The books I helped save from Chinese repression

In February 2022, a friend in Hong Kong sent me an urgent notice on an encrypted messaging app. This was Bao Pu, a publisher whose New Century Press once regularly published memoirs of some of China’s most important dissidents, thinkers and activists, as well as photo books and collections of official documents that challenged the official version key events by the government. Since 2019, when the Chinese government violently suppressed protests in Hong Kong, it has been difficult for him to publish, in part because printers were too afraid to touch his manuscripts. He had tried printing in Taiwan and shipping the books back to Hong Kong, but customs created problems. After a draconian new national security law was passed in 2020, he all but gave up and was thinking about new projects, and maybe even going abroad.

Now there was a more pressing matter: The warehouses where he and other publishers kept their books wanted them to empty their stock. The securities were so sensitive that even storing them became a potential violation of the law. The warehouse owners issued an ultimatum: Get them out immediately or they would be pulped.