Shuttered in Shanghai, Chinese bookstore reopens in Washington

A Chinese bookstore reopened in Washington on Sunday, six years after the Chinese government forced it to close its doors in Shanghai.
JF Books was teeming with books — and customers — when it opened its doors in Washington’s Dupont Circle neighborhood. In the storefront, the shop’s name is displayed in English and Mandarin in neon green lights. The sporadic rain was perhaps fitting considering the bookstore’s namesake “jifeng” means “monsoon” in Mandarin.
The bookstore is located next to Kramers, an indie bookstore that has been a Washington fixture for decades. Yu Miao, who runs JF Books, says he hopes his bookstore becomes an institution for the local community, too.
“I hope the bookstore can establish a connection between people in the Chinese community, and this connection could be established through knowledge,” Yu told VOA shortly before the shop opened for business. “Also, I hope the bookstore’s function can go beyond the Chinese community. It can also contribute to the local community.”
The shop sells Chinese-language books from Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, in addition to a selection of English-language books. It will also regularly host speakers for events.
Founded in Shanghai in 1997 as Jifeng Bookstore, the shop ran into trouble in 2017 when its landlord said the lease couldn’t be extended. The bookstore looked for a new location, but the prospective landlords at each potential site received warnings or notifications from the government.
Jifeng Bookstore is one of several independent bookstores that Beijing has forced to close in recent years.
The fact that bookstores have become a battleground underscores the Chinese government’s broader repression of free expression and crackdown on anything deemed to be critical of the government, according to Sophie Richardson, the former China director at Human Rights Watch.
“[Chinese President] Xi Jinping and his government have clearly targeted a great deal of hostility at scholars,” Richardson told VOA at the bookstore. “Their books are regarded as potential threats, and so the party does what the party knows how to do, which is to send people into exile, to send them to jail, to shut down bookstores.”
China’s Washington embassy did not immediately reply to VOA’s email requesting comment for this story.
Gesturing at the throngs of people who were looking at books about everything from Chinese history to science, Richardson, who is now a visiting scholar at Stanford, added that there is a clear hunger for Chinese books.
“It’s amazing to see this clear demand for this kind of material in an environment where people can get it free of fear of persecution,” she said.
That’s another reason why Yu wanted to reopen the bookstore: It can be difficult to find Chinese-language books in the United States, he said. “And so, I think there must be many others that have the same concern,” he said.
When Jifeng Bookstore closed its doors in 2018, Yu never expected it to reopen.
“I thought it was closed, then its story ended,” Yu said. “I never imagined to reopen the bookstore.”
Now, JF Books has joined a rising number of independent Chinese bookstores that are being opened by members of the diaspora in cities around the world. They sell books and hold discussions about politics and history in a way that the Chinese government has stifled inside China.
JF Books already has scheduled three speakers for September. Howard Shen, a graduate student at Georgetown University, told VOA that he’s especially excited about the upcoming events.
“It’s such a big thing in the Chinese speaking community in D.C. We are all very excited to have this bookstore. It’s such a meaningful place for all Chinese in the world who love freedom,” said Shen, who is from Taiwan.
One corner of the store features farewell messages that customers wrote back when the store was forced to shutter in 2018. Leading up to the bookstore’s second floor, photos on the wall memorialize the bookstore’s two-decade history in Shanghai. At the top of the staircase, photos show the bookstore’s final day in 2018.
“Jifeng Bookstore will soon depart from Shanghai,” the caption of one photo reads, “but the monsoon will continue to blow.”