On September 1st of this year, D.C. literari descended on Dupont Circle. The nearly 50-year-old Kramers bookstore is often the destination of choice for such gatherings, but this time, book lovers flocked to an unassuming storefront with a green neon sign right next door: JF Books. 

It was the opening of Washington’s first Chinese bookstore, and over 700 visitors crammed through the narrow space throughout the day to peruse bamboo bookshelves stocked primarily with Chinese-language books.

“It is a new spiritual home for overseas Chinese,” Cai Xia, a former professor at Beijing’s Central Party School who now lives in D.C., told The Wire China. “Seeing this bookstore here gives you a sense of the unique intimacy and warmth of your hometown.”  

Indeed, beyond just easier access to Chinese-language texts, many visitors are excited about what JF Books represents: namely, a second life for Jifeng Bookstore, a cultural landmark in Shanghai from 1997 to 2018, when authorities forced it to shut down. With eight different locations in Shanghai at its peak, Jifeng Books sold avant-garde yet legal literary works and hosted hundreds of cultural salon events. 

It was a golden age of Chinese civil society, says Yu Miao, Jifeng’s owner from 2013 on. He opened JF Books in D.C. after a tumultuous personal journey that included his wife being detained in China. For him, the store opening in Dupont Circle felt like regaining some of what he had lost.

“Many people experienced a period of relatively active civil society in China, and so when they move abroad to rebuild their lives, it’s natural that they retain these elements,” Yu told The Wire.

Yu and his customers, many of whom were familiar with Jifeng in Shanghai, are not alone. As various media outlets have reported, since the pandemic, a growing number of Chinese emigrants have taken Chinese public life with them abroad. Chinese bookstores in cities like Tokyo and Hanover now sell uncensored books and frequently host cultural events. Chinese stand-up comics are doing gigs in places like New York and proliferating on YouTube and social media. And several former Chinese state television journalists have launched their own YouTube channels to discuss Chinese politics and history; in the process, they have become some of the most popular Chinese-language programs overseas.

With JF Books, the phenomenon has now reached the heart of the American political world. And given the wealth, education level, and professional experience of this wave of immigrants, the new Chinese diaspora stands to be significantly more influential and impactful compared to the previous, post-Tiananmen generation. 

…these young people are willing to say, ‘it’s OK if I can’t go back.’ Xi Jinping has made some big mistakes by making it so difficult for the smartest and most innovative people to actually live full lives and contribute to society.

Orville Schell, the Arthur Ross director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society

Many of the post-Covid cultural émigrés I spoke to — from bookstore owners to comedians — insisted they are not dissidents or activists, and that they have no desire to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party. But their actions are inherently political, notes Yangyang Cheng, a research scholar at Yale Law Schools’ Paul Tsai China Center whose essays often appear in U.S. media. 

Cheng even sees a similarity between the flurry of cultural activity among overseas Chinese and the trend among young, educated people in China to “lie flat.” 

“They are both forms of non-cooperation with the Chinese regime,” she says. “In China, it is expressed as [lying flat] but abroad, you can do something more active.” 

For Anne Jiang, a volunteer and actress with the New York-based feminist comedy club Nü Zi Zhu Yi, it doesn’t necessarily feel like making jokes about Chinese political and sexual taboos is making a difference. 

“Many people realize that we cannot change China,” she says. Fighting Chinese politics, she adds, is “an impossible goal for me, but what I can do is make my life overseas better.”

But she is making other Chinese emigrants’ lives better in the process. And the power of doing it in Mandarin is not lost on anyone. 

Before one of Nü Zi Zhu Yi’s recent shows on the Upper East Side, for instance, a crowd of young Chinese students and professionals were buzzing with excitement. Several fans mentioned one of their favorite jokes was at the expense of Bo Guagua, the son of Bo Xilai (Xi Jinping’s main political rival before he was convicted on bribery and embezzlement charges in 2013). Bo Guagua has taken to X recently to defend his parents for the first time, and one of the comedians, impersonating a news anchor on China’s official daily news program, mocked the effort. “You know what they say: a single misstep can lead to eternal regret. Right, Guagua?”

Such jokes are not without risks. Staff at Nü Zi Zhu Yi told me their families in China had been harassed by the police and that they themselves were asked to ‘tea’ with police when they returned home for visits. Many no longer post photos or videos of their shows online, and some have even made promises to their parents in China that they will stop performing. 

But they don’t. 

“That’s the most obvious expression of, ‘I don’t care anymore about what the government thinks,’” says Orville Schell, the Arthur Ross director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. “It’s a symbol of real decoupling on a personal and professional level because these young people are willing to say, ‘it’s OK if I can’t go back.’ Xi Jinping has made some big mistakes by making it so difficult for the smartest and most innovative people to actually live full lives and contribute to society.”

Indeed, as China transformed from poverty to the world’s second-largest economy, the number of people emigrating fell to a low around 2012. As President Xi Jinping came to power, however, and then amended the constitution to remove presidential term limits in 2018, emigration has risen steadily. It is tricky to calculate the exact number of emigres per year, but United Nations data shows that, on average, China was losing 57 percent more people per year in the years 2020–2023 than it was in 2010–2013.  

This exodus included a growing number of skilled, educated and creative middle-class individuals — many of whom favored the U.S. as a destination. (In a trend that shocked a lot of observers, nearly 10 times as many Chinese migrants crossed the Mexico-U.S. border in 2023 as in 2022.) While the bookstore owners, comedians and YouTubers might not consider themselves exiles or dissidents, they are setting up in places like Washington, D.C., as stewards of a Chinese civil society that has, for the time being at least, been banished. And Annie Jieping Zhang, who has founded a network of bookstores called ‘Nowhere’ in Chiang Mai, Taipei and Amsterdam, says this new Chinese diaspora is uniquely up to the task.

“This generation has lived through China’s reform and opening-up, as well as its accession to the WTO,” she says. “Compared to previous generations of immigrants, they face less struggle when it comes to wealth accumulation, career and knowledge. As a result, people now want to do more than just make money — they want to create something meaningful.” 

The Civil Trap

In the 2000s and early 2010s, the Chinese government was still censorial, but it allowed certain aspects of social life to exist. The annual Shanghai Pride festival, for instance, attracted tens of thousands of participants each year. In 2012, to protest domestic violence, feminists walked through Beijing’s streets with bridal gowns covered in red paint. And nonprofits such as the China Rural Library enjoyed the support of well-known scholars and lawyers as they opened dozens of public libraries across the country in an effort to “enable rural youth to grow up to be healthy modern citizens.”

Yu, from JF Books, traces his own personal journey into civil life as well as a larger national shift to the Wenchuan earthquake on May 12, 2008, which killed nearly 70,000 people. He volunteered for two years following the tragedy and says the event “awakened the civic consciousness of many people.”

“For me,” he adds, “it meant that I began to care not only about my personal life, my career, and how much money I could make, but also about others and society.”

There was a significant surge in volunteering and charitable donations across China during this time, which coincided with global attention for the Beijing Olympics. In 2008 alone, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, the number of Chinese volunteers increased by at least 14 million. And for the first time that year, charitable donations from individuals reportedly surpassed corporate donations. By the end of 2008, Peking University released the “Blue Book of China’s Civil Society Development,” which declared that “China’s civil society is rapidly emerging along with the development of a market economy and democratic politics, and it is having an increasingly significant impact on China’s political, economic and social life.” 

“At that time,” says Cai Xia, “it wasn’t just the society’s need, but the Chinese Communist Party also recognized the importance of cooperating with society.”

In 2011, Wang Rong, the Party Secretary of Shenzhen, even expressed encouragement for civil society’s role during an interview with Chinese media. “As an economically dynamic immigrant city, Shenzhen hopes to establish a civil society sooner rather than later,” he said.

Yu saw this cooperation with the CCP first hand. In the wake of the earthquake, he launched the Pollard Volunteer Trail initiative to organize volunteers and travel to remote, mountain schools in the country’s southwest region. Samuel Pollard, an English missionary who arrived in China at the end of the 19th century, had established these schools but many had shuttered or fallen into disrepair. Yu says the local government welcomed his efforts initially, and his volunteers brought lights, books and playgrounds to the schools and organized training sessions between education scholars and rural principals. 

He first sensed the landscape was shifting, however, when the rural school principals started questioning his motives and their once warm welcome turned increasingly to vigilance. During training sessions, he says, they began asking him directly, “Is your idea in conflict with China’s socialist education principles?”

I’m inspired by what dissidents are doing, but the ways they act or what they do don’t have a direct impact on me. I feel that we are more influenced by the United States, because its social structures are very mature.

Aaron Wang, who, along with three other recent Chinese émigrés, is planning to open a Chinese bookstore called Unbound Bookstore

While some officials saw the benefits of civil society, others during this time had begun to portray it as a “trap” set by Western instigators. The debate was mostly internal until 2013, when Communist Party cadres nationwide received a warning from senior leaders to guard against and eliminate the threats in Chinese society, including the promotion of Western concepts such as “civil society” and “Western constitutional democracy.” 

As Xi Jinping came to power, traces of civil society in China began to disappear. In 2015, hundreds of human rights lawyers and journalists were arrested or placed under surveillance. Many universities in China subsequently installed facial recognition systems at their entrances, which made holding public events (especially on sensitive subjects) more challenging. And in 2017, the government introduced a new Foreign NGO Law aimed at regulating international non-profit organizations’ activities more tightly, which made it difficult for Chinese NGOs to take money from international foundations.

During this time, Yu felt the changes both in his NGO work and at Jifeng Books, which was increasingly being monitored by police. One day in 2017, while inspecting the bookstore, Yu says he found several hidden surveillance cameras behind the bookshelves. He didn’t know when they had been installed. 

Yu says he was directly warned to close his rural education project in 2016 because the organization “contained a religious element in its name.” The following year, Jifeng Books had been ordered to close.

During one of many conversations he had with the Shanghai police, Yu says he asked, “Do you really believe it is right to shut down a bookstore like Jifeng?”

The officers did not answer directly, Yu says, but one of them told him, “You can imagine all this as a scene from the novel 1984.”

1984, George Orwell’s dystopian novel about surveillance and totalitarianism, had been a bestseller at Jifeng Bookshop for years.

‘Run’

When the COVID-19 vaccine became available in 2021, most countries lifted their strict lockdown measures. China’s ‘Zero-Covid’ policy remained in place, however, which contributed to a major shift in people’s views on the government.

“Even some apolitical people started to think that the government was not going to change and would continue pursuing somewhat irrational policies,” says Ian Johnson, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin and the founder of the China Unofficial Archive, a non-profit that documents independent thought in China. “This government was no longer the technocratic government people thought it was, or that it had been over the past few decades. It was now being run very ideologically. For many people, this was the time to reassess.”

The term 润 — borrowed from the English pronunciation of ‘run’ — became a buzzword among many young people and members of the middle class, reflecting the desire to seek safety and a better life abroad. An anonymous group even uploaded a document titled ‘The Run Philosophy’ on GitHub to guide Chinese on “the three major questions of why run, where to run and how to run.” According to the document, it “became the core religion and core belief of the new Chinese people.”

The more ideological turn in government hit this generation especially hard, says Schell, at the Asia Society. “They grew up with some acquaintance with non-governmental parts of society,” he says. “They acquired habits that put them in contradiction with the way Xi Jinping is now running society.”

The post-Tiananmen Square wave of immigration, by contrast, although also politically disillusioned, didn’t have these habits. In 1994 alone, more than 720,000 Chinese people emigrated. Most of them had been born in an economically underdeveloped China, and many did not speak fluent English. The pressures of building a life in a foreign country left them with little interest or time to devote to civic or cultural pursuits. 

“Back in those days, we all came with nothing but a suitcase and a few dollars in our pockets,” says Zhou Fengsuo, a former student leader in the Tiananmen protests who moved to the U.S. in 1995. “Nowadays, many people who have found success in their careers in China come here but are reluctant to completely give up life in a Chinese-speaking environment.”

Political activism is still present, Zhou says, especially among those who were involved in the White Paper Movement, but in the new diaspora, “the focus has shifted more to cultural exchange and building a sense of identity — things like art, literature and social entrepreneurship.”

The new Chinese diaspora’s familiarity with Western culture seems to be critical to this shift and may help account for the popularity of its cultural pursuits. Many see Chinese and Western cultures as complementary and can navigate between the two with ease. Some of the performers at Chinese stand-up comedy clubs, for instance, also do English shows, with jokes about vest-wearing bankers on Wall Street just as common as those directed at Xi Jinping. At JF Books, 30 percent of the books are in English or written by non-Chinese writers, and at Accent Society, a Chinese bookstore in New York, they even offer creative writing courses in English.

“I’m inspired by what dissidents are doing,” says Aaron Wang, who, along with three other recent Chinese émigrés, is planning to open a Chinese bookstore called Unbound Bookstore in San Francisco next spring. “But the ways they act or what they do don’t have a direct impact on me. I feel that we are more influenced by the United States, because its social structures are very mature.” 

People are wealthier and also more experienced, and so that means there’s the ability of people to put together their own organizations. They’re not begging foreign NGOs for money. They’re setting it up themselves. That’s a big difference.

Ian Johnson, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin and the founder of the China Unofficial Archive

Today’s Chinese diaspora also has the deep pockets and know-how necessary to participate in these social structures. According to estimates from an economist at Natixis, a French investment bank, China is expected to experience an outflow of $150 billion in 2023 alone. A report by the investment migration firm Henley & Partners also predicts that China will once again this year be the country with the largest net loss of millionaires.

“People are wealthier and also more experienced [compared to the Tiananmen immigrants], and so that means there’s the ability of people to put together their own organizations,” says Johnson. “They’re not begging foreign NGOs for money. They’re setting it up themselves. That’s a big difference.”

In addition to its four Chinese founders, for instance, Unbound Bookstore has over 20 shareholders, most of whom are new, middle-class immigrants from China. Before raising funds, Wang sent a questionnaire to potential shareholders and asked: “Can you accept that if the bookstore ultimately fails, you will lose all your investment?”

Most respondents said they would be fine with it, Wang told The Wire China. “They value the community aspect of this bookstore more,” he says.

Rachel Shi, who recently opened her own Chinese stand-up club in New York, says she has also been surprised by the engagement and commitment she’s seen from her community. She started her club, ‘CrazyLaugh,’ with three other comedians in 2022 while she was still working at an American bank. Within months, she had nearly 200-person audiences, and in 2024 she left her banking job to focus on the comedy club full time.

The creative pursuit has been personally transformative, but Shi says the connection with other Chinese immigrants is most rewarding. Instead of feeling like “dispersed people,” she says the comedy club has created “a new, small center” where they can belong. 

“It is not a temporary home,” she says. “It is not ‘China,’ nor does it represent China. It represents the culture, identity and experiences of each of us.”

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