The annual Hong Kong Book Fair opened in mid-July 2025 at the Convention and Exhibition Centre, a shimmering landmark against the Victoria Harbour skyline, at the heart of Wan Chai. In the long shadow of the pandemic and the enforcement of the National Security Law in 2020, attendance at one of the world’s largest Chinese-language book-trade events has declined by nearly a sixth compared to the 2010s.footnote1 This year, the Book Fair’s organizer, the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (hktdc), reportedly barred three independent publishers from the event, which can account for more than half of their annual revenue. Nevertheless, the event still attracted 890,000 visitors, a significant portion of whom were tourists from the Chinese mainland. Travelling on short-term visas, many of them made a round trip within a day or two, just to acquire the latest copies of their favourite authors and bring them back to the other side of the border—depending on whether they could make it through customs checks.
If the presence of mainland readers has been a familiar sight at the Book Fair for nearly two decades, what’s striking today is the youth of this cohort and how well informed they are. Upon arrival, most would skip the dense cluster of mainland publishers, quickly skim through the stands of mainstream Hong Kong houses such as the Commercial Press, Joint Publishing and Chung Hwa Book Company—commonly known as the ‘Three Sinos’ due to their shared origins in Sino United Publishing, now the largest player in Hong Kong’s book industry. Skirting the sellers of children’s books and textbooks, where local visitors typically linger, these mainland readers would converge instead on a small number of specific stalls, where their coveted titles were on display. An influencer posted a vlog on Bilibili, China’s most popular video platform among Gen-Z, showing a virtual tour of the fair and advising viewers on which books were worth buying and which to avoid.footnote2 This year, the recommendation was blunt: ‘Forget the rest. Go straight to the Chinese University Press.’
The special appeal of the Chinese University Press may not be so apparent to a non-mainland reader. A Hong Kong-based, bilingual academic publishing house sui nominis, it’s neither the largest in scale (with only thirty or so staff in total), nor the most lucrative compared to general-interest publishers like the ‘Three Sinos’ or local giants such as Cosmos Books. What makes it attractive to mainland readers is the high quality of its works of history and biography, covering much of China’s tumultuous twentieth century. For the most part, these are not to be found in mainland bookstores, but word has spread, generating the gravitational force that pulls Chinese readers towards Hong Kong. It has become tacit knowledge that a stream of well-respected, quasi-offshore titles about contemporary China are to be found there, speaking to a readership curious about their country’s past and sceptical of the streamlined official narrative. Closer attention to such titles reveals a polyphony of voices, from well-established scholars based in the prc as well as researchers based in Hong Kong, Taiwan and beyond. Such a quasi-cosmopolitan landscape of Chinese historiography has never been fully achieved on the Mainland, and it seems a utopian prospect under the present injunction to combat ‘historical nihilism’ and ‘tell the Chinese story well’.
Beneath the Book Fair’s carnival-like ambiance, with local consumers enjoying summertime cultural and recreational activities, there unfolds a map legible to dedicated readers. Starting with the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, it then moves to nearby stalls of Oxford University Press and City University Press, where a broader range of Chinese-language publications from prc authors is on sale. Readers with sufficient English proficiency can spot enticing titles from Hong Kong University Press, on subjects like the ccp’s underground mobilization in the colony under British rule. With careful attention, one may also come across small, marginal publishers tucked into the corner of the exhibition hall, where amateur histories, personal archives of the Mao era and autobiographies by former Red Guards are on display. Conversations with seasoned book hunters might lead the way beyond the Fair itself to the ‘upstairs bookstores’, scattered through the busy districts of Mongkok and Sham Shui Po. Though many have retreated from the Book Fair in recent years, their collections nevertheless preserve the traces of a vanishing belle époque in the city’s intellectual life.
The development of Chinese-language publishing in the age of globalization, and Hong Kong’s role within it, is a vast topic. This essay can provide no more than a bare outline, paying particular attention to the publication of high-quality original works and translations, over and above the sheer quantity of books traded. It explores a number of questions. How did the two distinct publishing regimes emerge? How has their relationship developed since the 1997 handover? How did post-colonial Hong Kong become the platform for an alternative cultural ecology, composed of offshore publishers, critical scholars and a de-territorialized reading public? What types of independent publishers have found niches there—and what are the prospects for them, amid political pressure and commercial conglomeration, in the years ahead?
After the Revolution, the infrastructure of China’s commercial publishing industry was nationalized under the aegis of the Ministry of Press and Publication (mpp), which laid out annual publishing plans for the nation.footnote3 Restaffed in state institutions, editors and print workers would henceforward employ their expertise in publishing books for the people. In tandem with a far-reaching literacy programme, a 1956 reform sought to standardize all written Chinese characters into a simplified script, a radical break in the country’s literary culture. Books were distributed domestically by the state-owned Xinhua Bookstore chain, as well as by internal Party organs, and exported to foreign markets via the Ministry of Culture. The cornerstone of this publishing regime was a system of standard national book numbers (shuhao). Book numbers, virtually the licence to circulate any title within the People’s Republic, were centrally allocated by the mpp to around two hundred state-owned publishing houses, making it the only player-and-rule-maker in the print industry.footnote4 In practice, however, the ideal of complete control of information across the Chinese cultural landscape was never achieved, as self-published editions and smuggled copies continued to spread underground. From the outbreak of the Chinese Civil War to the early Cold War, knowledge acquired offshore, covering a diverse political spectrum—from kmt mouthpieces and Chinese Trotskyists, early refugees from the ccp, to Western reporters and China watchers—had circulated back into the Mainland. During the Mao era, such texts were included for ‘internal reference’ (neibu cankao) in restricted publications to which the public had no access. But ordinary people could still chance upon leaked versions, capable of provoking intense excitement in underground reading groups.footnote5
By the time China reopened in 1978, its literary world had not only been inscribed into a distinct regime of cultural production but refashioned through its new writing system into a symbolic order that distinguished it from the rest of the Sinosphere. In the 1980s, the publishing realm underwent a rapid restructuring. The state-owned publishing houses were given greater managerial autonomy, allowing them to introduce wage subsidies and devise publishing programmes more adapted to market demands.footnote6 The number of registered publishing houses skyrocketed from 75 in 1976 to 553 in the mid-90s.footnote7 Book distribution also diversified: private outlets known as the ‘second channel’—by contrast with the ‘first channel’ of the Xinhua Bookstore chain—flourished and gradually gained official recognition.footnote8 By the early 1990s, there were 14,237 more book-distribution outlets than there had been in 1978, with a nationwide total of 100,346. The increase was mostly due to private entrepreneurship (getihu) including independent firms and bookstores, not to mention innumerable guerrilla-style street vendors scattered throughout urban neighbourhoods.footnote9 Growing marketization was accompanied by adjustments to international legal norms; China adopted the International Standard Book Number system (isbn) in 1986 and established its first copyright administration in 1987.footnote10