She was excited and scared, as always, but this time more excited. Beijing was “like New York in the 1980s”, as she used to put it – cheap, buzzing and ready for change. “People are actually doing things, not just talking about doing them.”

Kim had been testing the waters, spending the last year and a half living in China for a couple of months at a time. She wanted to make sure she could make ends meet working freelance, with some odd policy analysis reporting to pay the extras.

As always, she was bubbling with ideas. She wanted to write a feature on Mao impersonators, and another on the social repercussions of the one-child policy. She wanted to show a different China to western readers, but wasn’t sure the time had come for a woman to take that role.

That day last June, we went to a Soho bookstore. She started reading through tomes about the history of China while I sneaked downstairs to get her a copy of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium. It’s one of my favorite books, and I wanted her to have a copy to always remember why she had to keep writing, despite the difficulties.

The collection of essays talks about a “poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world”. In my head, Calvino’s auspicious image for the next millennium had blonde-reddish hair, and looked a bit like Kim.

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Although all books are still subject to the regulatory track illustrated above, the trends, hegemony, and forms of censorship have changed in the past four years. According to the executive director of the Arab Institute for Research and Publishing, Maher Kayyali, the Department of Press and Publication has reconsidered the ban of a large number of books in 2011, and has permitted some of the banned books. In addition, the option of re-exporting banned books was not available before then, as the Department used to confiscate and destroy all copies.

The Head of the Department of Foreign Publications in the Proceedings Directorate of the Department of Press and Publications, Firas Abbadi, attributed that to what he called “raising the ceiling of freedom” within the department.

He also added that there are banned books available in the market. “We do not emphasize censorship. There are no inspections. We ban books, but these are directives from beyond the Department [of Press and Publications]. The government does not want to interfere with people or stores.”

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