For years, the independently owned and operated Jifeng Bookstore (季风书园) was by almost any measure the best in Shanghai. It offered not only the latest works on Chinese economics and politics, but also translations of foreign works on a wide range of topics. Photos of Western authors such as Baudelaire, Foucault, Wittgenstein and Virginia Woolf covered its walls. Like leading bookstores elsewhere, all this was augmented with frequent talks by Chinese and foreign writers, plus a coffee shop jammed with people talking, reading and writing.
Yet as 2017 closed, so did Jifeng Bookstore. The ostensible reason was that the nearby Shanghai Public Library needed the space and therefore the landlord could not renew the lease. But the real reason was political—nervous Communist Party officials found the bookstore's intellectual atmosphere too freewheeling for comfort and so engineered its shut down. Its closure was just another step in the party's nationwide campaign to restrict the flow of information and the channels through which it is disseminated to average Chinese citizens.
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