Reading in China

When people emerge from feudalism only to find themselves imprisoned once more by pyschopaths dressed as plumbers, it’s difficult to take exception to any desire they may have to change their condition and to make that change permanent. However, there is always the odd Cassandra in trousers determined to find defeat in victory. “In China there are no bestseller lists,” writes Rafael Poch,

Since you can’t eat literature, less Gogol and more Google might seem like a reasonable choice, but when Rafael Poch discovers internet searches he’ll also discover that there are in fact Chinese bestseller lists – an inevitable consequence of automated stock control and intelligent consumers – and that, contrary to his belief, China may turn out to be passing through a gold-leafed age of reading.

Firstly, it’s not necessarily true that – as he suggests – people are reading less (or even buying less books). Euromonitor, for example, concludes that the main reason for the drop of 7.9% in volume sales in the period 1998-2002 was “was a decline in textbook sales following a central government ruling to reduce student study loads during the review period” and notes that value sales increased by 31.6% over the same period. When you tie in the huge volume of pirated foreign work (18 million books were seized in 2001) that has appeared on the market as WTO rules and other liberal measures have kicked in, as well as the availability (and popularity) of literature available through the internet, I think that a more intelligent conclusion would be that people are not necessarily reading less but that they are reading what they want to read.

It’s hard not to get excited by that, but are they reading rubbish? The answer is – by my criteria – clearly no. The same Euromonitor survey notes that

Much smaller surveys, although of no quantitative value, tend to reflect this highly encouraging picture. Here’s an excerpt from a summary by an unnamed American diplomat of what was selling at San Lian in Beijing in mid-1998:

While you ponder whether the Chinese public may already be receiving more accurate information about the US and the rest of the globe than readers of La Vanguardia, here’s a top 10 – same bookshop, same source – from 1999:

When you bear in mind the amount of Chomsky lugged over the counters of our main bookstores, then this is excellent stuff, but number five is bothering me. Why?

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