One evening last week, a group of writers, including Paul Auster, A. M. Homes, Jonathan Franzen, Ha Jin, Francine Prose, and Murong Xuecun, gathered on the steps of the New York Public Library to denounce censorship in China. Franzen read aloud a letter written by the Uighur scholar Ilham Tohti, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2014 after being convicted of separatism. Homes read a poem by Liu Xia, the wife of the imprisoned democracy activist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo. Behind them, protesters held up Shepherd Fairey–style portraits of the artist Ai Weiwei and the Tibetan writer Woeser. A sign in front read “Governments Make Bad Editors.”

The rally, organized by the PEN American Center, was timed to coincide with BookExpo America, the publishing industry’s largest trade show in the United States, which was held across three days at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. As this year’s “guest of honor,” the Chinese government had sent a delegation of more than five hundred people from a hundred publishing houses, as well as twenty-four authors, and had rented twenty-five thousand square feet of space for a China-themed pavilion. “The Chinese government is using B.E.A. to paint a rosy picture of the world of letters in China, and to present its approved literature to the world,” said Andrew Solomon, president of the PEN American Center, in a speech on the library steps.

The backlash did not surprise B.E.A.’s organizers. “This is not specific to B.E.A., and this is not specific to China,” said Ruediger Wischenbart, head of international affairs for B.E.A., who has also worked at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Such events, he stressed, are always coming under fire for their invitees. In 2001, four weeks after September 11th, the Frankfurt Book Fair hosted a number of radical Muslim publishers. “People would ask, ‘Why are they here?’ ” he said. “I would say, ‘That’s the role of the book fair.’ ” At the Frankfurt fair in 2009, which also featured China, two dissident writers were invited to speak at an event, then disinvited, then re-invited after German journalists and diplomats protested, prompting Chinese officials to walk out and the fair’s director to apologize to China. In 2013, B.E.A. invited Russia; two years before that, Book World Prague hosted Saudi Arabia. These events, Wischenbart said, are not forums for literary or political debate. “Fairs are very practical things.”

The PEN protesters argued that the Chinese government was exploiting B.E.A.’s pragmatism for political purposes. In a speech at the rally, Suzanne Nossel, executive director of the PEN American Center, called the expo “an opportunity for China to spread its soft power and show that creativity and literature are flourishing despite repressive one-party rule.”

That may indeed have been China’s goal when it accepted B.E.A.’s invitation. But when I visited the Javits Center, a massive glass complex on the Hudson River, China’s soft-power push didn’t seem to be making much headway. If anything, the China-themed events highlighted the failure of Chinese publishers to sell books abroad, and reflected the challenges the country faces as it tries to improve its public image and export its culture around the world.

The China pavilion was set off from the rest of the fair, both geographically and aesthetically. Whereas the tables of American and international publishers were covered in colorful banners and stacks of books and swag, the China section, which occupied its own square on the top floor, looked like an extremely well-maintained, poorly attended library. Plants sprouted from rugs of fake grass laid across white benches. What little explanation there was of the book displays did not appear to have been proofread. One sign announced, “Book Exhibition for the World Anti Fascist War Victory Memorial Cum Chinese People Anti Japanese War Victory Seventy Anniversaries.” (Perhaps governments do make bad editors.)

Walking into the main event space for the pavilion’s opening ceremony, I noticed that the audience was almost entirely Chinese (something I noticed at later events, as well). During his opening remarks, Wu Shangzhi, vice minister of the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film, and Television, said he looked forward to a “deep conversation” between Chinese publishers and authors and their American counterparts. But the target audience seemed to be viewers back home.

A theme quickly emerged: China is the second-largest publishing market in the world, but a massive gap remains between the number of American books published in China and the number of Chinese books published in the U.S. In his speech at the opening ceremony, the Chinese ambassador to the U.S., Cui Tiankai, celebrated our cultures’ shared love of books, quoting both Confucius (“You never open a book without learning something”) and Thomas Jefferson (“I cannot live without books”). But he acknowledged that “the number of Chinese works that have been translated and published in the U.S. remains very small.” According to vice minister Wu, in recent years China has published six times as many American books as the U.S. has published Chinese books.

I asked Zhang Gaoli, an editor for China Publishing Group, why Chinese publishers had trouble attracting American audiences. He had just finished screening a video that was part of a multimedia package called “The Chinese Dream,” in which talking heads had discussed the rise of China against B-roll of street cleaners, flying birds, and a smiling Xi Jinping. “Most Americans don’t understand China,” Zhang told me. Translation is part of the problem, he said, as is the obliviousness of most Americans to global affairs and the foundations of Chinese culture. But he seemed confident that the tables would soon turn. “In a few more decades, China will become the most advanced culture in the world,” he said, at which time Americans will want to study it. For now, China just needed one big book, one big author, to blow open the American market.

The problem, from what I could tell, was that publishers didn’t seem to know what American readers wanted. After the opening ceremony, the two Chinese officials, Wu and Cui, gave deputy U.S. Trade Representative Robert Holleyman a tour of the pavilion, showing him around the display shelves while a gaggle of Chinese media trailed behind. They paused to point out such books as Xi’s autobiography (largely a collection of speeches), an academic work called “Why and How the CPC Works in China,” and another book, titled “Confessions of Japanese War Criminals for Carrying Out Aggressions Against China.” The American nodded politely. If anyone present saw a connection between the overtly propagandistic nature of the books being promoted and disappointing sales outside the mainland, they didn’t let on, but the tour did seem to suggest that suppressing independent voices wasn’t just bad for writers, but bad for business.

Even the Chinese delegation’s most promising soft-power weapons, the twenty-four authors, had trouble drawing crowds. On Friday, a Chinese newspaper lamented the lack of attendees at the on-site book signings. “Where Did the Readers Go?” read the headline. According to the article, during one signing featuring the crime novelist A Yi, the author grabbed a book and tried to push it on a middle-aged American man as he walked by. A Yi soon returned, dejected. “You’d better stop,” said another author, Su Tong, jokingly patting him on the shoulder. “You’ll humiliate our country.” The article went viral in China, before being deleted. (ChinaFile has a translation here.) The rest of the planned book signings were cancelled as a result.

I asked Xu Zechen, whose novel “Running Through Beijing” focusses on the gritty life of an ex-con, why, given the critiques from some Chinese writers and PEN America, he had agreed to participate. He said it was simply a matter of promoting the English translations of his books. He hadn’t heard about the protest against the book fair, he said: He only has a Chinese cell phone, so “I can’t get online here.” When I told A Yi that some Chinese authors, such as Murong Xuecun, were criticizing those who joined the delegation and asked for his reaction, he responded, “I’m sorry, that is a very hard question for me to answer.”

Close observers of the Chinese literary world argue that breaking down the community of writers into dissidents and collaborators misses the nuances of Chinese publishing and politics. Some of the authors who were invited to join the B.E.A. delegation, such as Sheng Keyi, who published the novel “Death Fugue,” about the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square, have had books banned in China. (Sheng was unable to get a visa at the last minute.) Others, like Feng Tang, also pride themselves on writing about taboo subjects.

“People use the term ‘dissident writer’ in a very confused way,” said Eric Abrahamsen, an American translator and publishing consultant who lives in Beijing, and who drew up the initial list of Chinese authors to invite to B.E.A. Chinese writers don’t go to jail for writing novels, he said: “If that was happening in China, Sheng Keyi would be in jail. Yan Lianke would be in jail. And not only are they not in jail, they’re part of the system. They’re part of the Writers Association. They’re drawing a stipend from the government. They’re getting literary prizes. They have difficulties—sometimes they have trouble publishing, sometimes they don’t win prizes they would have otherwise—but their feet are on the streets.” Dissidents like Woeser, Tohti, and Liu Xiaobo, he added, are jailed for their political activities, not their creative writing. “People talk about Liu Xiaobo as a poet,” he said. “But he’s not a very good poet, and he’s not in jail because of his poetry. He’s in jail because of his political commentary on Charter 08.”

The twenty-four invited authors did ultimately manage to bridge some of the gap with American audiences, and perhaps sell some books in the process. On Saturday afternoon, the poet Lan Lan read some of her works at the Bowery Poetry Club, to a mixed Chinese and American audience. At the China pavilion, the literary critic Dale Peck talked to Xu Zechen about, among other things, his views on Tolstoy. And, at the Center for Fiction on Friday night, A Yi, who was a cop before he became a crime writer, expounded on the psychology of Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver.” Occasionally, there was even substantive political debate. At the Javits Center, Zhang Weiwei, a professor at Fudan University, argued in favor of the Chinese government’s authoritarian model, while Robert Lawrence Kuhn, an analyst who hosts a show on China Central Television and wrote an authorized biography of former president Jiang Zemin, challenged Zhang’s assertions that this model will be sustainable once economic growth slows down.

When I approached Franzen at the PEN rally, he told me that, after visiting China, he’d come to understand the case for censorship. “China has known so much misery, so much social instability in the last century, that there’s this deep cultural fear of it that cuts substantially across political lines,” he said. “From the point of view of the Chinese government, trying to maintain social stability, there are reasons for censorship. And that’s a point of view that has a right to be heard, in the same way that the writers we were supporting here have a right to be heard.”