China offers no publishing contract for Clinton's memoir

NEW YORK, June 27 (UPI) -- Hillary Clinton's new book Hard Choices won't be available in Chinese bookstores, with Chinese publishers declining to buy translation rights.

Released in May, the memoir about Clinton's experiences as U.S. Secretary of State includes negative references to China's leadership. She writes about the Chinese government's censorship of her 1995 address to a United Nations conference in Beijing on women's rights, and of activist Chen Guangcheng, who sought asylum in 2012 at a U.S. embassy.

"It's not a secret that the center of the anti-democratic movement in Asia is China," Clinton says in the book.

Jonathan Karp, president of Simon & Schuster, the book's U.S. publisher, said China's tightly-controlled publishers turned down opportunities to publish translated books; an import company, Shanghai Book traders, refused to sell copies of the book in English.

Despite the status of Clinton's book as a worldwide best-seller, Karp said it was under an "effective ban" in China.