日本で本を売る中国人　習体制の出版抑圧を逃れ

日本で本を売る中国人　習体制の出版抑圧を逃れ - WSJ

【東京】チャン・シージーさん（47）はかつて中国大手出版社の経営幹部として年間数百万ドル相当の書籍販売を監督し、北京で開かれる宴会で契約を取り交わしていた。最近はショッピングカートを引いて東京の本屋街、神保町付近を歩き回り、自費出版業者として手がける3作品を置いてほしいと本屋に頼み込んでいる。

　北京で彼が扱った書籍は月に何万部も売れることがあった。日本で売れたのは1月以降で合計2000部にも満たない。

TOKYO—In his past life, Zhang Shizhi oversaw book sales worth millions of dollars a year,sealing deals over private banquets in Beijing as an executive at a major publishing fifirm.Nowadays, he pulls a collapsible shopping trolley around Jimbocho, Tokyo’s book district,personally entreating shops to stock the three titles he has to offffer as a self-fundedpublisher.Some of his books in Beijing sold tens of thousands of copies a month. In Japan, his entirecatalog has sold fewer than 2,000 prints since January.Zhang is part of a broader brain drain in China that has continued largely unabated sincethe Covid-19 pandemic, as intellectuals and entrepreneurs trickle out of the country toescape a radical tightening of political controls under leader Xi Jinping.In launching a scaled-down, offffshore stage of his career, Zhang has joined a wave ofChinese thinkers, artists and cultural workers who are trying to carve out space overseasafter deciding they can’t live the lives they want in the country of their birth.Zhang is happy with his “downshift,” as he calls it. Outside China, he says, he is free of thecountry’s cutthroat competition and able to publish the sort of thoughtful, critical workthat Chinese authorities can no longer tolerate.“I left Beijing to ‘go to that happy land,’ ” the 47-year-old says, quoting a line from theBook of Odes, China’s oldest recorded collection of poetry, about escaping a tyrannicalregime.While activists and dissidents have long flfled China after falling foul of the CommunistParty, many of those leaving now are political moderates who were content to contributeto the country’s cultural and intellectual life under Xi’s less draconian predecessors.

Slowing economic growth has intensifified the exodus by piling fifinancial anxiety on top offeelings of creative malaise.This swelling population of self-exiles has landed in cities across the globe. Chai Jing, oneof China’s most recognizable broadcast journalists, recently launched an interview showon YouTube from her current home in Barcelona. Yu Miao, owner of a celebratedbookstore in Shanghai, is preparing to open a new shop in Washington, D.C. Acclaimedmovie director Wang Xiaoshuai, who recently fell back into censors’ crosshairs after yearsof offiffifficial acceptance, has moved to London.

Zhang Shizhi’s departure from China is part of a broader brain drain that has continued largely unabated since theCovid pandemic.

The lack of space to express even moderate views inside China on topics such aseconomics, let alone politics, has magnifified the importance of Chinese voices fromoutside the country, said Ian Johnson, author of “Sparks: China’s Underground Historiansand Their Battle for the Future,” about Chinese intellectuals’ efffforts to preserve thecountry’s key memories.“There is a thirst for difffferent views that wasn’t as pronounced a decade ago, preciselybecause it’s not just dissidents and activists who feel a need for alternative explanations,”he said.Hoping to help slake that thirst, Zhang set out with his books on a sweltering afternoonearlier this month and rolled them into a Toho Shoten, a China-focused bookstore inJimbocho. Walking up to shelves of books about China, he pulled open a drawerunderneath.“Look,” he said, pointing inside, “inventory is running low.”A manager agreed to take fifive copies of one of Zhang’s books, but none of the others he’dlugged over in the trolley.“Publishing books is easy in a free and democratic society,” Zhang said, leaving the store.“Selling books is so hard.”A teacher by training from central China, Zhang migrated to Beijing in the early 2000s aspart of a wave of intellectuals lured by the relatively vibrant exchange of ideas prevalentat the time in the Chinese capital’s cafes and classrooms. He took a job with a smallpublishing startup, recording lectures at the prestigious Peking University and thenpersuading the professors to agree to publish the transcripts.After a two-decade career, Zhang found himself living in a spacious Beijing apartmentwith thousands of books, several by renowned authors whom he had edited.But there were signs of dark times to come. A decade-old bestseller by modern Chinesehistory writer Fu Guoyong, about the choices faced by Chinese scholars after theCommunist Party takeover in 1949, had irked the authorities so much by 2017 that anupdated version was ordered to be pulped before copies could reach a new generation ofreaders. Meanwhile, Zhang couldn’t get censors to approve a new edition of a popularbiography of Tsangyang Gyatso, the 17th-century Dalai Lama and legendary poet, whichleft him feeling dejected.“I couldn’t shake it offff,” he said.Zhang said he also worried about his two daughters, who were being bombarded with the

Communist Party’s political education in school and whom he feared would face a brutalrat race once they graduated into the workforce.The family moved to Tokyo in 2021, amid the Covid pandemic. The girls adapted quickly,but Zhang needed time to fifind his footing. After an abortive effffort to publish Chineseauthors in Japanese, a language he doesn’t speak, he spent his days playing table tennisand basketball and exploring local attractions.Other Chinese exiles described similar challenges. Yu Miao, the bookstore owner settingup in Washington, said he felt alienated in China after authorities forced his original shopto close down in 2018. When he arrived in the U.S., he said, “the alienation transformedinto dislocation.”Over time, though, Zhang noticed more Chinese intellectuals moving to Tokyo. Bookstoresand reading spaces popped up to cater to them, hosting lectures on Chinese history andcurrent affffairs. He started attending them regularly, the same way he had in Beijing 20years earlier and decided to take another shot at publishing.Many Chinese authors who want to escape censorship have to settle for having theirworks published overseas in traditional characters, which are favored by diasporacommunities but challenging to read for many people from mainland China. Zhanginstead began pitching authors on the opportunity to publish uncensored works using thesimplifified Chinese writing system favored by mainland China.“I told people I want books that are difffferent from the ones inside China,” Zhang said.“The more difffferent, the better.”Ye Fu, an essayist banned in China and now living in Chiang Mai, Thailand, gave Zhangpermission to issue a new collection of his writings about Chinese intellectuals. FuGuoyong agreed to let Zhang publish two of his books, including the one that got pulped.Zhang browsed the back pages of Japanese books to fifind a printing facility and enlistedhis wife’s help to design book covers. He called his new operation Yomimichi, or the Wayof Reading, and chose Shizhi as a new given name to mask his activities from Chineseauthorities.Sales were slow at fifirst but picked up quickly. Zhang’s books are now among thebestsellers at Uchiyama Shoten, a Tokyo bookstore that originated in Shanghai in 1917,according to current owner Shin Uchiyama, who said most of the buyers were Chinesetourists.“They can’t fifind those books in China,” he said. “Not many Chinese publish books inJapan.”

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