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
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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
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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
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When Li Xiang got home with a pile of books he had bought from a bookstore at a Shanghai business school, he started to happily flip through one of them until he noticed something odd; pages 16 and 17 were stuck together ….

Using a razor and the skill of a surgeon, Li managed to pry apart the glued-together pages to find that the offending passage described China’s legal system. On page 18, he also found lines of text that were redacted with sloppy strokes in black ink. Carefully scrutinizing the passage, Li could see the section was an explanation of China’s one-party rule ….

Li remembers how he had to play a little game with CNPIEC’s Shanghai office when he tried to subscribe to a foreign newspaper. Chinese mainland citizens can not directly subscribe to daily foreign language newspapers.

According to the import-export monopoly’s Shanghai branch’s website, subscription services for foreign newspapers and periodicals are restricted to people and companies from overseas, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao. A photocopy of a business license or passport is required proof.

“It was very interesting to see the way they dealt with it,” said Li. “I just asked my German friend for help. I used his ID to order the International Herald Tribune but had it delivered to my address,” he said.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: books, censorship, newspapers
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Pirated editions of the Nobel prize-winning author’s most famous novel – “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race,” according to William Kennedy – have been rife in China for decades. The piracy so enraged Marquez on a visit to the country in 1990 that he swore that even 150 years after his death his books would not be authorised in China, according to Chinese newspaper the Global Times.

But Thinkingdom House editor-in-chief Chen Mingjun refused to take no for an answer, writing a letter to the author in 2008 which according to the Global Times read: “We pay our respects to you across the Pacific Ocean, making every effort, shouting ‘great master!’ just like you did to your idol Ernest Hemingway across the streets in Paris … We believe that you’d also wave your hand and shout back ‘Hello friend!’ just like Hemingway did.” …

Jo Lusby, managing director of Penguin China, which publishes the English language edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude, said the size of the advance had “already created an enormous amount of interest” in the novel, despite it being “widely available in pirated forms for a long time”.

“I think they’ll be lucky if they can meaningfully address the presence of cheap pirated formats out on the streets, though,” she said.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: books, literature
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The transition from one FYP plan to the next is a key moment in China, closely watched by foreign and Chinese analysts. After 30 years of breakneck growth, with all the attendant difficulties and consequences of that model of development, the 12th FYP demonstrates a much more robust ambition to make the difficult transition towards a more sustainable model. If it is successful, the 12th FYP could prove to be a pivotal moment in Chinese development, of international as well as domestic importance.

China’s strategic challenge is to get onto a more sustainable development path, while meeting public expectations of improved living standards and employment. The current development model is exhausted for a number of familiar reasons: it is still too inefficient, too wasteful of energy and natural resources, it generates too many damaging externalities and it depends on an abundant pool of cheap labour, which China no longer has. At a similar stage of development, Japan, Korea and Taiwan all made the transition to higher value, more innovative and more technologically advanced models, much as China is trying to do today. In China’s case, the urgency is the greater because of three decades of damage to water, air, soil and human health, with the attendant social unrest they have brought.

The book is available in EPUB and PDF formats (free) and on Kindle ($1, Amazon’s minimum price).

Also on chinadialogue is managing editor Meng Si’s post on the results of the 2011 Environmental Press Awards. (Jonathan Watts’ post at the The Guardian, which co-sponsors the awards, was featured on CDT late last week.) The post includes links to chinadialogue’s translations of four of the five top prize winning articles:

Best investigative report

A green paper tiger?

By Lu Zongshu, Southern Weekly

Best in-depth report (two winners)

1) Zijin’s poisoned legacy

By Yang Chuanmin, Southern Metropolitan Daily

2) The Alarm from Zhouqu

By Gong Jing, Wang Heyan, Zhang Ruidan, New Century Weekly

Best human interest story

The birdwatching lama of Qinghai

By Geng Dong, Shanshui Conservation Centre

Most influential report

Burned by the sun: solar subsidies and poor oversight in China

By Yuan Ying, Southern Weekly

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 12th Five-Year Plan, books, environment, Isabel Hilton, sustainable development
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The choice is overwhelming on the China shelf of any bookshop – everything from macroeconomic tomes to travel guides. Why did you pick ‘life stories’ as your theme?

One of the real challenges for foreigners trying to think about China, and have it make sense to them, is to really get to think of it as a country populated by individuals. There’s a strong tendency in so much of the writing about China to deal in broad generalisations, in which we lose the diversity of the population. So focusing on biography, or life stories, seemed to be a good way to go against the grain ….

Could you imagine someone writing a flesh-and-blood biography of Hu Jintao, or Xi Jinping, or any other more current Chinese leader?

Not one that would make for compelling reading! Though I recently wrote a piece for Time magazine about how when Deng Xiaoping took power after Mao, he seemed in comparison a more down-to-earth, unexciting and pragmatic character – but now, in comparison to Hu Jintao, Deng seems positively charismatic. So we’ve had a kind of steady progression away from larger-than-life Chinese leaders.

Previously featured on China Digital Times are selections from Victor Shih on China’s economy, Evan Osnos on a broad range of China-related reading, Richard Baum on obstacles to reform in China and Xinran on understanding China. Other instalments available in the archives cover popular protest in China, China’s place in the global economy, Uyghur nationalism, the country’s environmental crisis and more.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: books, Deng Xiaoping, factory workers, five books, Hu Jintao, Mao Zedong, qing dynasty, Xi Jinping
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It’s good that you’re covering this topic. Wherever we are in the world, we all now need to understand the Chinese economy.

Yes, and especially some of its more sceptical aspects. Exports from China are still huge. It grew faster than almost any country in the world in 2009 and 2010. A recent calculation suggests its GDP has surpassed the United States on a purchasing power parity basis. But there are weaknesses in the Chinese economy that the educated reader needs to know about.

What do people get most wrong when they think of the Chinese economy?

The biggest misperception about China is that it’s a dynamic market economy – it isn’t. It’s a fast-growing, state-dominated economy with some dynamic, private-market aspects. If you look at investment, a main driver of growth, much of it is going to state-owned enterprises (SOEs) or shareholding companies dominated by state entities. Or it’s going directly to government investments carried out at a central or local level. The misperception has abated recently following Richard McGregor’s book on the Chinese Communist Party. People are realising that the party is still behind much of what happens in China.

Selections from Evan Osnos on a broad range of China-related reading, Richard Baum on obstacles to reform in China and Xinran on understanding China have been featured on CDT in the past. Other instalments available in the archives cover popular protest in China, China’s place in the global economy, Uyghur nationalism, the country’s environmental crisis and more.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: books, chinese communist party, chinese economy, five books, state-owned enterprises
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Why is it so important to you?

Well, it is such a good guide to our culture. In the book more than 100 people, buildings, poems, paintings and dreams are described in great detail. So you really find out the lifestyles of the people living there. I have read this book again and again ever since my childhood.

For example, there is a part which sums up how important food is in Chinese society. Xueqin writes about an aubergine recipe, which is a famous dish in the book, where the mother describes to her daughter and grandchildren how you need to wash the aubergines in snow, soak them with spring dew, pickle them with flowers from summer to season them and the thorns from autumn. And these are known as four season aubergines. That is so beautiful. And why I think this book is so important is because it has helped Chinese culture to survive despite all the political upheavals and civil wars which have taken place since it was written.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: books, cultural identity, five books, Xinran
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A chance conversation in Macau last year between the head of the Harvard-Yenching Library and the director of the National Library of China, two men with a passion for ancient texts, led to the signing yesterday of an ambitious, six-year pact to digitize Harvard’s treasure trove of 51,000 rare Chinese books.

Officials from Harvard and the National Library of China would not release exact costs, other than to say it was a “multimillion-dollar’’ project and that the Chinese government is paying most expenses. Harvard staff will be responsible for capturing images of the fragile books, scrolls, and artifacts, one of the largest collections outside Asia, using high-tech cameras in its state-of-the-art lab at Widener Library.

Once completed, these images dating as far back as the Song ynasty in 960 AD, will be publicly available for free on the Web to scholars in China and elsewhere.

“We need to change the mindset that rare materials must be kept behind closed doors,’’ said James Cheng, the head librarian at Harvard-Yenching, a separate building just outside Harvard Yard. “A library is not a museum.’’

© Paulina Hartono for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: books, digital books, Harvard, National Library of China
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