Richard Lea in Guardian
“It’s like a huge container ship coming into view,” says Paul Richardson, an international research fellow at the Chinese Institute of Publishing Sciences in Beijing, “full of Christmas decorations, white goods and sportswear, but there’s this other side to it, full of books, paintings and so on, which we are completely unaware of.”
“If you asked the average Guardian reader to name a modern Chinese writer of fiction they’d be hard pressed,” he continues. “If this is to be the Chinese century, we have no idea what that will mean.”
The world’s most populous nation, the world’s biggest consumer of raw materials, and now the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, China strides irresistibly towards its economic and political destiny. But as Beijing prepares for its Olympic extravaganza this summer, the cultural life of the 1.3 billion people who live and work in this economic superpower remains a closed book to many in the west – their bestselling authors unfamiliar, their most exciting writers untranslated.
It’s a situation rendered all the more peculiar by the immense size of the Chinese publishing industry.
“The sheer scale of everything in China is overwhelming,” says Richardson. “China has one of the three great book publishing industries in the world. Along with the UK and the US it publishes around 200,000 new titles and new editions a year, well ahead of the nearest rivals, Japan, Russia and Germany. It is by far the largest publishing market by volume – officially about 6bn units a year, but many more when pirated copies are taken into account. In terms of value the market will probably amount to around £4-5bn in 2007, which would put it fourth in the world – behind the US, Germany and Japan and ahead of the UK. If you take purchasing power parity into account it is second only to the US.”
The Chinese literary world is like a parallel universe, almost invisible to many in the west, complete with big hitters (Su Tong and Jia Pingwa), innovators (Xi Chuan and Che Qianzi), and bestselling superstars (Han Han and Annie Baobei), some of whom are earning more than £1m a year. Though as the Beijing-based translator and journalist Eric Abrahamsen points out, these figures should be taken with a pinch of salt. “The number of books sold is a mystery to everyone,” he says.
This is at least partly because of the unique constitution of the Chinese publishing industry. “Officially, publishing is still an activity reserved to the state. So unlike, say, printing or bookselling, no private or foreign direct participation is allowed,” explains Richardson. There are some 570 state publishing houses, which until recently were insulated from the vicissitudes of the market. “Now they are ‘cultural enterprises’, are expected to become financially independent and are allowed to compete in each others’ patches.”
As always in China, Richardson continues, “things are more complicated than they would appear at an official level”. Alongside the state houses are “cultural studios”, private publishers that supply creative input for the state houses (which is legal), or simply buy ISBNs and publish themselves (which is not). “Meanwhile foreign publishers also cannot participate directly, but all the major international publishing companies have some form of representation in China and many have worked out forms of co-operation with Chinese partners that get under the wire.”
