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.