Art Gallery, Tea Salon Inviting to Intellectuals : Beijing Enjoys Cozy, Cultural Bookstore

The Du Le Bookstore, with attached art gallery and basement tea salon, would be nothing extraordinary in a European city or at the edge of an American campus.

But the store, which opened last week as a meeting place and cultural center for intellectuals, is a first of its kind in Beijing.

“This is the first day, and it’s hard to judge what the future will bring,” commented Wang Ruoshui, a prominent reformist intellectual who was expelled from the Communist Party in a hard-line ideological crackdown last summer and who was one of about 200 people at the bookstore for its opening celebration. “But I feel this place should be supported. This is really wonderful as a place for people to get together.”

Yu Yansha, 25, who fought months of relentless bureaucratic battles to open the quasi-independent collective bookstore, said she believes the opening represents a significant step toward greater openness in Chinese intellectual life.

‘Others Will Follow’

“If we’re first, others will follow,” she said. “What we have done has broken the restrictions of the traditional system.”

Yu said she believes the bookstore will prove popular among “middle- and high-level intellectuals” because “this is a good place to talk.”

“Ordinary restaurants are dirty and the atmosphere is poor, and hotel restaurants are too expensive,” she said.

Book sales in China are dominated by the government-run New China bookstore chain, although some collective stores also exist. The latter usually are responsible to local government agencies but are not directly run by them.

Art galleries also are generally under strict government control, and many young artists experimenting with new styles have trouble finding places to display their work.

“It’s hard for artists to show their works,” Yu said. “Lots of officials control them.”

Art Displays

The Du Le Bookstore, founded by Yu and a group of university professors and students and other intellectuals, is associated with the Beijing City Handicapped Persons Assn. But it is essentially independent and will offer space to artists who have trouble finding display space elsewhere, Yu said.

The first exhibition is a collection of woodcarvings by Guo Dalong, 31, who works as a traditional arts craftsman. His display includes stylized female nudes and pieces merging traditional Chinese stringed instruments with female shapes.

Guo said that his works, painted in red as a symbol of life and black as a symbol of death, draw inspiration from Maori and African art, as well as the folk crafts of southwest China.

“Every country, and every government, should respect people’s freedom and individuality,” Guo said while discussing his work.

Yu commented that the future of the store is uncertain.

“The higher you go, the worse you fall,” she said. “In the future, it’s possible that it will have to stop again, because with this type of activity, it’s very difficult to place limits on ideology.”

Salons Planned

The bookstore also plans to organize tea-salon gatherings where writers and artists from all over China can be invited to lead discussions or workshops.

“Some people can get famous here,” Yu said. “They just need to be people with ideals and ambition, and our bookstore can recommend them to society.”

Wang stressed that the selection of books at the store will make it of special value to Beijing’s intellectuals.

“At most bookstores, the people buying books for the store to sell don’t understand well what books have real value,” declared Wang, who in 1983 was ousted from his job as a deputy editor of the official People’s Daily for his criticisms of Chinese society.

Western Authors

“Here there are a lot of books that introduce Western schools of thought, like Freud’s psychoanalysis . . . and sociology,” Wang said. “There are a lot of Western authors. And there are a lot of works by middle-aged and young Chinese writers with new ideas.”

All of the books are in Chinese and are published in China. This country has not yet enacted a copyright law, and many of the books are inexpensive pirated translations of foreign works, often printed by regional publishing houses.

China has about 500 book publishers, which are usually controlled by agencies of the central or provincial governments. They must adhere to restrictions against pornographic and “reactionary” materials but have some independent decision-making power. As a result, some of the most experimental or intellectually provocative foreign and domestic works come from the smaller regional houses.

Bookstores can deal directly with publishers, but most books in China are distributed through the official New China bookstore chain, which tends to make centralized bulk purchases from major publishers.

Small Regional Publishers

Part of what makes the Du Le bookstore unusual is that Yu has put special effort into dealing directly with smaller regional publishers, and thus the store has a selection that cannot be found conveniently elsewhere.

One key bureaucratic fight won by Yu, she said, was for the right to function as a nationwide wholesale and retail book distributor, a right she believes necessary to prevent the enterprise from going bankrupt.

“China has some good people who are willing to help us,” Yu said. “That’s why I’m willing to stay in China--there are some good people in the Chinese leadership. . . . Things aren’t impossible. You just have to do them, and then they are possible.”