Looked Up To and Forgotten: 20 Years of Jifeng, a Private Bookstore

"So many things happen, one hot topic after another, one round of sighing after another. Bigger things than this have already happened, shocked us, angered us, been mourned, and then vanished from our lives and our conversations."

People will soon forget all of this.

A countdown sign announcing how many days are left, the pleas and the angry questions in the notes readers leave, a poem posted every day on the WeChat official account, lectures called off because of "the weather" or some other excuse, the winding story of a store that moved because it couldn't pay the rent and is closing because the lease won't be renewed, a private bookstore called Jifeng, a place people call a cultural landmark of the city.

All of it will be forgotten.

1.

At 3 p.m. on August 10, we arrived at Jifeng Bookstore, inside the concourse of the Shanghai Library metro station.

Walk in and you see a glass wall packed with sticky notes — close to 1,000 of them.

"Such a huge city, and it can't hold on to one small space of freedom! 2017.8.7"

"Only by reading more can you change your fate! Thank you, Jifeng Bookstore, for bringing us an interesting world! — Wang Ziyan, 2017.08.06"

"A must-visit every time I come to Shanghai — I always find satisfying books to take back to Taipei. I hope this is only a temporary goodbye! May Jifeng last forever! Taipei · Zeng Baiwei, 2017.7.11"

"My handwriting is ugly, but I still wanted to write something. I stopped by and happened to learn that you might be leaving. I hope you're still here the next time I come to Shanghai. — From a student in Zhejiang about to enter the last year of high school, with an uncertain future ahead"

In the upper left corner of the glass wall was a line: "If one day I have to leave this place, let those shining ideas return to my feet one last time." In the upper right corner: Jifeng Bookstore farewell countdown — 174 Days.

On the table beside the wall, next to a basket of sticky notes, sat a blue folder holding what was probably the last piece of public reporting on Jifeng's fate — an article in Caixin Weekly titled "Twenty Years of Jifeng Bookstore," a memoir by Yan Bofei titled "Recollections of Twenty Years of Jifeng," and the Shanghai Library's official reply to Jifeng's application to renew its lease.

That reply sealed the fate of Jifeng's Shanghai Library store. It said the store had to close because the landlord — the Shanghai Library itself — was taking the space back for its own use, "to prevent the loss of state assets, and in light of the library's current space needs and development requirements." The lease would expire on January 31, 2018. This was Jifeng's last remaining store in Shanghai.

Yu Miao is Jifeng Bookstore's current general manager, having taken charge at the end of 2012.

"The closures before this were always about the business environment, or the rent, or how the store was being run. This time none of that applies. There's nothing wrong with how we're running the store, and there's no problem with our finances either. I honestly don't know how to put it — what this has to do with," Yu Miao said in a brief interview with QDaily.

That matched what he had said on April 23 at the event announcing the closure — you could call it a press conference, though no news coverage followed it.

"Our relationship with the Shanghai Library has actually been very pleasant these past few years. We trusted each other, and things stayed proper and cordial between us. Coming to this point, they too had no choice but to make this decision, so we hold no resentment toward them. What we want to say is that we don't actually know the real reason we can't survive in Shanghai. Nor do we know who ultimately gets to decide whether a bookstore lives or dies. We only hope to say goodbye to Shanghai, and to the world, with composure and grace."

Composure and grace kept turning up alongside the growing pile of notes. Every day, besides its usual book news and event listings, Jifeng's WeChat official account also posted a poem.

Incantation (excerpt) Czesław Miłosz

Human reason is beautiful and invincible. No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books, No sentence of banishment can prevail against it. It establishes the universal ideas in language, And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice with capital letter, lie and oppression with small. It puts what should be above things as they are, Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.

July 2, 2017, Jifeng countdown: 213 days

The posture won Jifeng a great deal of admiration. Like the countdown running beside it on the official account, it made the approach of tragedy easy to feel.

2.

Grace, certainly.

On April 23, standing with Yu Miao to "unveil" the countdown wall were Jifeng's founders Yan Bofei and He Ping — better known to many by his other name, Xiao Bao — along with that day's guest speaker, Ji Weidong, dean of the Law School at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Jifeng Bookstore is counted as one of Shanghai's cultural landmarks. In 1997, Yan Bofei, together with Zhu Hong and He Ping, pooled their money to open the first Jifeng at the Shaanxi South Road metro station. It covered 40 square meters and held just over 8,000 books.

Before he opened the bookstore, Yan Bofei was a scholar. When the Cultural Revolution began, he was one of the young people sent down to the countryside. After it ended, he was in the first cohort of college students. He earned a master's degree in philosophy from East China Normal University in the 1980s, then joined the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, where he studied the philosophy of science and modern Chinese intellectual history. In those years he was "part of an intellectual enlightenment movement, reinterpreting the fate of a generation, or several generations, and trying to connect it to the spirit of the world."

"After the 1990s, the intellectual world splintered, Deng Xiaoping made his southern tour, and a free economy rose up strangely, with no debate over it. Yet it was precisely this convergence of political and economic conditions that produced our bookstore. It was almost a result forced on us by circumstance, by our own lives and spiritual condition. So we never thought about how long it would last — to the point that now, when it's time to commemorate it, we can hardly find any record of it at all," Yan Bofei wrote in an essay marking Jifeng's 20th anniversary.

To Yan Bofei, then, founding Jifeng was always an accident. At the start, Jifeng's efforts were about "survival," with no "lofty goal" behind them.

But in a way, Jifeng was also tapping an undercurrent of its era. Private bookstores like Sisyphe in Guizhou, All Sages Bookstore, Guolinfeng and Fengrusong in Beijing, Librairie Avant-Garde in Nanjing, Xiaofeng Bookstore in Hangzhou, and Xueeryou in Guangzhou all appeared around the same time in different places. They were the first crop of private bookstores to emerge after private bookstores vanished from China entirely in 1956. For the three or four decades before that, China had only the Xinhua Bookstore system.

"Back then it wasn't only that we had no money — government policy was scarce too. In many places, book-sale licenses simply weren't issued to private bookstores. The first Jifeng's book license came only after a long wait, and only after we pounded on the desks at the press and publication bureau and the market office," Yan Bofei recalled.

By then, running a bookstore was no longer entirely "an accident" for him. Day-to-day choices about which books to stock and how to arrange them gradually shaped Jifeng's character; as an independent bookstore, it grew its own values and temperament. "Your instincts about knowledge and value immediately become part of the store's personality — that's what's called an 'independent bookstore.' You use your own values to define the store's stance. It was here that the spirit of underground reading during the Cultural Revolution, and the 1980s hope for another possible path for China, stubbornly took root again, and it set the store apart from every other bookstore in Shanghai at once," Yan wrote.

"An independent cultural stance, free expression of thought" — those fourteen characters became Jifeng's lasting motto.

It didn't want to be only a place that sold books; it wanted to become a "public space" where "certain social issues" could be discussed. With its distinctive book selection and its full program of cultural events, Jifeng built a reputation among Shanghai's book lovers.

What followed was a stretch of graceful, steady expansion.

At the end of 1998, Jifeng took over the roller rink next door, turning the 40-square-meter shop into a store of more than 900 square meters. For several years that made Jifeng the only large privately run bookstore in Shanghai. The same year, Yan Bofei and his partners opened two more branches, the Fuxing store and the Lianhua store. Then Jifeng expanded fast, at a pace of roughly one new store a year: the Huangpi store (1999), the Jing'an store (2001), the Art store (2002, specializing in film, theater and other art books), the Raffles City store (2003), and the Shanghai Bookstore (2005, set up jointly with Taiwan's Linking Publishing). This was Jifeng's peak — eight stores open across Shanghai.

Yan Bofei recalled that Jifeng's expansion was inspired by Beijing's Fengrusong Bookstore. In the summer of 1998, Yan and his wife took their two children to Beijing for a week. On their last day there, they visited Fengrusong, run by Wang Wei of Peking University's Institute of Foreign Philosophy. It was an academic bookstore just outside the university's south gate, yet it covered more than 800 square meters. That left Yan "deeply surprised and moved," and he began to believe that "an independent academic bookstore on this scale could survive."

And so it proved. In those years, Jifeng's bestsellers were, remarkably, titles like Shostakovich's Testimony, Chen Yinke's Late Poems and Other Writings, edited by Feng Yibei, Austin's How to Do Things with Words, Vera Schwarcz's Time for Telling Truth Is Running Out: Conversations with Zhang Shenfu, and Deng Ye's The Coalition Government and One-Party Tutelage.

Besides the stores, Yan Bofei founded Sanhui Books in 2003 to publish works of thought, social science, scholarship and culture. Over 14 years it put together titles like Ill Fares the Land, Thinking the Twentieth Century, Max Weber and German Politics: 1890–1920, Retracing Hu Shih's Journey and The Origins of Totalitarianism, and published writers such as Barbara W. Tuchman, Edward Said, Hannah Arendt, Yu Ying-shih and Ray Huang. Like Jifeng, Sanhui had its own values and stance, calling itself "a publishing house that has put out almost no bestsellers, existing only to leave behind a little intellectual resource for a life of free thought." "A life of free thought" became its slogan too.

In 2006, Yan Bofei and his colleagues launched the Jifeng Book Bulletin. At the time this e-zine was known, along with Dupin and Independent Reading, as one of "Shanghai's three major e-zines." In 2011, the Dupin group disbanded. In 2015, Independent Reading stopped publishing. Only the Jifeng Book Bulletin has kept going, still coming out, past 500 issues. Yan recalled that at issue 100 it had 3,500 subscribers; by issue 200, more than 20,000. In 2007, Jifeng began holding a monthly salon, "Today, We Read," carrying its commitment to a public space further.

3.

Grace was constant. Composure was something Jifeng always struggled to hold on to.

Being Digital was a bestseller in Jifeng's first year. When the book was popular, most people in China didn't know what the internet was, let alone use it. Over the next 20-odd years, nearly all of Nicholas Negroponte's predictions about digitization came true. The internet completely changed how people lived, worked, studied and entertained themselves. It changed physical bookstores too.

Looking back, the years when Jifeng grew gracefully, calmly and fast were exactly the years when the internet was just starting out in China. That window was also the only good time these private bookstores ever had.

2008 was the turning point for Jifeng — and very nearly for every brick-and-mortar bookstore in China.

By that year the internet had already shown its power. Online bookstores' lower prices hit physical stores easily. Rents were climbing fast, which made things worse still.

"Books themselves are very poor at making money," Jiang Li, deputy general manager of Shanghai Book City, told QDaily. "If you have to pay rent, there's simply no way to keep going," said Wang Derong, deputy general manager of the Hong Kong Joint Publishing bookstore in Shanghai. Joint Publishing also received subsidies for its book import-export business, which accounted for 75% of its business. Like Jifeng, both stores sat on Huaihai Road.

In the fall of 2008, Jifeng's Shaanxi South Road store faced closure, because "the 10-year lease was up and the landlord wanted to raise the rent tenfold." But the news that Jifeng would close over a rent hike drew intense attention from Shanghai's book lovers, the press and cultural circles, creating public pressure — delegates at Shanghai's "Two Sessions" that year even raised questions about it.

Jiao Yang, then head of the Shanghai Press and Publication Bureau, said: "Jifeng Bookstore is indeed a cultural landmark of our city. If it left the Shaanxi South Road metro station, the damage to Shanghai's overall cultural style and character would be incalculable and irreversible." Yu Zhengsheng, then Shanghai's Party secretary, also issued instructions on the matter. In the end, with the government pressing the metro company and after six months of negotiation, Jifeng renewed its lease for two years, with the right of first refusal in the third year, and survived.

That campaign, seen as a movement to "defend Jifeng," took on a larger meaning. "The 2008 lease crisis let us see, for the first time, what a bookstore could mean to public life. Many young people who had grown up alongside the store stood up to defend it, even resorting to dramatic action to call for public support. Those lovely young people were full of passion for public life, and the question of whether the store would survive made them realize what role and responsibility an individual might have in public affairs," Yan Bofei recalled.

In 2012, the three-year lease the Shaanxi South Road store had signed with the metro company expired again. The rent was going up again, and Jifeng still couldn't afford it. In the end, the store on Huaihai Road had to move to the Shanghai Library station, where rent was relatively cheaper — and that store is now Jifeng's last one. Yan Bofei also stepped back from management, and Yu Miao, an entrepreneur born in the 1970s, became general manager. At the time Yu told the media that Jifeng rented its space from the Shanghai Library fairly cheaply, and that rent came to 20% of operating expenses, not high next to the 64% taken up by labor.

That same year, the Huaihai Road branch of Shanghai Book City, also on Huaihai Road, closed. It leased the whole five-story, 1,500-square-meter building to Nike — rent from a fashion brand paid far better than selling books. But in the words of Jiang Li, the chain's deputy general manager, the closure was simply an "outlet adjustment." Bookstores have to find a size and cost structure that suits them.

In August 2012, the Huaihai Road branch reopened on one floor of the Xuebao Mall. The new store lost money from the day it opened, and in late 2015, when the building changed hands and the whole mall had to be renovated, it was forced to shut. Jiang Li thinks it is these big new commercial complexes that have failed traditional bookstores: "When there's no foot traffic, they actively bring bookstores in, hoping to draw a crowd. But once they have better foot traffic and better demand, they drive the bookstores out."

On April 23, 2013, World Book Day, Jifeng's Shanghai Library store officially opened.

Four years later, on the same date, Yu Miao announced its end.

That day was World Book Day.

In the four years between those two dates, the store sold 870,000 books, published 282 recommended reading lists, put out 179 issues of its book bulletin, and organized 443 events, including 150 humanities lectures, drawing 100,000 attendees in all.

In 2016, Jifeng won the "Reading Organizer" award at the second Chinese-Language Reading Leaders awards. The citation read: "It has long since been more than a physical bookstore. It is a broad social and cultural public platform, a cultural landmark of Shanghai, spreading culture, shaping souls and safeguarding growth."

4.

In recent years, bookstores of every kind have expanded and upgraded inside shopping malls, becoming a standard fixture for drawing young people looking to kill time, by selling coffee, or even, like MUJI, treating books as one part of a lifestyle-goods store — and once Jifeng closes, this Japanese lifestyle brand may well sell more books than anywhere else on Huaihai Road.

Jifeng's original idea was simple.

"What we love is running a very pure bookstore, keeping it going — one we believe in and that our readers believe in too. So in that sense we don't ask much of it commercially. We think a physical bookstore should above all be a public cultural space. In a place like this, besides people meeting books, people can also meet each other and exchange ideas freely. We think that's a quality a bookstore, an independent bookstore, ought to have," Yu Miao said in an earlier interview with QDaily.

"There are many parts to anyone's life. Some parts are about surviving, about bringing you a better life. Other parts rest on your ideals or beliefs — things you want to do because you love them or think they're worth doing. And in that part, commercial behavior doesn't have much to do with it."

Now all of that has become a luxury out of reach.

Even before it learned the Shanghai Library was ending the lease, Jifeng had seen its community partnership projects in Xinjiangwan, Balitai, Jiading and other parts of Shanghai called off for one reason or another.

On April 23, the day the closure was announced, Yu Miao told QDaily about Jifeng's future: "Right now we're still looking for a new place in Shanghai. We know the chances are slim, but we don't want to give up entirely. We've made long efforts before, and there have always been all sorts of unexpected setbacks. Because there are truths you can never know, you can never judge for certain that this road is a dead end. Given that, we want to keep trying."

5.

On April 23, 2017, the moment the dark green curtain came away, a male reader shouted: "Jifeng, hang in there!" Applause broke out.

Jifeng's WeChat official account said a long line formed at the cash register on the day of the unveiling. A staff member surnamed Ni, who had worked at Jifeng for 20 years, said it had been a long time since she'd seen anything like it. One customer browsed slowly until 11 o'clock and bought 7,000 yuan worth of books.

For Yan Bofei, Yu Miao and the others, this was the day Jifeng announced the countdown to its own "funeral." "When this installation is drowned in countless words, people will no longer be able to see the bookstore through it — and that will be the moment the bookstore dies," Yan Bofei wrote in "Recollections of Twenty Years of Jifeng."

That day we also met a woman who had come from Suzhou specially, "changing trains several times" to get there. She first visited Jifeng almost 10 years ago, and felt she could find books there that "you couldn't see at Xinhua Bookstore" — it was at Jifeng, for instance, that she discovered the psychologists Rollo May and Viktor Frankl. After seeing the closure news online she felt "pretty sad," thinking, "such a good bookstore is saying goodbye," and decided to "hurry over and take a look." That day she made a point of buying Faith, from Joint Publishing's general-education series, had it stamped with Jifeng's commemorative seal, and got Yu Miao to sign it.

"I feel quite sad. There are a thousand reasons to make it move, and not one reason to close it. Our society already has far too few bookstores. Something this rare, and it still has to say goodbye — it nearly brought me to tears. It's just so sad. The rarer a thing is, the more precious it should be. Now it's the opposite: the rarer, the cheaper. In a country this big, with over a billion people, there are only a handful of good bookstores, and even those have to close. If closing a store like this is really a deliberate decision, I think that's civilization going backward," she told QDaily.

Liu Qing, a professor of political science at East China Normal University, also told QDaily of his regret and sorrow at the closure. In 1990, before Jifeng existed, Liu Qing already knew its future founders Yan Bofei and He Ping — "we're still friends to this day" — and he took part in many Jifeng events over the years. On hearing the news, Liu Qing said: "Why can't Shanghai make room for one bookstore? What I feel is deep regret, deep sorrow."

"This irony, this sorrow. The irony of the present situation is that China has now become a great power leading the world, and yet in Shanghai, this first-class, international, world-class metropolis, we are so carefully excluding and obstructing this kind of effort — to build a public space, to build a culture of rational reflection, a civic culture. It shows how narrow-minded this first-class, world-class city still is in certain respects, and how worrying that is. Judged by the spirit of a great nation like China, we still seem to lack a great deal. That is what's worth reflecting on here," Liu Qing said.

6.

By now, 112 poems have gone out on the official account.

The bewilderment and grief of nearly four months ago have faded a great deal. Reader comments and page views have dropped off sharply.

Beijing once had a Fengrusong. When it closed in 2011, there was plenty of grief.

In the past year alone, bookstores like Yecao and Douban Bookstore have also closed or disappeared, bringing the usual wave of grief.

So many things happen, one hot topic after another, one round of sighing after another.

Bigger things than this have already happened, shocked us, angered us, been mourned, and then vanished from our lives and our conversations.

Cover image: Glen Noble on Unsplash, Rucksack Magazine on stocksnap