At the Associated Press, Fu Ting reports mounting pressure on China’s independent bookstores and other cultural channels and venues:
Independent bookstores have become a new battleground in China, swept up in the ruling Communist Party’s crackdown on dissent and free expression. The Associated Press found that at least a dozen bookstores in the world’s second-largest economy have been shuttered or targeted for closure in the last few months alone, squeezing the already tight space for press freedom. One bookstore owner was arrested over four months ago.
The crackdown has had a chilling effect on China’s publishing industry. Bookstores are common in China, but many are state-owned. Independent bookstores are governed by an intricate set of rules with strict controls now being more aggressively policed, according to bookstore owners. Printing shops and street vendors are also facing more rigorous government inspections by the National Office Against Pornography and Illegal Publication.
[…] It’s not just the books’ contents that are making Chinese authorities wary. In many communities, bookstores are cultural centers where critical thinking is encouraged, and conversations can veer into politics and other topics not welcomed by the authorities.
[… Former Shanghai bookseller Zhou Youlieguo] said his fully licensed independent bookstore, which sold art books and self-published works by artists and translators, was fined thousands of dollars and he was interrogated over a dozen times during the past four years. He’s seen colleagues jailed for selling “illegal publications.” All the self-published book artists and editors he worked with asked him to take down their work after warnings by local authorities.
Zhou said he could not handle further harassment. He said it was as if he were “smuggling drugs instead of selling books.” [Source]
From Fu’s AP colleague Dake Kang, on Bluesky:
The AP article prominently features the resurrection in Washington D.C. of Jifeng Books, which was forced to close in Shanghai in 2018. This summer, The New Yorker’s Chang Che similarly highlighted the growth of independent Chinese bookstores in Tokyo and elsewhere in Japan, where they have become community hubs and event spaces.
Readers still in China, though, face tightening restrictions. Numerous officials have been disciplined for reading, importing, or otherwise handling “books that have serious political issues.” In April, an online repository of pirated ebooks closed its WeChat account under mounting pressure from authorities. The ongoing constriction of Hong Kong’s political environment has included a purge of sensitive books from public libraries. At South China Morning Post last week, Yuanyue Dang reported that the flow of books from Taiwan into China has been aggressively curtailed:
Three book editors, all of whom requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue, said the changes began in 2019, when works by Taiwanese authors started to require additional approval under new rules – even for literary works that were not previously considered sensitive.
The approval process can now take years, or even be “indefinite”, according to the editors. This has been especially true since former US House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s August 2022 visit to Taiwan, after which publishing new books by Taiwanese authors became even more troublesome.
[…] Only four works of Taiwanese literature have been published in mainland China since Pelosi’s 2022 trip, including just one so far this year.
[…] One of the editors who spoke to the Post said that because of the uncertainty in cross-strait relations, “we no longer consider bringing in books by Taiwanese authors”.
“We can’t afford the cost of waiting indefinitely,” another editor said. [Source]
