I was a regular customer of Wansheng Bookstore on Chengfu Road in Haidian, Beijing when I was studying at Tsinghua University during the late 2000s and early 2010s. At that time, the Wudaokou area, home to several of China’s top universities, including Tsinghua and Peking Universities, was also dotted with bookstores similar to Wansheng. These shops had gained a reputation for carrying high-quality intellectual and literary books, and together they were known as duli shudian, or ‘independent bookstores’. In those years, I never paid much attention to this label, although I did develop a sense that these so-called independent bookstores differed in many distinct way from the more conventional bookshops on the market, such as the state-owned Xinhua Bookstore. Yet I never really paused to consider what the differences were until I came to the UK in 2012 to study sociology at Cambridge.

Cambridge is a historic and academic town with its fair share of bookstores. As I became more familiar with these establishments, I soon learned that they fell into two main categories: chain bookstores, owned and operated by large corporations, and independent bookstores, run by individual proprietors. The term ‘independent bookstore’ brought back my memories of those duli shudian I used to frequent in Beijing and I immediately sensed that the term carried a rather different set of meanings in the Chinese context than it did in Britain. For me, the Chinese expression signified something more nuanced and richer than simply being non-chain. 

Intrigued by this discovery, I decided to understand what it meant to be an independent bookstore in the Chinese book trade and explore the forces and factors driving the rise of both the notion and the practice of independent bookselling in the country. By studying this distinctive cultural phenomenon, my goal was also to gain insight into the wider social, cultural, economic and political dynamics shaping China’s book industry and its broader cultural economy. As my research progressed, it became more and more clear to me that the rise and proliferation of independent bookstores, occurring at a time of widespread bookstore closures and business digitalisation, was by no means a coincidence. Rather, these shops served as critical sites in which greater shifts in the power relations and socio-cultural structures shaping China’s book business and wider cultural industries were taking place, and where these shifts could be observed and investigated first-hand.