Emigrants are creating an alternative China, one bookstore at a time

On a rainy Saturday afternoon in central Tokyo, about fifty Chinese sat together in a gray, nondescript office that doubles as a bookstore. They came for a seminar on Qiu Jin, a Chinese feminist poet and revolutionary who was beheaded more than a century ago for plotting to overthrow the Qing dynasty.

Like her, Ms. Qiu had lived as an immigrant in Japan. The title of the lecture, “Reconstruction of China in Tokyo,” said as much about the ambitions of the people in the room as it did about Ms. Qiu’s life.

Public discussions such as these were common in major cities in China, but have become increasingly suppressed over the past decade. The Chinese public is discouraged from organizing and participating in social activities.

Over the past year, a new kind of Chinese public life has emerged – beyond China’s borders, in places like Japan.

“With so many Chinese people moving to Japan,” said Li Jinxing, a human rights lawyer who organized the event in January, “there is a need for a place where people can vent, share their grievances and then think about what to do next .” Mr Li himself moved to Tokyo from Beijing last September amid concerns about his safety. “People like us are on a mission to drive China’s transformation,” he said.

From Tokyo and Chiang Mai, Thailand, to Amsterdam and New York, members of the Chinese diaspora are building public lives banned in China and training themselves to be civic-minded citizens—the kind of Chinese the Communist Party doesn’t want them to be. They open Chinese bookstores, hold seminars and organize citizen groups.

These emigrants are creating an alternative China, a more hopeful society. In the meantime, they are redefining what it means to be Chinese.

Last year, four Chinese bookstores opened in Tokyo. A monthly feminist open-mic comedy show which started in New York in 2022, was so successful that feminists are organizing similar shows in at least four other American cities, as well as London, Amsterdam and Vancouver, British Columbia. Chinese immigrants in Europe have founded dozens of nonprofits focused on LGBTQ, protest and other issues.

Most of these events and organizations are not overtly political in nature, nor aimed at overthrowing the Chinese government, although some participants hope that they can one day return to a democratic China. But the immigrants they organize say they believe it is important to learn to live without fear, trust each other and pursue a life of purpose.

Far too many Chinese, even after they left, were too afraid of the government for years to attend public events that did not conform to the Communist Party’s mainstream rhetoric.

But in 2022, the White Paper protests that broke out in China to object to the country’s pandemic restrictions led to demonstrations in other countries. People realized they were not alone and started looking for like-minded people.

Yilimai, a young professional who has lived in Japan for a decade, said he has been organizing and participating in protests and seminars in Tokyo since the 2022 protests.

Last June he came to a lecture I gave about my Chinese-language podcast: “I do not understand”, and was surprised to find himself among about 300 people. (I was surprised, too. Who would want to listen to a journalist talk about her podcast?) He said he met and kept in touch with about a dozen people at the event.

“Participating in public life is a virtue in itself,” said Yilimai, who used his online nickname because he feared government reprisals. It means ‘a grain of wheat’, a biblical reference to the resurrection.

China once, in the 2000s and early 2010s, had what the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas called a public sphere. The authorities allowed space for lively, if censored, public conversations alongside state-sanctioned cultural and social life.

In bookstores in major Chinese cities, Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” ​​and Friedrich Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” were bestsellers. A Beijing book club founded by Ren Zhiqiang, a real estate magnate, attracted top Chinese entrepreneurs, intellectuals and officials. Shanghai Pride, an annual celebration of LGBTQ rights, attracted thousands of participants. Feminist activists organized movements such as ‘occupied men’s toilets’ and official news sockets covered them as progressive forces. Independent films, documentaries and underground magazines explored topics that the Communist Party disliked but tolerated: history, sexuality and inequality.

In the decade after Xi Jinping took over the country’s leadership at the end of 2012, all these initiatives were suppressed. Investigative journalists lost an outlet for their work, human rights lawyers were jailed or suspended, and bookstores were forced to close their doors. Ren Zhiqiang, the real estate magnate who founded the book club, is serving 18 years in prison for criticizing Mr Xi. Nongovernmental organization organizers and LGBTQ and feminist activists were harassed, silenced, or forced into exile.

In turn, a growing number of Chinese have fled their homeland, the government and the propaganda for places that allowed them freedom. Now they can connect with each other and provide platforms for Chinese people inside and outside the country to communicate and imagine a different future.

Anne Jieping Zhang, a mainland-born journalist who worked in Hong Kong for 20 years before moving to Taiwan during the pandemic, started a bookstore in Taipei in 2022. She opened a branch in Chiang Mai, Thailand last December and plans to open in Tokyo and Amsterdam this year.

“I want my bookstore to be a place where Chinese people from all over the world can come and exchange ideas,” Ms. Zhang said.

Her bookstore, called Nowhere, issues Republic of Nowhere passports to its esteemed customers, who are called citizens and not members.

Nowhere’s Taipei branch hosted 138 events last year. The Chiang Mai branch organized approximately twenty events in the first six weeks. The themes were wide-ranging: war, feminism, protests in Hong Kong and cities and relationships. I spoke about my podcast at both locations.

Ms. Zhang said she did not want her bookstores to be just for dissidents and young rebels, but for every Chinese who was curious about the world.

“It’s not about what you’re against, but what kind of life you desire,” she said. “If the Chinese or the Chinese diaspora in some places cannot rebuild society without top-down restrictions, even if we undergo regime change, we will certainly not be able to live a better life.”

Ms. Zhang and Mr. Li, the human rights lawyer better known by his pen name Wu Lei, said the Chinese expatriates were very different from their predecessors in the 1980s, who were mainly economic immigrants. The new emigrants are better off and better educated. They care about their economic well-being and their sense of belonging to something bigger than themselves.

Both Ms. Zhang and Mr. Li started their businesses with their own money. The monthly rent for Mr. Li’s roughly 700-square-foot space, which he uses primarily for events, is about $1,300. He said he could afford it.

Ms. Zhang, currently a Nieman fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, subsidizes the Chiang Mai facility with her savings. The Taipei branch made a profit last year. An increasing source of income is sending books to Chinese people all over the world.

On the same Saturday in January as the seminar at Mr. Li’s bookstore in Tokyo, eight young Chinese sat around a dining table in the home of a Japanese professor to discuss the previous weekend’s elections in Taiwan. Since last year they have been meeting at public and private events.

“We are preparing for the democratization of China,” said Umi, a graduate student who moved to Japan in 2022 and participated in the White Paper protests. “We have to ask ourselves,” she said, “If the Chinese Communist Party collapses tomorrow, are we ready to be good citizens?”