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10/13/2009

Every year 150,000 books are published in China. The most impressive bookshop in the center of the city has a concrete facade decorated with golden letters and calls itself the Beijing Books Building. It belongs to the same state-owned company that operates the official state news agency, Xinhua, which means "new China." Incredibly large crowds of customers throng the four-story building, pushing their way through stuffy aisles of bookshelves. The bestsellers are books with tips on how to lead a healthier life and get-rich schemes, including the "Sales Bible" and the collected wisdoms of the great guru of capitalism, Warren Buffett.

"I often walk around Beijing with an incredible feeling of rage," says novelist and filmmaker Guo Xiaolu. She lives half the year in London, and the other half in Beijing. When Western visitors rave about China's enthusiasm for new beginnings, and its energy, she gets angry. "They fail to notice that this manic enthusiasm for new high-rises and new cars has an incredibly melancholic, even depressed core."

She was born in 1973 in a fishing village in southern China. "No one there, not even my parents, ever picked up a book," she says. She started writing as a 10-year-old schoolgirl and published her first book of poetry at the age of 14. At the age of 18 she managed to get accepted into the Beijing Film Academy. Her film "She, a Chinese" won the coveted Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival. It is the story of a Chinese girl who moves to the big city, where she is surrounded by hookers and killers, and finally ends up in the UK.

In 2002, Guo Xiaolu went to Europe on a scholarship. She now works with British and German publishers and producers, but doesn't want to give up her apartment in Beijing. Her latest book, entitled "UFO in Her Eyes," is a satire on China's modernization that is set in the year 2012.

In her novel, the mayor of a Chinese village proclaims that "everything old must make way for the new," and has banners displayed with slogans like "Get rid of the weak, get rid of the lazy!" The book also includes a few dim-witted state security agents and a mother who bemoans the 5,000 miners, most of them young people, who die every year in China's mines. It is totally out of the question that "UFO in Her Eyes" will ever appear in China, says Guo Xiaolu. She says she grew up as a communist, but today she often suffers from "asphyxiation" in Beijing.

Army of Censors

A huge army of censors -- whose names and exact number remain unknown -- watches over China's media. Novelists are handled by a special government agency, the General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP). The GAPP is the official partner of the Frankfurt Book Fair. It organizes the guest country program and has launched a number of initiatives, including donating half a million euros (roughly $739,000) in subsidies for the translation of Chinese novels into German.

The censors at the GAPP intervene when important leaders of the Communist Party are attacked, when ethnic minorities in the country are portrayed in a less than flattering manner, or if allusions are made to the student revolts of 1989. But the agency also acts to suppress pornography, or what passes as such in prudish China. In general, anything that could endanger the "stability and unity of China" is considered undesirable.

As in other communist states, books were the most incisive weapons of intellectual discourse in China until well into the 1990s. But for the past few years, the Internet has served as the main platform for intelligent and rebellious debate.

It is always hard to get an overview of what is happening in Chinese media, with 150,000 books published each year and millions of Chinese Web sites. But what is particularly confusing is that many ostensibly banned topics can now be discussed in Beijing without the authorities so much as batting an eye.

'We Don't Ask for Permission'

One example of this newfound tolerance can be found behind the gray walls of the Sanwei Bookshop, which lies on the main east-west artery in the heart of the city, not far from Tiananmen Square. The building is a traditional town house, like the thousands and thousands that once dotted the city of Beijing. Now it stands forlorn amid office high-rises and huge construction sites, like a dwarf among giants.

Since 1988, Li Shiqiang has run the city's first independent bookshop here, together with his wife, Liu Yuansheng. The walls are covered with framed black-and-white photos of old Beijing and, in a space the size of two living rooms, books of a primarily political nature are displayed on high wooden tables. There are books about Barack Obama, global climate protection, the economic downturn and Bob Dylan. Visitors from Germany may also be surprised to find an anthology of essays by German philosopher Jürgen Habermas translated into Chinese as well as former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's book "Men and Power: A Political Retrospective."

In the tea salon that belongs to the bookshop, there are five dozen chairs and a few tables. Occasionally there are jazz concerts, and every Saturday afternoon people are invited to attend presentations and discussions. Participants here talk about the moral limits of greed and excessive profits, about the political explosiveness of Islam and the constraints of Chinese censorship. "It almost never happens that an event is banned by government authorities," says Li Shiqiang. "We simply don't ask for permission, and usually nobody cares about us."

Preventing Catastrophes

Li Shiqiang was born in 1945, after the Japanese occupiers had been defeated, when China was a battlefield torn apart by civil war. He was four years old when hundreds of thousands celebrated the birth of the People's Republic of China on Tiananmen Square. Li became an engineer. In 1958, his wife lost her job as a teacher because she was supposedly a "rightist." In 1966, Chairman Mao proclaimed the Cultural Revolution, and all well-educated individuals were suddenly regarded as scum.

For seven years, from 1968 to 1975, Li languished in prison. "We have experienced many catastrophes," he says while his wife serves tea. "And even though it may sound ridiculous, because we are only two ordinary individuals, we intend to use the work in our shop to do everything possible to prevent further catastrophes."

In 1989, when the military used tanks to crush the student rebellion on Tiananmen Square, Li's daughter was among the protesters and was imprisoned for two years. She now lives in South Korea. After the Tiananmen massacre, the afternoon presentations in the Sanwei Bookshop were banned. It wasn't until 2002 that they could begin again with discussions, "and we've noticed that there have recently been new visitors from the affluent middle class."

Sometimes he gets angry about what China's novelists write these days, says Li. "It is pure greed, not censorship, which prevents them from writing about the important political issues facing our country. Our entire society wants to earn money, and I've realized, to my disappointment, that this is also true of our authors."

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• Part 1: Controversy as Frankfurt Book Fair Fetes Beijing
• Part 2: 'An Incredible Feeling of Rage'
• Part 3: The Nouveau Riche's Golden Toilets