Jifeng, or “monsoon,” is derived from the store’s slogan: “There’s a crack in everything, and that’s how the monsoon blows in.”

Yu’s post was widely shared online among intellectuals, media professionals and book lovers in China.

“No bookstore in Shanghai can ever surpass Jifeng,” was a popular comment.

Another said: “The ‘monsoon’ will come back sooner or later.”

Jifeng was founded in 1997 by Yan Bofei, who studied the history of political thought at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

The bookstore quickly found a market for its range of titles on politics, history and philosophy, and at its peak expanded to eight branches across Shanghai.

The stores also hosted lectures by leading scientists from the humanities and social sciences.

But when Yu, a successful businessman with an interest in social issues, acquired a majority stake in the bookstore in 2013, Jifeng was already under pressure from rising rents. In the years that followed, three branches were forced to close due to high costs and accusations from the authorities that they did not have a license.

Jifeng’s main bookstore, the last remaining branch, finally closed in January 2018 after being denied a lease renewal.

In 2017, after learning that the lease would not be renewed, Yu told the South China Morning Post that obstruction by local cultural authorities was to blame for the bookstore’s fate.

In his post Saturday, Yu said Jifeng hosted more than 800 seminars in the five years before its closure and that tradition will continue at the new Washington store.

Some of these seminars were canceled at the request of the authorities, Yu told the Washington Post in 2017. The topics of the seminars included the South China Sea, constitutionalism and the fate of modern Chinese entrepreneurs and intellectuals.

JF Books will sell Chinese humanities and social sciences books published in Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as English-language books about China and Asia – many of which are unavailable in mainland Chinese bookstores due to strict censorship.

The closure of the last Shanghai store came as authorities tightened ideological controls under Xi Jinping, who became party leader in 2012 and president of China the following year.

In 2019, the Unirule Institute of Economics, a Beijing-based think tank that advocated a market economy, was shut down by city authorities, citing violations of regulations related to holding seminars without official permission.

But independent bookstores, once a common sight in many major cities in China, are also struggling due to commercial pressures, with several of them having to close during the Covid-19 pandemic.

After Jifeng’s last branch in Shanghai closed, Yu and his family moved to Florida.

In the spring of 2022, shortly after the start of the two-month Covid-19 lockdown in Shanghai, the store’s previously quiet WeChat account suddenly published an article saying, “Let’s shout out our dissatisfaction.”

In addition, several sociological and political science books on the topic of “disobedience” were recommended.

The article and Jifeng’s original WeChat account were immediately blocked.

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, in January last year, Yu accused Shanghai police of imposing a travel ban on his wife, Xie Fang, on national security grounds. She was stopped in August 2022 before she could board a plane after visiting her ailing mother earlier that year. She returned to Florida more than eight months later, in May 2023.