Bruce Humes

Back from the Frankfurt Book Fair where she introduced the China Book Export Promotion Program to foreign publishers, Wu Wei (吴伟), who is a Deputy Director of the State Council Information Office and head of the program, spoke with Southern Weekend (南方周末).

Note her curious choice of authors when asked (below) about promoting “Chinese values” to readers outside China:  Jiang Rong (姜戎), author of the best-seller Wolf Totem (狼图腾), who did prison time in the Cultural Revolution and after the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square, and still rarely speaks with the media, Chinese or foreign; Jia Pingwa (贾平凹), whose Ruined Capital (废都) was banned in the 1990s for its explicit sexual content and only recently published uncensored; and Yan Lianke (阎连科), author of Serve the People (为人民服务, still banned in China), who has candidly stated that the Chinese authorities instructed him he was persona non grata at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, even though his novels are selling well in Europe. 

This is my translation of the tail-end of the Southern Weekend interview (full text in Chinese):

SW: Is it very difficult to promote books with “Chinese values”?

Wu Wei: Especially when it comes to communicating your values, it’s very tough going. That’s a fact. We are currently publishing more novels than a few years ago, but the results haven’t been outstanding.

For example, Wolf Totem was a huge best-seller in China, and the boss of the UK’s Penguin Publishing personally approved its purchase at a high price—US$100,000 upfront. This is the first book out of China to go for such a high price, but it hasn’t sold well. The reason is the cultural backgrounds of the East and the West. They don’t understand what Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem is all about.

Or like the agreement between HarperCollins and the People’s Literature Publishing House to publish fifty books over five years. In the end, they only published two or three. Books like The Ancient Ship (古船) didn’t sell well, so they weren’t willing to continue. They are not like us. It is not their mission to propagate Chinese culture. They might give you a bit of face by publishing a few books, but that can’t last for long. Just how Chinese novels can be popularized abroad is indeed a question.

For example, the Shaanxi Writers Association asked me to come to their conference to speak on how to help the “Shaanxi Army” (陕军) go global. Shaanxi Province is home to some tremendous literary talent. When I spoke to foreign publishers about it, they said they were willing to publish books by writers like Jia Pingwa, but in the end, the works weren’t translated. His books contain a lot of Shaanxi dialect that even we Mandarin-speakers don’t understand, dialect that foreigners are even less likely to understand. Another example is Yan Lianke’s The Joy of Living (受活). The translation rights were sold in 2004, but the book has yet to appear in translation. The reason is that they can’t translate it—they just don’t get the dialect.

The overseas copyright to Yu Dan’s Confucius from the Heart (论语心得，于丹著) sold for top dollar, but I’d be hard-pressed to predict how it will perform in the market. This is a thorny issue: We can export the copyright, but the challenge lies in getting not just a linguistic ‘fit’, but also a cultural ‘fit’ (对接). 

SW: Movies utilize historical themes to break into the international market. Do historical novels have an international market too?

Wu Wei: They aren’t selling well. You sit at home imagining countries outside China, but it’s not a matter of imagination. You think things should be like this or like that, but in reality that isn’t the case…

In 2000 the Information Office conducted a “Chinese Culture Survey” in the US, a random street survey about what they understand about China, and what things had left the strongest impression. The results: One, the Great Wall; Two, pandas; Three, egg rolls. The Great Wall and pandas are, after all, unique to China, but spring rolls—that’s just a food sold by street hawkers. This is the impression Americans have of China. Their strongest impression is stuff like that.

SW: In contacts with Western publishers, is there a big gap between the kind of books they want to buy and those we want to sell?

Wu Wei: It should be said the gap is gradually shrinking. At the outset they focused on our traditional culture, including classic novels, because there was no risk in publishing them.

But now foreigners are very concerned with your developmental model. Developed countries are concerned that you will threaten them, and with how to contain you. Developing countries, particularly those in Africa and South America, are a lot like China originally. In thirty years you’ve been able to develop to this point, so they are especially keen to know how you developed. When I went to Vietnam last year, the Vietnamese were very intrigued by our thirty years of reform and opening up to the outside, and hope to learn something from it.

But the problem is, books on those topics are few, and well-written ones are even rarer. [end excerpt]