As China cracks down on bookstores at home, Chinese-language booksellers flourishing overseas

Yu Miao smiles as he stands among the 10,000 books crowded on rows of bamboo shelves in his newly reopened bookstore. It's in Washington's vibrant Dupont Circle neighbourhood, far from its last location in Shanghai, where the Chinese government forced him out of business six years ago.

“There is no pressure from the authorities here,” said Yu, the owner of JF Books, Washington's only Chinese bookseller. “I want to live without fear.”

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'ssecond-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.

The office did not respond to interview requests from The Associated Press. China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in a statement to AP, said it was not aware of a crackdown on bookstores.

Yu isn't alone in taking his business out of the country. Chinese bookstores have popped up in Japan, France, Netherlands and elsewhere in the U.S. in recent years, as a result of both stricter controls in China and growing Chinese communities abroad.

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.

The bookstore owner who was arrested was Yuan Di, also called Yanyou, the founder of Jiazazhi, an artistic bookstore in Shanghai and Ningbo on China's eastern coast. He was taken away by police in June, according to Zhou Youlieguo, who closed his own bookstore in Shanghai in September. Yuan's arrest was also confirmed by two other people who declined to be named for fear of retribution. The charge against Yuan is unclear.

An official in Ningbo's Bureau of Culture, Radio Television and Tourism, which oversees bookstores, declined comment, noting the case is under investigation. The Ningbo police didn't respond to an interview request.

Michael Berry, director of UCLA's Center for Chinese Studies, said a sluggish Chinese economy may be driving the government to exert greater control.

“The government might be feeling that this is a time to be more cautious and control this kind of discourse in terms of what people are consuming and reading to try to put a damper on any potential unrest and kind of nip it in the bud,” Berry said.

These bookstore owners face dual pressures, Berry added. One is the political clampdown; the other is the global movement, especially among young people, toward digital media and away from print publications.

Wang Yingxing sold secondhand books in Ningbo for almost two decades before being ordered to close in August. Local officials informed Wang he lacked a publication business license even though he wasn't eligible to obtain one as a second-hand seller.

Faded outlines marked the spot where a sign for Fatty Wang's Bookstore once hung. Spray-painted black letters on the bookstore's window read: “Temporarily closed”.

“We're promoting culture, I'm not doing anything wrong, right? I'm just selling some books and promoting culture,” Wang said, tying a bundle of books together with brown wrapper and white nylon string.

“Then why won't you leave me alone?” Wang added.

Half a dozen other people heaved boxes of books into the back of a van. The books, Wang said, were being sold to cafe and bar owners who wanted to burnish little libraries for their patrons. Some would be sent to a warehouse in Anhui. The rest, he said, were to be sent to a recycling station to be pulped and destroyed.

Bookstores are not the only target. Central authorities have also cracked down on other places such as printing shops, internet bars, gaming rooms and street vendors. Strict inspections have taken place all over the country, according to Chinese authorities.

Authorities in Shanghai inspected printing places and bookstores, looking for “printing, copying or selling illegal publications,” according to a government document. This shows the authorities are not just barring the sale of some publications, but tracing them back to the printing process. They found some printing stores did not “register the copy content as required” and demanded they fix the problem quickly.

In Shaoyang, a city in China's south, authorities said they will be “cracking down on harmful publications in accordance with the law.”

The Communist Party has various powers to control which books are available. Any publication without a China Standard Book Number is considered illegal, including self-published books and those imported without special licenses. Books can be banned even after they are published if restrictions are later tightened — often for unclear reasons — or if the writers say something upsetting to the Chinese authorities.

Yet despite these restrictions and the crackdown on existing booksellers, more bookstores are opening. Recent figures are unavailable, but a survey by Bookdao, a media company that focuses on the book industry, shows more than twice as many bookstores opened than closed in China in 2020.

Liu Suli, who has been running All Sages Books in Beijing for over three decades, says there are many idealists in the industry.

“Everyone who reads has a dream of having a bookstore,” Liu says, despite the challenges.

In many cases, those dreams are being fulfilled outside China. Yu and other Chinese booksellers around the world stock their shelves with books from Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China, as well as books published locally.

Zhang Jieping, founder of Nowhere, a bookstore in Taiwan and Thailand, said there's a growing demand for books from migrants who left China after the COVID-19 pandemic.

“They don't just want to speak fluent English or Japanese to fit in, they want cultural autonomy,” Zhang said. “They want more community spaces. Not necessarily a bookstore, but in any format — a gallery, or a restaurant.”

Li Yijia is a 22-year-old student who arrived in Washington from Beijing in August. One Sunday morning, she wandered through JF Books where she found titles in Chinese and English. She said a Chinese bookstore feels like “another world in a bubble” which helps her critical thinking by allowing her to read books in both languages.

“It also relieves homesickness, like a Chinese restaurant,” Li added.

The closure of the bookstores leads the owners to different paths. Some ended up in jail, some went looking for jobs to feed their families. Some started a journey to leave censorship behind.

Since he closed his Shanghai bookstore, Zhou, 39, has moved to Los Angeles, but hasn't decided what his next step will be.

He 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.”