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14 WORLD maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 26 APRIL 2023 A new era for China's readers AS China celebrated World Book Day one year ago, Xi Jin- ping expressed the hope that "our whole society can take part in reading, creating an atmos- phere of love for reading." As the day rolled around again on Sun- day, state media were inundated with visions of Xi as a great lover of literature, who as a sent-down youth at the age of 15 is said to have plodded down a long coun- try road just to borrow a copy of Goethe's Faust — which he then read assiduously by lamplight. In Ttuesday's official People's Daily, Xi the Great Reader was once again front-page news. An article just below the paper's masthead declared that "Gener- al Secretary Xi Jinping leads the way in promoting reading for all." But for China's avid readers, the prospect of finding fresh and insightful books has grown as dim over the past few years as a cave home in Liangjiahe, the village where the young Xi of legend is said to have studied his Goethe. Book publishers in China, in- cluding the private publishers once seen as an important chan- nel of growth in the industry, have suffered under a thick at- mosphere of political wariness as ideological controls have in- tensified. The results can now be seen in the numbers. According to a report on the retail book market released in March, there were 25,000 fewer book titles released in China in 2022 than in 2021. This included a drop of 5,000 in the number of new original Chi- nese titles, and a drop of 20,000 in the number of imported titles in translation. New titles have dropped sub- stantially as a proportion of China's book publishing indus- try during Xi's decade in pow- er, from more than 20 percent of the total in 2014 to just 13.63 percent in 2022. In 2020, the re- tail market for books shrank for the first time in decades, and in 2022 contracted even further. Several Chinese book editors interviewed by the Chinese-lan- guage outlet Initium blamed the decline in new titles on the tight- ening ideological climate. " You cannot say China is bad, and you cannot say that foreign countries are good," one editor said. Liu Suli, the founder of All Sag- es Bookstore in Beijing, said the publishing industry in China was "already in deep water up to its neck." Reversing the metaphor, Liu described a worrisome atmos- phere of diminishing choice as publishers stopped releasing certain kinds of books altogeth- er. "The pool of knowledge, the pool of ideas, the pool of arts and culture, must be kept at a certain depth," he said, "so that when people want to dive in, some- thing will be waiting there." A second book editor at a well-known publishing compa- ny cited as evidence of the dire state of the market the complete lack of reflections in published works in China on the pandemic that has dominated life over the past three years. "There certain- ly could be public expressions from Chinese intellectuals about the pandemic, but they have been denied the power of the narrative," said the editor. Generally speaking, there are a range of topics in China that are absolute no-go areas for private publishers, left to the trusted hands of state-owned groups seen as more attuned to the priorities of the leadership. These include contemporary history (for exam- ple, of the Xi era), the history of the CCP (which must be cleave to the official line), biographies of state leaders (which can touch on sensitive connections and inter- ests), and ethnic issues (seen as potentially divisive). Further stipulations from the National Press and Publica- tion Administration (NPPA), which regulates and supervises the publishing and printing in- dustries, specify that publishers must avoid topics broadly relat- ed to national security and social stability, which can cut a wide path, as well as major events in PRC history, and topics related to the special administrative re- gions of Hong Kong and Macau. But invisible and unspoken restrictions on book publish- ing have perhaps cut even more deeply. One veteran Chinese book editor told Initium that in- formal prohibitions in a general climate of fear were expanding the circle of constraint. "No one tells you exactly what the band of the publishable is," he said. "Instead, you are simply told in a 'single chop' fashion not to publish any sensitive material whatsoever." The editor had planned a series of books dealing with Nazi Ger- many, but these were subjected to layer upon layer of censor- ship until publication became impossible. "The reason for not publishing them was never ex- plained to me, and my impres- sion was that this was an ad hoc decision on the part of the cen- sors," he said. "Sometimes pub- lishing a book is really a matter of luck." Books dealing with the former Soviet Union and Eastern Euro- pean countries have also become difficult to publish in China — a situation that would have been unthinkable 10 years ago. Even as Russia's invasion of Ukraine roils the world and Chi- na's take on the region is in the spotlight, publishers and readers interested in this topic — like so many others — are simply out of luck. According to a report on the retail book market released in March, there were 25,000 fewer book titles released in China in 2022 than in 2021