台港書籍、媒體漸進地進入中國 China Opens up slowly to Taiwanese Media and Publishing

Many Chinese Language Taiwanese Newspapers however are still blocked in China

For a few years many Taiwanese students have been buying books from China, in particular cheaper translations of foreign technical textbooks. What started as a cheaper option for students eager to save money has turned into a normal part of book selling in Taiwan. Indeed, mainstream Eslite bookstore chain among others has a dedicated floor in many of its recently opened branches, emphatically called "books in simplified characters." Of course all of these books come from China but most bookstores shy away from emphasizing the geographical nature of these publications. One has to remember that only two decades ago, any book from China was totally banned and that it would have been enough to be found in possession of a Chinese book to be arrested under martial law. In practice many innocent foreigners having brought dictionaries from Mainland China never encountered any problem.
Recently, in a similar "Alice in Wonderland through the mirror view," some Chinese bookstores have started stocking up on books from Taiwan and Hong Kong. Wangfujing Bookstore has a dedicated section of such books.

Wanfujing Bookstore: Promoting Books from Hong Kong and Taiwan

Considering that the "Law of the People's Republic of China on the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language (Order of the President No.37)" explicitly says in Chapter 1, article 1 that it "is enacted in accordance with the Constitution for the purpose of promoting the normalization and standardization of the standard spoken and written Chinese language" and that article 2 clearly states that normalization means the standardized characters (so-called simplified): "For purposes of this Law (...) the standardized Chinese characters." Articles 4 declares that authorities at various levels shall "take measures to popularize Putonghua and the standardized Chinese characters."
The Wangfujing bookstore being in the hands of Xinhua is, at least in spirit, breaching the law; not necessarily a bad thing. Naturally the selection of books, mainly from Taiwan, is still fairly limited. What is noticeable is that it is done with aplomb going to the point of producing promotion material. This has hardly been noticed in the Taiwanese media. a non-event.

Taiwanese Publishers in Force? (click on picture for larger resolution)

This comes at a time when Internet censorship on Chinese Language sites is intensifying. It is not clear what criteria are applied for blocking one site or another.
All English Language newspapers from Taiwan, including government sponsored sites, are freely accessible from Beijing; including the Taipei Times and the China Post. On the other hand many, but not all, Mandarin Chinese publications are blocked. Attempts to read the China Times 中國時報 or the Liberty Times 自由日報  are greeted with the notice that "the connection has been reset." At the same time on line papers such as Nownews did not provoke the ire of the censors. Many Wikipedia Chinese language pages could be accessed quite easily.

 There are dissenting views about whether there are two factions within the Chinese government, one being more liberal than the other. We can only speculate what brought about this timid liberalization on the printed word while more stringent controls are being enforced for electronic material.
In the meantime, many customers were clearly interested in the books being on offer.
One particular type of books was still missing: I could not see any travelling guide to Taiwan. Surely, with individual travel opening up for Beijing and Shanghai residents, this could have been a red-hot item.