© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: books, Evan Osnos, film, inequality, literature, materialism, urbanization, wealth gap
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Perhaps no work of fiction has returned to me more often over the past eight years in China than F. Scott Fitzgerald’s slippery tale of James Gatz of North Dakota, who thrust himself into a new world in desperate, doomed pursuit of love and ambition—a life in which the “dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.” I’ve stood in Shanghai, bathed in the lights of a new skyline, and thought of Gatsby’s glimpse of New York, with “the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps.” And at times it’s been hard to think of anything but Fitzgerald’s “universe of ineffable gaudiness”—upon seeing, for instance, the Korean boutique in Beijing with the English name “PRICH: Pride & Rich.”

But to Chinese readers, who have read Gatsby (in translation or in English) for decades, the story has acquired new layers of relevance in recent years, as the initial rush of China’s boom has given way to a more complex economic phase. When Chinese readers talk about Gatsby today, some see a cautionary tale of materialism run amok; others point to the potential danger in the gap between riches and power; and still others recognize the dawning realization that that one may never grasp the dream he so desires. “After Gatsby was gone, no one cared,” a Chinese blogger named Xiao Peng wrote not long ago. “Not his business partners or his friends or his guests. Once everything became clear, Gatsby’s life evaporated like smoke.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: books, films, inequality, literature, materialism
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

1) The Republic of Wine by Mo Yan

The Republic of Wine: A Novel takes place in a fictional province in modern China. The plot is filled with enticing yet horrific accounts of corruption and hallucination, and mixes many different styles: satire, surrealism, detective, martial arts or wuxia, and more. Mo Yan once called it his most perfect novel.

2) Civil Servant’s Notebook by Wang Xiaofang

Corruption, bribery, seduction, power struggles and cunning plans… You’ll get the insider’s scoop in Wang Xiaofang’s Civil Servant’s Notebook.

3) I Love Dollars by Zhu Wen

Despite the nation’s official stance as a Communist country, China has turned largely capitalist. Zhu Wen tells imaginative stories of the post-Mao China, in a spiritually bankrupt and monetarily-driven time.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: books, lit, literature, mo yan, pop culture, publications
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

The title refers to an incident in prison when he broke the rules by singing; as punishment, he was ordered to sing 100 songs. When his voice gave out, he was tortured with electric shocks from a baton inserted into his anus.

“I felt like a duck whose feathers were being stripped,” he writes.

[…] Even now, he experiences a recurring nightmare. “I am flying and I see people on the ground with guns and knives running after me,” he said. “But I am a bird without legs, and when I can’t fly anymore, I fall to the ground. The people come nearer and nearer, and as soon as they are about to attack, I wake up filled with terror.”

[…] He sees his mission as a storyteller of human suffering, not as a reformer striving for change in what he calls the “foul pigsty” that is China. “I have no interest in what China will become,” he said. “My suggestion would be that China crumbles into dozens of little countries so that it would no longer be the terrible menace it is now.”

See more on the book and Liao’s incarceration via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: books, June 4th, Liao Yiwu, memoirs, prison abuse, prisoners, prisons, torture
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

On Weibo, a kind of Chinese Twitter, I recently made a joking comparison between media censorship and the pervasive threat of contaminated food, a constant source of worry:

“There’s no end to these food scares,” a friend sighed. “Is there any hope of a solution?”

“Oh, all we need is for food inspections to be as forceful as film censorship,” I told him breezily. “With all that faultfinding and nit-picking, food-safety issues will be resolved in no time.”

More than 12,000 readers reposted this. One wrote: I know what we should do. Let’s have those in charge of film, newspaper and book censorship take over food safety, and have those responsible for food safety censor films, papers and books. That way we’ll have food safety — and freedom of expression as well!

The unpredictable whims of film censors at the State Administration for Radio, Film and Television have been blamed for wrecking China’s Oscar chances, and even state media have carried calls for a more consistent and codified approach. SARFT has been extending its reach to cover online video and require pre-vetting of TV documentaries, however, and Hollywood productions increasingly subject themselves to its censorship in exchange for access to Chinese funding and theaters. Meanwhile, the country has witnessed a seemingly endless stream of food safety problems, most recently cadmium-tainted rice.

Yu’s op-ed was translated by Allan H. Barr, who commented on his translations of Yu Hua and Han Han in an interview at Pomona College’s website (via CDT) in December. See more on Yu Hua via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: books, censorship, film censorship, food safety, literature, media censorship, news media, newspapers, SARFT, tainted food, TV, weibo, yu hua
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

In China, “bureaucracy lit” is a hot genre, far outselling spy stories and whodunits as the airport novel of choice. In these tales of overweening ambition, the plot devices that set readers’ pulses racing are underhanded power plays, hidden alliances and devious sexual favors. The current craze began in 1999 with “Ink Painting,” by Wang Yuewen, and has become so intense that last year a deputy bureau chief who writes a series under the pseudonym Xiaoqiao Laoshu was named China’s 17th-richest author. “Officialdom lit” is hugely popular, not just as a peek behind the curtains, but also as a go-to guide for aspiring cadres in search of their own sycophancy strategies.

[… But t]he trifling plots of bureaucracy lit look positively petty compared with the grand crimes surrounding the downfall of one of China’s highest-flying politicians, Bo Xilai, formerly the Communist Party secretary of Chongqing, whose wife was found guilty of murdering a former British business partner. Bo’s wife — or a woman rumored to be her plumper stand-in — was given a suspended death sentence, while Bo’s former police chief got 15 years for abuse of power, corruption and defection. Bo himself is facing a criminal investigation into charges including abuse of power, corruption, improper sexual relationships and possible involvement in covering up a murder. It’s hard for any novelist to compete.

Lim goes on to describe the “gargantuan irony” of official celebrations of Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize for Literature. Also at The New York Times is a spoiler-laden review of Mo’s Sandalwood Death and Pow! by Ian Buruma, who concludes with a sympathetic assessment of the author’s widely criticized politics:

Perhaps Mo Yan really is in tune with the current Communist regime. Perhaps he simply wants to play it safe. But the political perspective of his fiction is also a reflection of his peasant spirit. To a villager, all politics are strictly local, especially in China, with its vast distances. The capital is far away. National politics aren’t the peasant’s concern. What counts is food on the table, fertility, sex and staying out of trouble, if necessary by appeasing the powerful, be they local or foreign.

[…] To demand that Mo Yan also be a political dissident is not only what the Dutch describe as “trying to pluck feathers from a frog.” It’s also unfair. A novelist should be judged on literary merit, not on his or her politics, a principle the Nobel committee hasn’t always lived up to. This time, I think it has. It would be nice if Mo Yan were more courageous, but he has given us some great stories. And that should be enough.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bo Xilai, books, bureaucracy, civil servants, corrupt officials, corruption, literature, mo yan, Nobel Prize, officials, Wang Xiaofang, yu hua
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

China, Schmidt and Cohen write, is “the world’s most active and enthusiastic filterer of information” as well as “the most sophisticated and prolific” hacker of foreign companies. In a world that is becoming increasingly digital, the willingness of China’s government and state companies to use cyber crime gives the country an economic and political edge, they say.

[…] But for all the advantages China gains from its approach to the Internet, Schmidt and Cohen still seem to think its hollow political center is unsustainable. “This mix of active citizens armed with technological devices and tight government control is exceptionally volatile,” they write, warning this could lead to “widespread instability.”

In the longer run, China will see “some kind of revolution in the coming decades,” they write.

In a separate post, Gara takes a broader overview of the book’s contents, including real-name registration, “automated and machine-precise” haircuts, and the view that “we’re already living in an age of state-led cyber war, even if most of us aren’t aware of it.” See also Schmidt’s daughter Sophie’s account of their recent trip to North Korea.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: books, cyberutopianism, cyberwar, Eric Schmidt, Google, hacking, real name registration, revolution
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Seasoned at playing the provocateur, Mr Li moved from reporting on sport to writing essays on politics and society soon after the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, which killed more than 80,000 people. His writing on the struggles of common people after the disaster brought his work to a whole new audience of internet-savvy young Chinese. He went on to publish a novel in 2011, “Li Kele Protests Demolitions”. Mr Li’s “Li Kele” was an immediate hit; the descriptions of ordinary people who united together to fight faceless forces and venality propelled the writer into the arms of a more organized new audience: China’s advocates for social reform.

Later that year Mr Li announced that he would be running for public office in Chengdu as an independent. Although his election campaign was never allowed to get under way (candidates for office are carefully screened by the Communist Party and eventually Mr Li failed his background check), he gained a new degree of credibility. Here, it seemed, was a man who would back up his words with actions.

At the book launch in Chengdu, an elderly man named Liu Shahe sat behind Mr Li. Mr Liu is one of the signatories of Charter 08, the document demanding a list political reforms that Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel laureate, was jailed for drafting. Mr Li tweeted Mr Liu’s words to him—“You man of words, just keep writing”—and said the encouragement from the older man had reduced him to tears.

Li has answered questions about the silent signing in Chengdu on Sina Weibo, explaining why he opted to go through with the event, and why a book published through official channels had encountered such opposition. Introducing his partial translation at China Media Project, David Bandurski commented that the disruptions have only made Li’s voice louder.

In Guangzhou, the final leg of Li’s tour, the signing was cancelled at the last minute because the building where it was being hosted was closed for fire safety inspections.

Li Chengpeng apologized to his readers for the Guangzhou cancellation with a tongue-in-cheek post to his Sina Weibo account playing on the title of his book [Everybody in the World Knows]: “Once again I apologize to everyone: Because fire safety inspections are happening at the Tianya Building, outsiders cannot go in, and therefore my book signing for readers is cancelled. I’m accepting this fact, because this place is really in need of a fire safety inspection. Everybody in the world knows, fire safety is really important.”

For all of its hitches and hijinks, Li Chengpeng’s book tour illustrates the limitations of control in the era of social media. Li’s “silent” signing in Chengdu was anything but silent — it was broadcast loudly across the internet. Every leg of his tour became the subject of fevered discussion online, pitting the values of speech and openness against controls that appeared foolish and anachronistic.

See more about and by Li Chengpeng via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2008 Sichuan earthquake, books, Charter 08, Chengdu, corruption, David Bandurski, Guangzhou, Li Chengpeng, Liu Xiaobo, local elections, sina weibo, soccer, social media
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

“I would hardly be here to buy Li’s book if not for what happened to him on Sunday,” one young man said. “I just came here to show my support for Li, a liberal-minded critic.”

[…] Meanwhile, dozens of protesters, most in their 40s or 50s and some wearing Mao Zedong badges, gathered outside the building.

One of the protesters said he was outraged by some of Li’s recent comments, such as labelling those who took to the streets in anti-Japanese demonstrations in Shenzhen “brain damaged”.

“Li is a typical traitor who does nothing more than distort history and mislead the public, particularly the young,” he said.

Also at the South China Morning Post, Laura Zhou had previously described Sunday’s altercation, over which Li is reportedly considering legal action.

Li Chengpeng, a former journalist, was punched in the head during an afternoon signing of his new book for readers at the Zhongguancun Bookstore in Haidian district, and another man was filmed throwing a packaged kitchen knife at Li.

The man who punched Li claimed to have a strong aversion to the content of Li’s new book, The Whole World Knows. The assailant was taken away by Beijing police, according to a post on the public security bureau’s microblog that night.

The new book is a collection of essays that include sensitive topics such as the shoddy quality of school buildings that collapsed and killed thousands of students during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and the alleged cover-up of the 2011 Wenzhou train crash.

The knife incident, in which a man waited in line to present Li with the threatening “gift”, and then threw it at him when it was apparently rejected, was caught on video (via SCMP’s John Kennedy):

Click here to view the embedded video.

In contrast with the action in Beijing and Shenzhen, Li’s signing in Chengdu on Saturday was markedly subdued. Li had been ordered not to address the audience and wore a mask over his mouth in protest. Global Voices Online translated a weibo post Li sent before the event, together with a selection of other users’ reactions:

Someone just delivered a strict order: at my book signing event, I’m not allowed to talk; the readers are not allowed to ask me any questions; I can’t even introduce myself or say “ Happy New Year, Thank you”. I’m not even allowed to introduce the names of other guests at my event; they are not allowed to talk or answer any questions. They can only sit in the corner. I deeply feel it’s against my understanding of dignity. They are crazy.

王金明小伙[zh]: It’s the most depressing signing event I’ve ever experienced. There were many people on the spot but no sound. The policemen were guarding each corner. Li wore a mask and signed his book with the wrong date. His guests only appeared very shortly before being asked to step down. There were tears on Li’s face.

I suddenly discovered that the Communist Party has made creating a buzz into an art. Li Chengpeng’s book signing was just a small ordinary event, but after the Communist Party’s handling of it, it became a work of performance art that has spread throughout the world.

Bruce Humes and Sascha Matuszak blogged their accounts of the Shenzhen and Chengdu signings, respectively.

Scuffles between leftists and liberals also broke out outside the offices of the Southern Weekly newspaper, during protests over censorship of its New Year greeting. Li was particularly outspoken about the Southern Weekly affair. From an interview at Japan’s Asahi Shimbun:

To me, this feels as if the insult toward freedom of speech has been lifted up a level. I cannot stand it, and I believe many other people feel the same.

China’s Constitution recognizes freedom of speech. The new party leadership advocates the rule of law. It should therefore sponsor freedom of speech–but doesn’t. The reality is different.

[…] I’ve felt pressure. I’ve been braced to see my blog shut down. Yet, we are not challenging the government. We just want China to become a better country.

The fact that many people have raised their voice this time has great significance. This is the first step on a long road toward achieving freedom of speech.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2008 Sichuan earthquake, anti-Japan demonstrations 2012, Beijing, books, Chengdu, freedom of speech, leftists, Li Chengpeng, Mao Zedong, rule of law, Shenzhen, Southern Weekly, southern weekly protest 2013, train crash, wenzhou, writers
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

OK, I’ve cheated a bit – three of the publications below are poetry, and two others come out in January 2013. Still, it’s a good haul and many times better than the annual total, say, ten years ago. (Please post a comment if I’ve missed anyone out.) I couldn’t begin to add up just how many hours of translation the whole list represents, and that’s without the extra work translators have put in, on some of these books, to get them off the ground. So, lets raise a glass to translation and all pat ourselves on the back!

[…] PS On Twitter, @cfbcuk (that’s the China Fiction Book Club) has posted each one with review links, tagged #abook4xmas.

Among the twenty is Mo Yan’s Sandalwood Death, translated by Howard Goldblatt. Goldblatt has been variously credited with accurately rendering the Nobel-winner’s prose by Mo’s admirers, and with flattering it by his critics. Two titles were translated by Allan Barr, professor of Chinese at Pomona College. The school’s website features an interview on his translations of Han Han’s This Generation and Yu Hua’s China in Ten Words:

“Han Han’s style is sarcastic and playful, full of mischievous puns, and channeling his distinctive voice and conveying his wicked sense of humor were the biggest challenges I faced,” says Barr, who has been at Pomona since 1981.

[…] The concept of one book, China in Ten Words, was developed after Yu [Hua] spoke at Pomona in 2009. Barr had invited the writer to speak during his U.S. tour for his novel Brothers. When discussing the topic of Yu’s speech, Barr suggested Yu speak about China from a writer’s point of view, and Yu built his presentation around two common words in the contemporary Chinese language: 人民 (“people”) and 领袖 (“leader”). He realized he had other words he wanted to write about and developed the idea into a book.

“When I drove him to LAX at the end of his visit here, we agreed that I would translate the book into English,” recalls Barr. “Yu Hua wrote China in Ten Words over the months that followed, sending me each chapter as he completed it. The book’s 10 chapters all take a different word as their theme, in a wide-ranging discussion that involves memoir, anecdote, and analysis.” The book’s Taiwan edition mentions Pomona in the preface, says Barr, but that reference didn’t make it into the English edition. The book was not published in mainland China due to its critiques of the country.

See Yu Hua’s own words on the book, translated by CDT’s Don Weinland, and Perry Link’s review, via CDT. On Han Han, see recent profiles and reviews by Jeffrey Wasserstrom at Words without Borders, Rebecca Liao at The New Inquiry, Katrina Hamlin at Reuters’ Breakingviews, Duncan Hewitt at The Daily Beast and Ian Johnson at The New York Review of Books, as well as an excerpt from This Generation at The Daily Beast.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: books, Han Han, literature, mo yan, reading, translation excerpt, yu hua
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Driving sales is a literate population that emphasizes education and self-improvement. Censorship has become less draconian since Mao’s time and publishing has become more commercial. As a result, readers of Chinese books today have more choice of genre, voice and subject matter than they have had at any time in the last 60 years.

[…] International publishers looking to enter China have reason to be enthusiastic. Last year 48 titles sold over one million copies each. Among bestsellers for 2011 were a collection of speeches by former Prime Minister Zhu Rongji – it topped the list – and a modern sequel by Liu Xinwu to the 18th century “Dream of the Red Chamber,” one of China’s so-called four great classical novels.

[…] There is also censorship and political pressure. No guidebook of forbidden topics, no glossary of forbidden words, exists. And if some taboos are predictable (“1989″), others are random or absurd [see Murong Xuecun on the “Absurdities” of Chinese Censorship, via CDT]. Forced to go by instinct – and so risk overstepping the mark – writers, publishers and booksellers routinely self-censor. (Thus the most daring Chinese writing is to be found online, where censors have less reach. Readers are flocking to literature sites such as Rongshuxia.com and Qidian.com; in 2011, those attracted over 100 million visitors every month.)

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: books, Dream of the Red Chamber, literacy, literature, online literature, online novels, publishing, Zhu Rongji
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

In his first national broadcast interview since arriving in the United States, Guangcheng describes the intersection between human rights and disability rights in the United States and in his native China. Chen says that disabled people can hold up “a mirror to society.”

[…] One of the keys to protecting the rights of the disabled, Chen says, is that disabled people themselves become involved in the struggle to improve their situations. “It’s very important that disabled peoples’ rights have to be enforced, and have to be protected by disabled people themselves by being involved in that process,” he says. 

[…] While he is enjoying his time in New York, Chen says that a return to China is inevitable. He hopes to continue his efforts to curb the uncontrolled powers of local authorities through legal means. “I think the role of lawyers in promoting implementation of the constitution is absolutely essential, and can’t be denied,” Chen says.

Meanwhile, Chen has secured a book deal. From The New York Times’ Media Decoder blog:

Mr. Chen will write a memoir that he said would describe “the true conditions in China, especially in the vast stretches of rural China.” The book is tentatively scheduled for release in fall 2013 by Times Books, an imprint of Henry Holt & Company. John Sterling, editor at large for Henry Holt, acquired the book.

“Chen’s story is a remarkable journey of activism on both a personal and political level,” Mr. Sterling said in a statement. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: books, Chen Guangcheng, disabled, memoirs, new york city, United States
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

We don’t much think of the party as a political organization these days. It is dominated by technocrats obsessed with economic and engineering challenges. These men–and they are almost all men–are comfortable talking about detailed economic and technical data, but they are not skilled politicians, adept at handling large crowds or palace intrigue. This apolitical system is a recent phenomenon and the outcome of a conscious decision by the founder of modern China, Deng Xiaoping.

…

Eventually, politics had to re-emerge. China has reached a level of growth and development at which the big questions it faces are not technical engineering puzzles but deep political, philosophical ones.

Bo represented the revival of politics in at least two ways. In a system of colorless men, he was charismatic, conniving and political. He was comfortable in front of crowds, eager to push himself forward, and he rubbed against the grain of consensus decisionmaking. Money was, as in U.S. politics, the grease that smoothed Bo’s rise. But he also represented the “new left,” an ideological movement that emphasized social and cultural solidarity, the power of the state and other populist issues. Whether he truly believed in these stances is irrelevant. Like all good political entrepreneurs, he saw a market for these ideas in modern China and filled it. And there are other would-be leaders–military nationalists, economic liberals, even more-full-throated populists–who are debating China’s future furiously, though privately, in Beijing and Shanghai.

Bo’s ouster is the most significant purge in the party’s top ranks since Tiananmen Square. The party may hope that the People’s Republic, as it did after that earlier upheaval, can return to its efficient and steady technocratic path. But China has changed too much. And politics in China is xenophobic, populist, nationalist, messy and certainly unpredictable–like politics everywhere.

TIME subscribers can also read Hannah Beech’s cover story on Bo Xilai in the current issue of the magazine. Bloomberg Businesweek’s Bruce Einhorn writes that Bo’s family is just one of many in which the relatives of leaders have advanced and enriched themselves on the coattails of their family’s status, but questions whether the scandal will really threaten the ability of future “princeling” families to do the same:

Will Bo’s downfall threaten his princeling brethren? Stan Abrams, law professor at Central University of Finance and Economics in Beijing, believes they’re feeling some pressure but don’t need to worry too much. “Princelings are being read the riot act in terms of conspicuous consumption,” he says. With the Bo affair still unfolding, the princelings at SOEs might need to lay low for a while. “Their decision making is going to be under more scrutiny than usual,” says Abrams, who believes foreign investors hoping to make big deals with state companies will need to be patient. “Making a deal with an SOE might be a little tougher these days,” he says. “Things that were sensitive before are even more sensitive now—and dealing with an SOE is always more sensitive.”

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the princelings to give up their power in the post-Bo world. “I don’t think one or two [high]-profile cases are going to change anything,” says Abrams, who is author of the China Hearsay blog. “These people are still the sons and daughters of those in charge. Why would they change the whole system? They will do whatever they can to make sure they are protected. [That means] you demonize the folks who screw up and keep the rest running as smoothly as possible. Anything else overturns the system, which is not something they want to do.”

On a lighter note, The Wall Street Journal reports that the political thunderstorm on the mainland has created a business opportunity for Hong Kong’s bookstores, with bestselling books boasting titles such as Bo Xilai’s Crimes, The Inside Story of Bo Xilai’s Fall, and Chongqing’s Department of Murder capturing the intrigue of local residents and mainland visitors:

Such books have sprung up across Hong Kong in the past month and are being sold everywhere, from newspaper stalls to airport shops. The sudden proliferation seems astonishing, given Mr. Bo was purged from the Communist Party just over three weeks ago. Still, many of the books (which are issued by Hong Kong or overseas publishers) recycle material that’s been previously written about Mr. Bo—including numerous newspaper articles and other content culled from the Internet.

“The books are written with varying quality,” says Ms. Zheng frankly. “Not all of what they publish may be true.”

These days, she adds, there’s too much repetition among books, and much of the content is stale. Still, that doesn’t stop mainland customers from loading up with reading material. Near the cash register, customers flick through their purchases and trade fears that their books might get confiscated if spotted by customs officials, who often seize any books that appear to contain sensitive information about Chinese leadership. Some readers go so far as to put different book jackets on their contraband purchases, the better to avoid getting them confiscated.

Most customers just pick up one or two volumes, but one man—who didn’t want to talk about his purchases—walked out this morning with a stack of ten titles. “People will make special trips to Hong Kong just to buy these books,” comments Ms. Zheng. “Some just pick titles randomly, but some of them really understand Chinese politics better than us and know what they’re looking for,” she says. Previous popular releases include titles like Tombstone—an acclaimed two-volume, over 1,000-page expose by a former Xinhua journalist of China’s government-caused famine in the 1950s—as well as China’s Best Actor: Wen Jiabao, a highly critical account of current China’s premier, both banned on the mainland. Another book, The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang, which chronicles the memoirs of Zhao, who was purged and kept under house arrest for 15 years after the 1989 Tiannamen Square protests, has sold some 130,000 copies in Hong Kong since its 2009 publication.

See also a post on China Beat by Xujun Eberlein, who was born in Chongqing and writes about how the city’s people view Bo Xilai.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bo Xilai, books, CCP, Chen Guangcheng, corruption, Hong Kong, princelings, scandal
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

The Shanghai 99 Readers’ Culture Co., Ltd., the owner of the store, plans to sell an e-reader application through Apple’s App Store by the end of this year in an effort to capitalize on the increasing popularity of tablet computers and mobile devices.

Mobile device users who download the application will be able to browse the company’s library and purchase copyrighted e-books for just 60 percent of the cost of buying a printed version, according to Yuang Yuhai, the company’s president.

“The Internet is an infinite bookshelf,” Huang said. He is already known for his ability to adapt to China’s changing publishing industry in the Internet era ….

Traditional publishing houses are scrambling to find solutions to what could become a dangerous trend for printed media. These companies have taken to using microblogs as a marketing tool in order to increase the visibility of their products ….

The change indicates that publishing has become a more dynamic and interactive industry, rather than merely focusing on the one-way transfer of information, according to Huang.

Ebook reading is also a prominent feature of Baidu’s new Yi mobile OS, based on Google’s Android. Baidu was said last month to have bought a 40% stake in ebook vendor Fanshu.com; the company’s earlier Wenku (“Library”) document and ebook sharing platform sparked accusations that the company was deliberately profiteering from piracy.

In April, Xinhua reported impressive growth of ebook consumption last year, with mobile phones the most popular platform:

The survey, conducted by the Chinese Academy of Press and Publication (CAPP), covers more than 19,000 people from 51 cities in 29 Chinese provincial regions.

It says that Chinese people between the ages of 18 and 70 read 613 million electronic books in 2010.

Among them, 23 percent read e-books via mobile phones, up 8 percentage points from 2009. Another 3.9 percent read books on e-book readers and over 18 percent read books on the Internet, it said.

Online distribution and reading of novels has become well established in China in recent years, as Wired reported in 2007:

Zhang Muye is a thirty-something office worker who shows up to his Chinese investment company on time. Yet to millions of Chinese fans, he is the author of ‘Ghost Blows Out the Light’, an internet novel viewed more than 6 million times online. It has sold 600,000 copies in print ….

It’s a particularly lucrative game. Zhang is far from unique in China, where writing and reading novels online has become the hobby of an estimated 10 million youth. Yet unlike the music world, where MP3s are threatening to kill off CDs, online novels in China are helping physical books fly off the shelves. Print versions of popular online works sell by the millions and publishers, as well as authors, are cashing in.

“Novel,” the top search term on China’s biggest search engine, Baidu, yields thousands of Chinese literature websites. More than 100,000 amateurs shirk mundane duties to publish their tales of fantasy and love in installments on these platforms. A handful of anonymous web authors have seen their pageviews soar into the upper seven digits. When that happens, print publishers come knocking.

The phenomenon has much in common with the enormous popularity in Japan of ‘keitai shousetsu’ (cellphone novels), which are distributed, read and even written on mobile phones.

Sources:

Chinese publishers adapt to rising popularity of e-books – Xinhua
Survey indicates e-book boom in China – Xinhua
The Chinese Novel Finds New Life Online – Wired

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Baidu, Baidu Wenku, books, cell phones, literature, mobile technology, publishing
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

When former leaders have kept a hand in things, they have usually done so from behind the scenes. Most maintain offices and large staffs. They get copies of official documents and are quietly consulted on important matters—not least on the promotion of future leaders.

But this month saw a rare public return to the fray. Mr Zhu, who is 82 and in much more robust health than Mr Jiang, retired as prime minister in 2003. In office, Mr Zhu had a reputation as a blunt, honest reformer. He has now released a multi-volume collection of speeches and letters from his years in power. China’s state-controlled press has given his work lots of attention, even highlighting some of the most pointed remarks made by a man famous for his short temper and sharp tongue. Among these were his contention that a government full of yes-men ill serves the needs of the people. Chinese leaders, he also railed, should devote less time to lavish banquets and pointless meetings, and more time to solving problems ….

Cheng Li of the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, says he is surprised that Mr Zhu is now being so forthright, but predicts that public interventions by former leaders—“old-man politics”—could well increase. Not only is the number of ex-leaders growing. A rise in factional politics and greater differences of opinion among a new (and weaker) generation of leaders might also undermine unity at the centre. China’s old men will no doubt want to say something about it all.

At the Tsinghua University centenary celebrations referred to in the article, Zhu told students that he watched CCTV’s prime-time news show every evening “to see what their bullshit is”, and recommended that they read ‘Will the Boat Sink the Water?‘, a banned book about downtrodden peasants and corrupt officials: see ‘Our Maverick Premier Takes an Alma Mater Bow‘ on CDT. Beyond just making provocative remarks, Zhu has also provided political protection for investigative journalist Wang Keqin.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: books, leadership reshuffling, retirement, succession, Tsinghua University, Xi Jinping, Zhu Rongji
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall