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You've taken a trip to Hong Kong and are returning with a stack of reading material that you can't normally find on the mainland. To your dismay, the customs agent seizes your books, but won't tell you why. What do you do? Sue!

Southern Weekly reported last week on a professor who is suing a customs office in Guangzhou over the confiscation of seven books he brought back from Hong Kong.

Most of the books that Feng Chongyi had confiscated by the Tianhe Terminal Customs Office were written by mainland authors and did not violate national laws or regulations. But the heart of his complaint is more general: there is no publicly-available index of banned books, and no clear public standard of what constitutes illicit printed material. Feng argues that this violates Chinese law.

Feng's lawsuit mirrors an earlier attempt by the Fujian-based author Chen Xiwo to retrieve twelve copies of the Taiwan edition of his novella collection Book of Offenses from Fuzhou customs officials. Southern Weekly summarizes his case, in which the appeals court found that his book "disseminated pornography" and deserved to be confiscated.

The article also digs up an interesting older case in which Zhu Yuantao, a Beijing-based lawyer who won a fleeting victory over the Beijing Airport Customs Office.

In 2002, Zhu returned from a trip to Hong Kong with a copy of Gao Hua's account of the Yan'an Rectification Campaign, which customs agents seized as a banned book. He sued, lost, and then won on appeal in the Beijing Municipal People's High Court, which said that in the absence of a clear, public standard for banned publications, the confiscation of his book lacked a legal basis.

However, two months later the court revised its decision to uphold the seizure, and subsequent lawsuits over confiscated books have never been successful. Perhaps authorities are nervous that making the customs blacklist public would set an unfortunate precedent for information control in other areas — domestic media and publishing, for example, where unwritten rules abound.

It's an illuminating article, and its first line is particularly interesting in what it reveals about Southern Weekly's intended readership.

Many people have had the following experience: they bring back certain books from overseas, but when they pass through Chinese customs, the books get confiscated as illegal printed material. Most people simply accept this, but noted academic Feng Chongyi has chosen to go to court.

Feng, who carries a Chinese passport, is currently an associate professor and deputy director of the China Research Center at the University of Technology, Syndey, as well as an adjunct professor at Nankai University.