Essay | The Books I Helped Rescue From China’s Repression

In February 2022, a friend in Hong Kong sent me an urgent notice on an encrypted messaging app. It was Bao Pu, a publisher whose New Century Press once regularly issued memoirs by some of China’s most important dissidents, thinkers and activists, as well as photo books and collections of official documents that challenged the government’s account of key events. Since 2019, when the Chinese government violently suppressed protests in Hong Kong, it had 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 made trouble. After a draconian new National Security Law was passed in 2020, he all but gave up and was thinking of new projects, and possibly even of moving abroad.

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