One of the features of this year’s Taipei International Book Exhibition was a display by California-based exiled Chinese poet and essayist Bei Ling (貝嶺) on banned books and underground literature from China.
Of the 100-odd items of banned and underground publications on display under the banner of “A Tendency Exhibition” were copies of China’s Food Contamination, published in 2007 by Zhou Qing (周勍), and Feng Congde’s (封從德) June 4 Diary, published last May, 20 years after the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre.
“[The exhibition shows] that Taiwan is the only Chinese community in the world that has freedom of publication and freedom of expression,” he said.
Bei Ling, founder and editor of Tendency, a literary journal founded in late 1993 and published in Chinese, said that many Taiwanese visited his booth over the five-day exhibition before it closed yesterday, many of whom bought works on behalf of friends or relatives in China.
He said that a number of figures from China’s literati, executives of cultural companies and bookstores came to Taiwan under the guise of tourism to visit his booth.
He said it would be prohibitively expensive for him to open a bookstore in Taipei, but added that he would establish a “Tendency House” in Taiwan, offering a place for visiting Chinese exiled or dissident writers to stay and a place where great minds can interact.
Bei Ling established his Tendency Studio in Taipei in 2003, marking the first publishing house run by a Chinese writer-in-exile in Taiwan.
The founder of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, an organization of Chinese writers and intellectuals based in Boston, Massachusetts, and dedicated to freedom of expression, Bei Ling was arrested in China in August 2000 for “illegally publishing” his journal.
After a brief spell in a Beijing jail, he was released and exiled from China with the help of international societies and the US State Department.
He is on the executive board of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine, and a research associate at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for East Asian Research.
His poetry, essays and book reviews have been published in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the New York Times, Harvard Review and many other publications.
His poetry has been translated into English, Japanese, German, French and Spanish.
He once wrote: “I am one for whom personal freedom is a precondition for survival.”
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