to Basic Law restrictions barring central government departments from interfering in local affairs and that it has not only the right but indeed the responsibility to comment however it wishes on Hong Kong matters. Since then, the Office’s forays into local politics have become more brazen. The Office has played an active role in directing “improvements” to the electoral system that have barred the opposition from running and drastically reduced the number of directly elected lawmakers. In 2022, the Office informed members of the Election Committee that former security chief John Lee Ka-chiu (李家超) was the only candidate approved by Beijing to become Chief Executive and he would therefore be running unopposed.
New SAR, New SUP
At the same time as the LOCPG was tightening its hold on Hong Kong politics, it was also reorganizing its media and publishing empire, binding it even more closely to the Party-state.
In April 2020, four months before its offices were raided by national security police, Apple Daily reported that the central government was setting up “a state-owned cultural enterprise that spans publishing, news, film and television as well as arts and culture” and that this new entity “will be led by the mainland’s top representative office in the city.” The name of this new “soft power” powerhouse was not then known, and with Apple Daily shut down soon thereafter reporting on the story quickly tapered off. Our own research into corporate records in Hong Kong and China and state media coverage, however, sheds new light on who currently owns and controls the SUP empire.
A transfer of ownership in 2022 saw SUP shares fall entirely into the hands of a Bauhinia Culture Holdings Limited (紫荆文化集团有限公司), which is listed in Hong Kong documents as having its principal address in Shenzhen’s Qianhai New District, a pilot area created to promote closer cooperation between mainland China and Hong Kong. Strangely, however, no company by this exact name appears in PRC corporate registration listings. Many “Bauhinias” appear but none are viable candidates. This begs the question: Has the company been secreted away in the online records?
The Hong Kong Companies Registry does turn up another “active” company called Bauhinia Culture (Hong Kong) Holdings Limited (紫荊文化(香港)集團有限公司). This company’s directors are listed as former SUP head and Liaison Office secretary-general Wen Hongwu (文宏武) alongside fellow PRC nationals Hu Xianzheng (胡賢政) and Xu Zhengzhong (許正中). The 2023 annual return also lists as director Mao Chaofeng (毛超峰), whose address is SUP Tower in North Point. While this Hong Kong-registered “Bauhinia” is not listed as a shareholder in SUP directly, it is clearly linked to SUP.
Combining the full name minus “co. ltd.” with “Shenzhen,” turns up a report from Shenzhen News, the municipal government’s official news portal. It reports on a major exhibition in the city: “The central cultural enterprise Bauhinia Cultural Group (文化央企紫荆文化集团) will bring major projects, activities and products to the exhibition.” Coverage from April 2024 on the Guizhou province channel of the China News Service (CNS) website — part of the United Front Work Department of the CCP Central Committee — reports on a trip to the area by Bauhinia Cultural Group Company Limited (紫荆文化集团有限公司) CEO Xu Zhengzhong (许正中). Xu is listed as a director of Bauhinia Culture (Hong Kong) Holdings Limited in 2024, along with Wen Hongwu (文宏武) and Hu Xianzheng (胡贤政).
Xu Zhengzhong’s remarks, as reported by CNS, make it clear that Bauhinia is a state-run enterprise and that its goals align, both in the mainland and in Hong Kong, with the goals of the CCP leadership:
Xu Zhengzhong said that Bauhinia Cultural Group, as a comprehensive, large-scale, backbone central-level cultural enterprise, through a management mode of Shenzhen and Hong Kong as dual headquarters and with a base in Hong Kong and deep rootedness in the Greater Bay Area, focuses on five major industry pieces, including the development of film and television industry, media information, publishing and distribution, cultural and tourism performances, financial investments, and is committed to tell China's story well to the world and to promote the going out of Chinese culture.
This explains why, even though SUP is registered as a Limited Liability Company in Hong Kong, its ultimate controlling company in Shenzhen, with 100 percent of SUP shares, does not appear on corporate registries: it is not a private enterprise at all but a state-held public institution (事业单位). While Hong Kong Company Registry documents showing SUP’s shareholding structure are publicly available, there is evidence of active disguise on the part of the Chinese state to conceal the true nature of the group’s control. No data on this Bauhinia Holdings group is publicly available.
Apples and Oranges
While SUP is predominately focused on print, through Chinese-language books and educational materials, it has also become a player in online media. In 2014, the group launched Orange News (橙新聞), so named to position itself opposite the pro-democracy Apple Daily. It describes itself as “a new media platform that focuses on quality news and thoughtful perspectives… dedicated to providing rational, objective, in-depth and wide-ranging news reports and commentaries, with an emphasis on thoughtfulness, culture, popularity, and multi-perspective views."
When the Hong Kong Journalists Association elected a new board in 2024, for example, Orange News ran three strongly-worded editorials in the space of 24 hours. In the first, current affairs commentator Liang Wenwen (梁文聞), who had criticized the HKJA for months, wrote that the group “has always in the past upheld the banner of ‘press freedom’ to loudly criticize the government.” Liang’s text was full of air-quote references to “press freedom,” echoing CCP language dismissing the notion as a Western fallacy. In another Orange News commentary, writer Han Jinluo (韓進珞), resorted to a phrase generally seen in the past in CCP criticisms of activists and rights defense protesters: “having ulterior motives” (別有用心). Han alleged that under the HKJA’s newly-elected committee chair, the subsequently terminated Wall Street Journal reporter Selina Cheng (鄭嘉如), the press group would become “a cheerleading team for the American government” (美國政府的啦啦隊).
For a more recent example of Orange News editorial standards, we can look to their coverage of the Democratic Party’s decision to disband in February 2025. Like every other state-run and pro-establishment news source in the city, they describe how Hong Kong’s oldest and biggest pro-democracy party has no one to blame but themselves, relating how the party lost public support by siding with anti-government protesters in 2019 — even though democratic candidates won by a landslide in the November 2019 District Council elections when protest “chaos” was at its height. Instead, they cite as proof of the Democratic Party’s unpopularity the fact that its candidates did not secure enough nominations to run the 2023 DC election. Orange News reporters conveniently leave out critical context: that the 2023 election was the first after a major overhaul designed to bar opposition parties from running, and that the nominations perspective candidates needed were not from the public but from unelected committees that were tasked with screening “unpatriotic” candidates and, for the most part, only nominated candidates from among their own ranks.
A brief survey of recent news reports on the site suggests a preponderance of stories without diverse sourcing — many seeming to come directly from HKSAR government departments, like this piece on the Culture, Sports and Tourism Bureau. One regular video series run by Orange News is with member of the Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macao Studies (全國港澳研究會), an organization based in Beijing and backed by the PRC government. In a recent video, the host tries to “set the historical record straight” on violence during the 2019 protests, and comes down clearly in support of Hong Kong police and the SAR government. Some stories, like this one, seem to come directly from the HKSAR government’s Information Services Department. Other stories are sourced from official PRC outlets like China Today, as well as Russian state sources like Russia Today.
A brief survey of recent news reports on the site suggests a preponderance of stories without diverse sourcing — many seeming to come directly from HKSAR government departments.
First We Take Hong Kong
Alarm bells about state-run Sino United exercising a virtual monopoly on publishing and bookselling in Hong Kong have been ringing for years. Public concerns about the company’s dominance and its control by the PRC central governments Liaison Office were ignored by the previous Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam. Within Hong Kong, there is insufficient oversight of incursions against publishing freedoms resulting from PRC interference. Numerous international organizations have also highlighted this issue: In April 2024 both the International Publishers Association (IPA) and the European and International Booksellers Federation warned that publishing freedoms were under threat in Hong Kong. In recent years, human rights advocacy groups such as Amnesty International have also spoken out about the deterioration of publishing freedoms in Hong Kong.
This is an issue that has gone overlooked or deliberately ignored for decades, in fact. In the 1980s and 1990s, SUP subsidiaries were established in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom in 1988, 1989, and 1990, respectively. The group also hoovered up long-established Chinese-language publishers serving diaspora communities, like San Francisco’s Eastwind Books and Arts (東風書店) and Eastern Bookstore (東方書店) in New York City. This CCP strategy of using cosmopolitan, globally linked Hong Kong as a springboard for external propaganda efforts, especially those targeting diasporic communities, continues to this day.
With Sino United Publishing’s monopoly now uncontested and politically dangerous to challenge within Hong Kong, its empire seems guaranteed to grow — spanning the increasingly blurred boundary between the SAR and the Chinese mainland and spilling out over the PRC’s borders.
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