IN A small bookshop on the ninth floor of an office and residential building in Beijing’s university district, the staff wear Mao badges. Works extolling the late Chinese leader, damning capitalism and attacking globalisation are laid out on shelves. Scour the “non-mainstream economists” section for some of the most popular ones. Staples of most bookshops—volumes on how to succeed in business, play the stockmarket or get into an American university—are not on sale.
The Utopia bookshop is a refuge for China’s leftists, the term used to describe those nostalgic for Mao Zedong’s rule and worried that the country is abandoning its communist principles. This is the place to buy the selected writings of Mao’s late widow, Jiang Qing, and other members of the Gang of Four who were imprisoned after the chairman’s death. A three-volume critique of China’s property law, enacted in 2007 and much disliked by leftists because of its supposed bias in favour of private-property ownership, goes for 200 yuan ($30).
A bookshop manager says the global economic crisis is proving good for business. More in China are beginning to question “mainstream” economic thinking that favours open markets and private enterprise. “Liberalism is bankrupt. Lots of mainstream economists have nothing to say now,” says a Utopia regular.
The bookshop’s owner, Fan Jinggang, says its website has helped too. It includes Utopia’s fortnightly newsletter, the latest edition of which carries an article accusing Western countries of trying to make China “the biggest sacrificial victim” of the economic downturn and describing China’s liberal economists and political thinkers as the West’s
“running dogs”. The article’s author, Zhang Hongliang, is the director of a securities-research institute at Minzu University in Beijing.
Utopia, which opened about six years ago (in a different part of Beijing), is one of a handful of private bookshops in the capital to invite intellectuals to give lectures. The first of its kind, Sanwei Bookstore, opened in 1988 and has been host to many controversial speakers of the kind that frequenters of Utopia love to hate. In December a veteran Chinese journalist, Yang Jisheng, addressed a crowded upstairs room on the subject of the famine unleashed by Mao’s
“Great Leap Forward”, in which, Mr Yang believes, 36m people died.
The authorities watch warily. In his talk Mr Yang avoided a question from the audience about the broader political lessons to be drawn from the famine. But at Utopia, Mr Zhang of Minzu University spoke enthusiastically a few days later (copies available on samizdat CDs) about an important recent speech by Hu Jintao, the president and Communist Party leader. Mr Hu, he noted, had omitted the party’s usual warning about the need to prevent leftism. The left spots a political opening—if only, so far, on the shelf.
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