Bruce Humes

Yu Dan (于丹), who has presented her new interpretation of The Analects of Confucius to enthusiastic TV viewers throughout China, is now apparently gaining popularity overseas as well. According to a Sep 6 report in China Publishing Today, her take on the pithy sayings of the ancient Chinese philosopher, Confucius from the Heart (于丹，《论语》心得), has now been published in 17 foreign languages including English, French, German, Korean and Japanese. At the press conference to announce the book’s overseas performance, held at the recent 2010 Beijing International Book Fair (and attended by representatives of publisher Macmillan UK), a spokesperson cited a figure of 23,000 English-language copies for overseas sales in the first half of 2010.

How do you sell more than 3 million copies of a serialized novel in China? Biwa Kwan of Global Times talks to the publisher behind The Tibet Code (藏地密码) phenomenon:

When 36-year-old marketer Hua Nan came up with the idea of “selling books like toothpaste” it provoked strong reactions from within the publishing industry. “People would get angry and curse at me,” said Hua, who founded Dook Publishing with publisher Wu You. “They thought that comparing books to toothpaste was vulgar and cheap.”

By applying the “unique selling proposition” theory developed by Rosser Reeves, chairman of US advertising company Ted Bates, Hua Nan developed his marketing strategy of product differentiation based on the use of symbols in cover designs.

Scouring the internet for untapped talent, Dook Publishing discovered He Ma’s work, The Last Temple, deeming it a prime candidate for a design makeover.

The book was quickly re-titled The Tibet Code, emphasizing the story’s Tibet subject matter. Design changes included the use of multi-colored stripes – a common motif in Tibetan traditional costume – on the spine of the novel and the use of red and pink font in the title.

If you’re interested in the Tibet craze in China and how this dovetails with official Chinese government policy, see also King Gesar: Marketing China’s Tibet.

Inspired by the death of his own father and the Chinese novel Tales of Survival From a Chinese Labor Camp (夹边沟记事) by Yang Xianhui (扬显惠), director Wang Bin (王宾) has shot a film that ranks high among the contenders for the Golden Lion Prize to be awarded later this week at the 67th Venice Film Festival. Ironically, viewers in the West can now watch the film which is unlikely to be shown legally in the PRC any time in the near future, so sensitive is the topic—how China used labor camps to isolate and even starve to death those who dared criticize the Communist Party and its policies in the late 1950s.

Yahoo.com reports:

A powerful Chinese film on the plight of political prisoners condemned to forced labor camps in the late 1950s wooed critics in Venice on Monday, with some tipping it as a strong contender for the festival’s top prize.

“The Ditch” [夹边沟] tells the little-known story of some 3,000 people deported for “re-education” to labor camps on the edge of the Gobi desert, in western China, and struggling to survive extreme climate and acute food shortages.

Billed as right-wing enemies by the government for even mildly criticizing the Communist party or simply because of their background, many died of starvation, disease and exhaustion in the ditches that served as dormitories.

In the end, I didn’t make it to BIBF 2010. I was too busy down south in Shenzhen memorizing my lines for a gig at IIC China, the biggest integrated circuit show of the year. We performed a humorous “tear-down” of Apple’s iPad vs. a China-designed competitor, the Apad, with perhaps 150 (seemingly bemused) electronics engineers avidly watching us reveal the innards of the two new-fangled portables.

I’ve seen precious little reporting so far on Beijing International Book Fair 2010, although it closed shop September 3rd. For the benefit of those who couldn’t go, or don’t read Chinese, here’s an incomplete digest of a Chinese-language report filed by Li Zhou (李舟) for www.chinataiwan.org.  Words with “quote” marks are my translations.

Xi'an's Big Goose Pagoda, where Tripitaka spent two decades translating Buddhist canons he brought from India

Li Zhou confirms that there were indeed 100+ related seminars, forum discussions, author-meets-readers and so forth, as I alerted you in my piece on the run-up to BIBF 2010. Unfortunately, as is often the case in China at such international gatherings, translation/interpreting was an issue.

Indian publishers “handed out all their Chinese-language book flyers on the first day, with only those promoting children’s literature still available thereafter. German, French, Korean, Japanese and Spanish stands mainly exhibited books in their own languages, a major obstacle for Chinese publishers who are not multilingual. ” Perhaps most awkwardly, at one seminar held to celebrate India’s role as Guest of Honor, Nehru and Political Economics in India’s Development, “Three Indian scholars went right ahead and delivered their speeches in Hindi or English, but there was no translation  [into Chinese] whatsoever. Many Chinese readers departed, leaving a handful of Indian spectators.”

Before the events, I recommended checking out 2010 BIBF Literary Night where Chinese, Russian and Indian authors were scheduled to get together. It seems, however, that the actual proceedings left a bit to be desired. “Some 80 Chinese and Russian “post-80 generation” authors took part, including literary critic Bai Hua and author Cao Wenxuan. . .but when discussing the theme,  The Spirit of Post-80 Generation Authors, a cacophony of voices were heard and the simultaneous interpreting was inaccurate. As a result, this seemingly grand event became mired in a swamp of ‘form over content’.”

Liu Wei at China Daily writes:

Law student Wang Chen has more than 20 novels under her belt, all published online. It costs about 0.03 yuan to read 1,000 Chinese characters of her works on literature website www.17k.com – money that she shares with the website.The nation’s writer wannabes are discovering that writing online offers the best way out of having to compete for space in literary magazines and lobbying publishers for that all-important chance.

The Global Times reports that the movie adaptation of the best-selling novel by Ai Mi (艾米) has been previewed (too bad reporter Leng Mo doesn’t tell us where!):

Adapted from the popular novel “Hawthorn Tree Forever” [山楂树之恋], Zhang Yimou’s latest film “Under the Hawthorn Tree” previewed Wednesday [Sep 2, 2010] and was acknowledged as a welcome return for Zhang to the art house genre.

Set in the 1970s during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), the novel “Hawthorn Tree Forever” is based on a true story about a young city girl named Jing with a condemned political background who falls in love with a young man Sun from a high-profile family when she goes to the countryside to be re-educated. Jing’s age and social standing prevent the two from being together until she graduates and gets a secure job in the city.

Sun continues to support Jing and they date secretly before Sun is diagnosed with leukemia and dies.

See Rights Sold to Buyers in the EU, Brazil and Canada for details on the marketing of the novel overseas. Back in China, Hawthorn Tree Forever in the original Chinese ranked Number 28 in OpenBook’s List of Top 30 Best-selling Fiction Works (July 2010).

Four English-language articles from BeijingReview.com.cn:

The E-Reader Boom:

“Why are the prices for domestically made e-readers, which use the same technology as the Kindle, so much higher? The difference lies in the business models of Chinese and U.S. e-reader providers. Amazon.com, the largest online book retailer, sells e-books through its Kindle, while Chinese market players, mostly IT companies, have to profit from the devices alone.”

Embracing E-books:

Short interviews with four Chinese publishers. Says Ge Xiaozheng, VP of the Chinese Writers’ Publishing Group: “We have entered into an agreement with China Mobile to publish content on mobile phones.”

The E-reader Arena:

“Along with the debut of iPad and Nook, as well as cost reductions thanks to mass production, e-reader gurus like Kindle and Sony started to cut prices in order to win over more users. If the e-reader price falls below 1,000 yuan ($146), the student market would be immediately opened up. If 1 percent of students buy these devices, the sales volume of e-readers will reach 2 million and may even exceed 10 million in 2011.”

Growing Pains:

Interview with VP at Hanvon Technology, which reportedly sold over 250,000 e-readers in 2009.

The Global Times reports:

On the foot of Yulong Mountain in Southwest China’s Yunnan Province, lies the small village of Kenpeigu, once famous for its handmade paper, the production of which dates back to the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368). It is called Dongba paper after the religion of the local Naxi ethnic group because it was used to record religious text in pictographic script. While enduring for hundreds of years, the industry withered away during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) when all religions were tagged as superstition and banned.

Here’s a backgrounder on the Dongba script that has actually been around since the early Tang Dynasty (7th century). Wikipedia notes that “during the Cultural Revolution, thousands of manuscripts were destroyed. Paper and cloth writings were boiled into construction paste for building houses. About half of the Dongba manuscripts that survive today had been taken from China to the United States, Germany and Spain.”

Harmonious Land (水乳大地), a historical novel set along the Yunnan-Tibetan border, also contains many fascinating passages about the Naxi. See my interview with author Fan Wen (范稳).

China often tempts Westerners to make sweeping, oversimplified statements — for instance, Chinese culture is repressive, or materialistic or all about saving face. Sometimes this happens precisely because China is a place of such vastness and complexity that it’s easier to make such statements than to convey true understanding; sometimes it’s plain ignorance. Either way, when you combine this impulse with the fact that nonfiction and academic writing are often aimed at arriving at a definitive answer, at some inarguable conclusion, there’s considerable potential for misunderstanding.

Fiction, by contrast, is aimed at exploration, not explanation. It’s the province of nuance and contradiction. A good novel gives a sense of expansion, of a broadening and deepening view, but it also acknowledges that some things remain beyond our grasp. In this way, fiction can sometimes offer readers a truer perspective of China than other forms of writing. (Deanna Fei, author of A Thread of Sky, in an interview with The China Beat)

First published in April 2010, Each Leaf a Bodhi Tree: My 15 Years at Dunhuang (一叶一菩提——我在敦煌十五年), a memoir detailing how Buddhist grottos in northwestern China were saved from marauding Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, has been formally banned from further publication and distribution in China. Reports the Global Times:

” A most cautionary example in the history of Dunhuang’s exploitation occurred when a 19th century Taoist priest named Wang Yuanlu, who after discovering thousands of ancient scrolls crammed in a small cave, sold them off to foreign adventurers, including British explorer Aurel Stein, French linguist and Sinologist Paul Pelliot and American art historian Langdon Warner. The scrolls were priceless translations attributed to the Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who traveled to India via the Silk Road in 629 AD to bring Buddhist scriptures to China.

Despite heads of the institutes suffering persecution for years, namely Chang Shuhong, the grottoes remained unscathed, according to 73-year-old Xiao Mo, a prestigious architectural scholar who spent 15 years in Dunhuang.

Xiao published “Each Leaf a Bodhi Tree: My Fifteen Years at Dunhuang” in April, which features Dunhuang during the Culture Revolution.

“I wanted to reflect on the truth and reveal a glorious act of humanity during a tragic period in history. Unfortunately, I was informed that the book was banned from being distributed, promoted or reprinted,” he told the Global Times yesterday. “I don’t understand why and am saddened.”

Managers from Wangfujing and Xinhua Bookstores in Beijing both commented that they received no official announcement of a ban on Xiao’s work. When asked as to why they have been off the shelves for two weeks, the managers explained they were simply “out of stock.”

According to the South China Morning Post (SCMP), author Xiao Mo (萧默) who worked at the Dunhuang Research Institute for Cultural Relics in Gansu from 1963 to 1978, seeks a publisher for the book—now available only in Chinese—in Hong Kong. Reports the SCMP:

“Early this month, Xiao was delighted to find out that his book, published in April, had almost sold out on online bookstores and requested a reprint from the publisher.

His publisher told him in e-mails on August 4 and 8 that the head of the publishing house was interrogated by officials of the Central Publicity Department as to why the book had been published and about the whole process of publishing. Some editors were forced to write self-criticisms. A few days later, they received the order from Gapp banning the reprint.

An editor at the publishing house confirmed the ban and said the order came in July after all 5,000 copies had been distributed.

“The feedback I received from readers was that the plot was very intriguing,” Xiao said. “I’m only focusing on positive humanity during the Cultural Revolution, when some grass-roots leaders tried their best to protect people with their power. “I tried very hard to avoid violence and even used my sense of humour. It’s a whole new angle and a breakthrough in covering the Cultural Revolution. I have no idea at all why it was banned.”