Shanghai’s liberal bookstore, which closed its doors, is ready to take on new life in Washington

Jifeng, or “monsoon,” comes from the store’s slogan: “There’s a crack in everything, and that’s how the monsoon comes in.”

Yu’s post was widely shared online among intellectuals, media professionals and book lovers in China.

“No bookstore in Shanghai can surpass Jifeng,” read one popular comment.

Another said: “The monsoon will return sooner or later.”

Jifeng was founded in 1997 by Yan Bofei, who studied the history of political thought at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

The bookstore quickly found a market for its range of titles on politics, history and philosophy, and at its peak expanded to eight branches in Shanghai.

The tents also hosted talks by several leading scholars in the humanities and social sciences.

But when Yu, a successful entrepreneur interested in social issues, bought a majority stake in the bookstore in 2013, Jifeng was already under pressure from rising rents. In the following years, three branches had to close because of the costs and accusations from authorities that they were unlicensed.

Jifeng Main Bookstore, its last standing location, finally closed in January 2018 after its lease was denied renewal.

In 2017, after learning that the lease would not be renewed, Yu told the South China Morning Post that obstruction by local cultural authorities was to blame for the bookstore’s fate.

In his post on Saturday, Yu said Jifeng had hosted more than 800 seminars in the five years before its closure and that the tradition would continue at the new store in Washington.

Some of those seminars were canceled at the request of authorities, Yu told the Post in 2017, and their topics included the South China Sea, constitutionalism and the fate of modern Chinese entrepreneurs and intellectuals.

JF Books will sell Chinese humanities and social science books published in Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as English-language books about China and Asia, many of which are unavailable in mainland Chinese bookstores due to strict censorship.

The closure of the last Shanghai store came as authorities tightened ideological controls under Xi Jinping, who became Communist Party chief in 2012 and China’s president the following year.

In 2019, the Unirule Institute of Economics, a Beijing-based think tank advocating a market economy, was shut down by city authorities, citing violations of rules related to holding seminars without an official permit.

But independent bookstores, once common in many of China’s major cities, are also struggling under commercial pressures, with several closing during the Covid-19 pandemic.

After the last Jifeng store in Shanghai closed, Yu and his family moved to Florida.

In spring 2022, shortly after the start of a two-month COVID-19 lockdown in Shanghai, the store’s previously silent WeChat account suddenly posted an article that read: “Let’s shout out our discontent with a clear voice.”

He also recommended several books on sociology and political science on the subject of “disobedience.”

The article and Jifeng’s original WeChat account were quickly blocked.

In January last year, in a post on X, formerly Twitter, Yu accused Shanghai police of imposing an exit ban on his wife, Xie Fang, for national security reasons. She was stopped before boarding a flight in August 2022, following a trip to visit her ailing mother earlier that year. She returned to Florida more than eight months later, in May 2023.