Book Publishing in the People's Republic of China
Sally Taylor -- 7/15/98
The top profit-making industries in China today, some say, are tobacco, alcohol and publishing. But not many foreign publishers are yet making money in China, and those few who are tend to make it with scientific and technical titles, not trade. In Taiwan, foreign rights sales are more developed, so though the market is smaller, it can be as valuable to a foreign publisher.
Publishing in China is still very different from the rest of the world. The structure of the industry is still fixed by the Government: 500-plus state-run publishing houses are issued all the ISBN numbers for China. No one else can publish books.
The state-run publishers have various levels of political influence and economic strength and a variety of assignments in terms of subject matter, though that limitation is relaxing. They have to make money, but they also have a broad set of publishing ethics and goals, as well, established by the Association of Chinese Publishers. So they are far from being purely capitalistic.
Still, President Clinton's recent visit to China illustrated an openness to debating ideas in China that is quite different from even five years ago. This month the prestigious People's Publishing House will publishing a translation of Big Dragon China's Future: What it Means for Business, the Economy and the Global Order by Daniel Burstein and Arne de Keijzer (Simon & Schuster), which the Washington Post has called "the right idea" about China's changing future.
Until recently foreign criticism of China was strictly forbidden for general distribution in Chinese and would never have come from by the country's number one political publishing house, as this book d s.
"Big Dragon has already attracted the attention of many Chinese media," says its Beijing editor, Sun Yingchun, chatting with PW, as many in China did, by email. Using their "Oriental Press" imprint, People's Press have also recently published Iris Chang's Rape of Nanking and will do yet another American view of China title, China's Far West, by A. Doak Barnett later this year, as well as Chinese Heritage by a former senior leader in Taiwan, K.C. Wu, which was published in English by Crown.
"In many ways," says Burstein, pleased his book will be widely circulated in China under this prestigious imprint, "Discussion and debate in China is gradually becoming wider, more diverse and more open."
The powerful National Government publishing houses, such as People's, SDX Joint, The Commercial Press, plus the 100 university presses represent less than 20% of the total, but include most of those with over US $12 million turnover (8.3 yuan to US $1).
Provincial government houses in Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guangdong are below the national level, with city publishing houses below that. A few, like Zhejiang Educational Publishing House, are also very big. Specialist presses like The Electric Press belong to various branches of government are part of the middle range and can be quite powerful, as well.
The industry is covered by the China Book Business Review, the PW of China, which is currently a weekly.
With editor Chang Sanguo's helpful translators, we asked a wide range of publishers four basic questions: what successes they were having in translations, how do they make copyright agreements, how do they sell their books and fight piracy, and what advice do they have for American publishers wanting to do business in China.
Generally, publishers are very eager for more exchange with the USA.
"The most important thing for Westerners is to become familiar with the Chinese market," says Dong XiuYu, President of SDX Joint Publishing in Beijing. "We have a bright future and great potential. They should learn which publishers are important in China, and pay attention to the long view of China when choosing them."
Probably no publishing house exhibits the exciting future of the industry more boldly than Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press (FLTRP). President Li Pengyi has built one of the handsomest new buildings in Beijing, 17,000 square meters boldly designe, dedicated exclusively to book publishing.
Looking more like a banker than a publisher, Li graduated in 1980 from the Press's parent, the Beijing Foreign Studies University, the largest in the country and considered number one. Next year he will lead the Press's 20th anniversary.
"Much of our growth has been with successful new English language teaching textbooks."
Li already has two remarkable tenants in his new building, Addison-Wesley/Longman China and the publishers of the China Book Business Report.
The Longman cooperation started in the late 1980's and has "really taken off" according to Li in the last three years.
"There are many foreign publishers here now," says Li. "The major British houses in China started early than the Americans, with Longman and OUP first then Cambridge and BBC. From the USA Prentice Hall, Random House and Simon & Schuster have offices, but they are smaller, by comparison. All of them mostly concentrate on ELT materials."
The Longman arrangements have been brilliantly orchestrated over nearly two decades by Shanghai-born Hongkonger Willie Shen, who has been President of Longman, and now Addison-Wesley/Longman in Hong Kong for a decade.
Thanks to Shen, Addison-Wesley/Longman is the only foreign publisher allowed to do multiple title contracts in China. They are also the only foreign publisher with two showrooms there, open on a year around basis to book buyers and librarians across the country. One is housed in the new FLTRP building, the other in Shanghai. Both feature not only the 200 co-published ELT titles, produced so far specifically for the China market, but hundreds of Addison Wesley's Computer, High Education and Reference titles.
"It all takes a lot of patience," Shen admits. "But there are a number of major ELT projects in the pipeline for publication in the next two years, by which time we envisage generating handsome profit."
The other tenant of the new FLTRP building is the China Book Business Report. Modeled (we say with some pride) on Publishers Weekly and filled with advertising for new books, CBBR will go to twice weekly publication in 1999. A young and energetic staff who report on all aspects of national and international publishing (with written permission from PW, of course).
All the book sellers buy it and all the publishers advertise their new titles, and, what is really surprising, the ad rates are actually higher than PW's international ad rate!
Now President of the Writers Publishing House, a newly successful producer of bestsellers, both Chinese originals and translations, one of Zhang's trademarks is excellent design. A calendar he produced for 1998 doubled as his catalog and was one of the smartest productions PW saw anywhere in China, in both design and printing quality. And with a profit per employee of $21,000 in 1996 and the third biggest sales volume at the Beijing Book Fair that year, this "lesser" house has become a national marvel.
Recent successes have been Changing Places, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Shipping News, a Sherlock Holmes series, Growing Up and Long Walk to Freedom, with Horse Whisperers selling 220,000 copies and The English Patient 100,000.
Zhang contributes these successes to well-planned and timely multiple media promotions,
"But our best sellers are local authors' titles. One sold 900,000 copies last year, another on citizen's behavior has sold four million for us. China is a big market, so naturally everyone is interested in it."
SDX Joint Publishing Company has a list now that includes 60% translations, according to Dong XiuYu, who is both President and Editor-in-Chief. Her retailing success is remarkable, too, with one of the best bookstores in Beijing on the grounds of the publishing house. A real testamony to Western-style bookselling Dong learned in Hong Kong.
"Our own catalog includes 2000 titles published in the last 10 years," she told PW. "With more than 1000 of those translations from abroad. Since 1986 we have been working with the UK publishers, we started with the Times Atlas of the World and now we do a wide range of things, including the best authors series from the Library of America, Christian Thought in History, the Bibliotheque de France, and the Harvard-Tenching Academic Library. They also have 35 titles from DK.
SDX Joint also publishes three journals, including Book Reading which offers book reviews and articles by the country's "book scholars", something we cant say we have in the USA. With 130,000 subscribers, they began selling advertising two years ago.
"I am from Shanghai, which used to be our publishing center in China, but I think the future of the book industry is here in Beijing," she admits. "The academic and cultural communities are centered here now, and so there is a stronger academic atmosphere. Shanghai is more for businessmen, like Hong Kong. We are not so open as Shanghai, but we have a large pool of scholars."
For a number of years, publishers could "sell" their government-allotted ISBN numbers to individuals or organizations who had books they wanted to publish. But recently that practice was abolished by the government. Now, Chinese "packagers" go to publishing houses and make arrangements to work with them on projects. They are active both in Beijing and Shanghai, as well as other major urban centers, like Guangzhou. But they must step along a narrow path to avoid conflicts with the Government.
"There are lots of grass roots operations in China that are gaining more and more expertise as packagers dealing with foreign publishers," says Allyson Arias at McGraw-Hill. "I really admire them for coming in as entrepreneurs and trying to learn the business, starting from square one."
China still has no rights agents outside of the Government-run Copyright offices, which function quite differently from those in the West.
When the PRC joined the Berne Copyright Convention in October 1992, the World Intellectual Property Organization gained 1.2 billion new members. As their book market began to take off in 1995, publishers in China were eager for new titles to fill the demand, which has been increasing 20% a year. They have started buying foreign rights in earnest, but Government restrictions mean that proper mechanisms for rights buying still have a way to go.
"It's not really difficult for us to understand what is happening in China," says Hung-Tze Jan, Publisher and CEO of the young Cite Publishing House in Taipei. "They are where we were 20 years ago, in terms of copyright."
Taiwan is indeed ahead, having made enormous strides as an international publishing and rights-buying market since a bilateral copyright agreement with the USA in 1993 began protecting USA authors and publishers there. But it is unlikely China will need 20 years to catch up.
Right now, though, China has no copyright agreements with Taiwan. And the two countries are separated by their common language, Mandarin, with two different character sets. China uses simplified characters, Taiwan and Hong Kong the traditional ones. (Another confusion here: the spoken language in Hong Kong is Cantonese, though the written form is the same as Mandarin in Taiwan since Chinese characters are pictorial, not phonetic.)
Little Hong Kong, a city of just six million, successfully confronted the major copyright law reform challenge it faced in returning to China in 1997. A localized Copyright Ordinance covers matters in the Special Administrative Region, now, replacing the U.K.-based law which formerly applied.
With 1.4 billion Chinese speakers in the world, Hong Kong produced 400 new titles in 1997, Taiwan 14,000 and the PRC 120,106 (including reprints). The numbers, production quality and prices for books is increasing rapidly in China, so it is obvious where the future lies, though it is difficult to know how best to get there, when it comes to Chinese language rights agreements.
"We are keeping a close eye on PRC, but I don't think it a smart move for any Taiwanese or foreign trade publisher to rush there at this moment," says Joyce Yen, rights director for China Times in Taiwan, who d s not get involved in simplifed character rights.
"If you are in STM or reference publishing, then that's different. That's the segment where scale is all important. But when it comes to trade publishing, scale is not that important. Trade publishing is not such a capital-intensive industry. Rather, it is more knowledge- and relation-intensive: knowledge of people's tastes and changing whims and relations with the media and the booksellers are more important in trade publishing.
"Even though we in Taiwan speak the same language as those in Shanghai and Beijing, our ways of thinking are totally different. That's why I am not looking forward to a so-called 'common Chinese market,' even if the political barriers will some day come down."
One of those differences is a lingering anti-capitalist attitude towards publishing itself. In China publishing is still seen by many as a service to society rather than as a profit-making business (something many a profitless capitalist publisher can understand). This can make translation rights sales difficult, however.
"The publishers in China would like to keep uniform rates for translation rights," explains Chan ManHung at the Commercial Press in Hong Kong. "It is really something difficult for foreign publishers to understand. Yet I think it is more important for foreign publishers to get into the Chinese language markets now, legally. Then together with their local publisher partners they can figure out what kinds of translated titles will work in the market."
Many big American houses are doing just that, working directly with publishers in both markets, making separate, exclusive contracts for each character set and for each market, with high hopes for China.
"I generally license separate agreements for Chinese short and long character forms," says Allyson Arias, Asia Pacific Rights Coordinator in the International Rights Department at McGraw-Hill in New York. "And I define the territory, as well. We don't allow sublicensing by our Chinese publishers. Occasionally, though, a publisher in one form has referred an interesting sublicensor to my attention for the same book in the other form. In turn, I've then licensed to that publisher the other form, and he has worked out a separate arrangement to buy the first publisher's translation to work from. Despite the Asian Crisis, China is a tremendous market and it currently offers a lot of opportunities to license rights."
Anu Hansen, Rights Director for International Thompson also separates her agreements by character set and sell rights separately. "We definitely recommend separate agreements," she tells PW. "We deal directly with the publishers, with some agent work, but nothing exclusive with agents. It is getting more sophisticated in China and we have several good contacts there now. Our business has increased significantly.
"We started with business and computer titles, but other fields are catching on right now: business management, organizational behavior, counseling... At BEA this year we had a huge number of publishers from China closely examining different list.
The Taiwan rights agents, Big Apple/Tuttle-Mori and Bardon, both do increasing business in China. And there are two China-born rights agents in the San Francisco Bay Area helping U.S. publishers make contracts with China now, Gateway Communications and Tao Media.
When it comes to selling English language books into China these days, veteran book exporter Tom Cassidy. Since his first visited China in 1979, when English language books in the sciences, technology and medicine, along with English dictionaries, were 90% of all imports, the evolution of book buying has changed almost as much as China, itself, he reports. Now with his own firm specialized in exporting books and periodicals to China, Cassidy & Associates can be reached at chinacas@prodigy.net.
In 1997 China imported over $30 million worth of books from the USA, according to the U.S. Dept of Commerce, more than half of them scientific, technical and professional, but at least six million each in trade and textbooks. There are three million college students in China today oriented towards English and English is the second language taught to China's 62 million high school students. So the future is bright for a variety of English language books in China.
China's new wealth is giving many Chinese disposable income. Every young educated person in China sees learning English as a way to expand his career opportunities. Anything that reflects Western culture, music, business, economics, sports and the arts is purchased in ever increasing numbers by Chinese youth of the large cities of China, especially Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Guangzhou.
The major player in imported academic titles remains CNPIEC. They have an effective monopoly in periodical sales, mostly STM journals, which are 65% of the estimated $25 to $30 million market now. But others are doing trade books. Since China is becoming more of a retail market for locals, books must be priced for local buyers. Here are some price parameters for importers buying in quantity of popular subject areas:
British/American Literature: $1 to $5
Art & Architecture: $1 to $20 (Some exceptions)
Business: (all subject areas under this heading) $3 to $10
Dictionaries: $3 to $10
Normal credit terms are 120 days plus 30 days grace. Everyone pays, but some are late payers.
Here are some of the major importers licensed by the Chinese Government to import foreign books. There are no private book stores or importers of foreign books.
1. China National Publications Import & Export Corp. (CNPIEC) in Beijing. Largest of all, with many departments and a Shanghai importing operation as well. Also run the Beijing International Book Fair.
2. Beijing Publications Import & Export Corp. (BPIEC) The fasting growing in Beijing, importing all kinds of books and with a new bookstore in Beijing, covered elsewhere.
3. China Book Importing Corp. (CBIC) in Beijing. Mostly academic book importing and art/architecture books. With a small Shanghai branch.
4. Shanghai Book Traders (SBT) Like BPIEC in Beijing, they have their own building, showroom and good location, doing academic and increasingly retail business.
5. Zhonghua-Shangwu Trading Corp. in Guangzhou, doing mostly art & architecture.
Explanatory Notes
Names & Spelling. We use Chinese names as they have been given to us, either traditionally, with the family first, or "Westernized" with the first names first.
There are also several ways of spelling Chinese words in Roman letters and again we give the spelling chosen by our individual sources. Thus, it is still "Peking University Press" though they are now situated in "Beijing."
Read about Selling English Language Books in China.
See a list of Publishing Resources in the People's Republic of China.
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