Hosted by the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing

China in Five Bookshops: A Quintet of Travel Tales

This talk will use the speaker’s visits to unusual bookshops in five different cities at five different periods to explore ways that the People’s Republic of China has changed since he began going there forty years ago. The places described will include everything from a Shanghai establishment he went to in the early 2010s that surprisingly had the slogan “Big Brother is Watching You” painted on its walls, to a Hangzhou one that he went to earlier this year that has a photo booth just outside it that celebrates a story by Kafka, to a Hong Kong one that is struggling to stay in business after two heads of it were recently accused of sedition. At the end, the speaker will describe some ways that the story of Chinese bookstores can be enriched by bringing in inspiring developments that have been taking place lately outside of the PRC but have links to sites that once existed inside that country’s borders.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is a Distinguished Professor of History at UC Irvine, a former Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College, London, and the author, most recently, of Everything You Wanted to Know About China* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), which was published in the United Kingdom and Singapore earlier this year by Bui Jones Books and will be out in other markets from Stanford University Press in 2027