China Briefing | A tall tell-all tale from the dark side of Chinese power

For inquisitive mainlanders visiting Hong Kong, a trip to the city's cramped bookstores is as de rigueur as shopping and sightseeing. These customers are most likely to be seen milling around selections of volumes with crudely designed covers that promise intriguing or salacious tales of a "coup" or "assassination" in the Zhongnanhai headquarters of the Communist Party's leaders or epic battles between Xi Jinping and Hu Jintao or Jiang Zemin .

Crowding together often for hours at a time, they silently and quickly flip through the pages to devour the juiciest parts, sometimes buying one even though they are well aware that having such books could land them in trouble on the border crossing home. The mainland authorities have stepped up border checks for such material and offenders, particularly officials, face censure.

The publishers and the authors, mostly using pseudonyms, take advantage of the opaque nature of mainland politics to churn out books to satisfy the mainland public's curiosity. But most of the so-called exposés have proved to be more fictional than factual, culled largely from online rumours.

From time to time, the publishers also release autobiographies supposedly written by mainland political players, and more often than not they become instant hits.

The latest one to fly off the shelves is Shen Bing's Own Account: My Story with Zhou Yongkang. Published in October, Shen's supposed autobiography offers an implausible but compelling account of the decadent lives of former Chinese leaders, their relatives, and China's most famous television personalities.

Shen, 38, was a well-known CCTV anchor for 14 years before she was reportedly taken away by anti-graft investigators in December 2013 along with several other beautiful presenters from the network. The investigators were reportedly looking into the anchors' alleged romantic dalliances with Zhou as the authorities built their case against the former Politburo Standing Committee member and highest ranking official to be ensnared in the anti-corruption campaign.

Despite intense online speculation, the authorities kept a tight lid on Zhou's case until December when the party announced that he had been arrested on corruption charges. One of the accusations against him was that he committed adultery with a number of women and traded his power for sex and money. Shen was rumoured to be among those women because of her long association with Zhou, who promoted her to a senior post at the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, the top national security body.