[Originally written in October for Sticky's Electronic Sporadic Correspondence: November].

A quintessential Chinese neighbourhood print shop

Something that’s become increasingly clear the longer I stay in Shanghai is that there really are no absolutes. You read Western news reports about banned books and extreme internet censorship, and the next day you walk into a bookstore stocked with (albeit illegal) copies of one of these supposedly impossible-to-find-on-the-Chinese-mainland novels, or a clearly controversial website that has somehow slipped through the Great Firewall. None of this means China is a society of individual freedoms, though, and while it feels like attitudes are quietly changing in the public consciousness, events like the country’s recent 60th “birthday” are prime examples of how adept the government is at clamping down on anything and everything it perceives as a threat.

The last two years have been pretty turbulent in terms of the Chinese public’s access to information. Both the Olympics and the Sichuan earthquake meant for a brief period of time the government loosened its control over internet censorship, but other events like the more recent turmoil in Tibet have caused an opposite reaction. As I type, Facebook, Twitter, all Blogspot and Wordpress blogs, and “sensitive” articles on Wikipedia are all inaccessible from the mainland unless you use a web proxy (that is, if you can find one that itself isn’t banned). More frightening is the Chinese government’s ability to censor anything it likes on the internet in real time, which means sometimes seemingly innocuous overseas websites are blocked for no apparent reason, and other times there exists a kind of imbalance where Myspace is not blocked but other social networking sites are, and Hotmail goes down for a day or two while Gmail and Yahoo are still up.

And then there’s print media. Needless to say most newspapers and magazines are either state-owned or at least controlled, but so are most bookstores. The small handful of privately-owned bookstores in Shanghai like the Ji Feng bookstore chain have therefore been instrumental in introducing obscure and unusual publications in Chinese to the reading public, as well as foreign books that would otherwise remain unreleased in China (although there is an obvious industry in “bootleg books” produced by photocopying and binding copies of the original and selling them outside metro stations, only the most popular English books by the likes of Stephenie Meyer and Stephen King get this treatment). Shanghai does have China’s largest public library and an impressive collection of both Chinese and foreign-language publications, but before you can start reading or borrowing them, you need to purchase a reading or lending card. The cards don’t seem expensive to a foreigner like me (even one who’s used to a free library system), but one of the most important roles of libraries is to provide material to people who otherwise can’t afford books, so charging people to even look at them voids one of the library’s most important functions.

I think all of these factors contribute to how underground Shanghai’s subculture really is, but on a more practical level one of the reasons China’s largest city doesn’t have an emerging zine culture is probably because of the scarcity of photocopiers and printers outside special print shops. Most households don’t own printers and I only saw one photocopier during the month I spent on a Chinese university campus (it was also technically in a print shop). When people need something printed on their computer they’ll take a USB drive to a print shop and get it copied there (for about about 20 cents a page). But as many Shanghainese become wealthier and buy cars and enormous flatscreen TVs, I can only imagine printers aren’t far behind, and who knows — maybe an outpouring of zines will soon follow.