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 Just what we need In the last month, Beijing's English entertainment magazine world was shaken by two pieces of news. Firstly, Time Out was pulled from the shelves by regulators because the magazine did not have a publication license.
SEEC, the company that owns Caijing recently bought the magazine's operations together with its license agreement with Time Out international, but while the Chinese version (乐) does have a Chinese publication license, the English Time Out had always piggy-backed on the Chinese. GAPP, the regulator that controls magazines in China, finally decided that the piggy back arrangement was not kosher. However, sources at SEEC believe the problem will be sorted out, although probably only after the Olympics.
In the meantime, That's Beijing has also caught a little trouble. China Intercontinental Press (CIP), which controls the That's series of magazines and their publication licenses recently gave the boot to True Run Media who have been producing That's Beijing for several years. They handed the magazine over to China Electric Power Press who forked over 10 million yuan for the privilege (see Chinese press release).
It is unknown whether China Electric Power Press is aware that Mark Kitto, founder of the That's empire, has an unsettled trade mark dispute about the That's brand with CIP. Although CIP removed Kitto from his position as founder and chief of That's, they were not able to alter his ownership of the trademark, which was registered in China.
The old That's Beijing team are now working on a similar city magazine due to be published in July and called The Beijinger.
But the English-reading public of Beijing still does not know what rough beast is slouching towards us from the offices of the new That's Beijing team. A blog post by one of the new editors, subsequently scrubbed from the Internet, said they wanted to make a magazine with New Yorker style writing and W magazine layout. Oh dear.
Amidst the confusion and chaos in Beijing's English language magazine scene comes a new entrant whose debut cover is reproduced above: Expat Mag, which calls itself a "premier luxury lifestyle magazine for expatriates".
Because, you know, expatriates in Beijing and Shanghai are not exposed to enough advertising for luxury clothing brands, pens and watches. There is a clear and urgent demand amongst expatriate readers for breathy, bilingual advertorials about expensive expensive beauty products and accessories, and vacations in luxury spa resorts.
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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 National Geographic's English edition China: Inside the Dragon This article was contributed by Iacob Koch-Weser.
During this Olympic year, China has become the cynosure of the global media. That is partly due to the happenstance of snowstorms, Tibet riots, torch relay fiascos, and last but not least, earthquakes; yet plenty of items coming on stream are the result of meticulous planning. In May, National Geographic proved just that when it published “Inside the Dragon”, its first full-length edition on China in nearly a century. The last edition appeared in October 1912, just a year after the Wuchang Uprising had ended two millennia of dynastic rule and ushered in a new era of secular governance. The release of the current edition on the eve of the Olympics, 30 years after Deng Xiaoping inaugurated the Reform and Opening Up Policy, marks another milestone.
 National Geographic'a Chinese edition Focus on China: Instant and Eternal Timing aside, what is noteworthy about this edition is its Mainland Chinese version. Titled “Focus on China: Instant and Eternal ( Ningshi zhongguo: shunjian yu yongheng)”, it is being sold nationwide for 20 yuan and has been widely advertised at Beijing bus stops. The 300-page tome is nearly double the length of its English counterpart, complementing photos and translations from the English edition with its own features. Add to that a dab of censorship on politically sensitive topics, and the Chinese version is as remarkable for what it contributes as for what it leaves out.
An American publication portraying China to the Chinese - in Chinese? Not surprisingly, the choice of topics reveals certain China tropes that have gained currency in the West: the overburdened lives of middle class children who must succeed at all costs; the demographic time-bomb of the one-child policy; the rural hinterlands of Guizhou, backward and benighted yet beautifully mysterious; the polluted Yellow River and the urban jungles of the Pearl River Delta, gloomy results of breakneck development; the archaeological treasures of an ancient Sichuanese kingdom; the architectural coups of the Olympic project. The China portrayed here is forever a country of extremes, enchanting and frightening, with little room for middle ground.
And yet, while stumbling over stereotypes, there’s something fresh about this May edition. It has to be applauded for its attempt to enter new terrain in the global media. Given that National Geographic only began publishing its Chinese version in July 2007, it is still very much a work in progress. It has yet to strike a balance between authenticity, political correctness, and marketability.
Homegrown and Imported
It is generally acknowledged in China that publications have to “define a position (dingwei)”. Whether it’s the terse prose of Caijing, the vernacular of China Newsweek, or the Westernized chatter of The Bund - all these magazines have more or less defined a style for themselves. Can that be said of National Geographic China, where texts by Chinese writers are placed alongside imports from the States?
The Chinese writers NG has recruited for the May edition are predominantly book authors, not journalists. The literary tone they apply seems more geared toward conveying a mood than an argument. This becomes interesting when the content is “journalistic”: Ai Shaoqiang’s discussion of generational shifts in his native Gansu province, as well as Wang Bang’s survey of urban development in the Pearl River Delta, are most revealing in this sense. Ai Shaoqiang - known for his work on the Xiongnu and the Dunhuang caves - takes a personal angle by describing three generations in his native village. His grandmother still prays to the Jade Emperor on New Year’s and abides by traditional medicine techniques, remnants of a time when healthcare was wanting and infant mortality commonplace. One of Ai’s uncles, moreover, is so obsessed with having sons he thinks that women should keep getting pregnant until one arrives. Yet the young women of the village are more keen on mimicking the cosmopolitan mothers they see on television, who live in modern flats and have just one child to care for.
Ai’s personal tone brings his story to life. His style jives well with that of Amy Tan, the ABC author who gained fame in the US with her books The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, and other China-inspired novels. In the translated article “Village on the Edge of Time”, Tan returns to the home of her ancestors in Guizhou to find a community in flux. While the young migrate in increasing numbers to the cities, village elders still hold sway at home. Cell phones, televisions, and children’s toys are filtering in; yet when natural disaster or disease hits, shamans are called on to administer rites and appease the gods. Tan seems ambivalent about all this, lamenting the ineluctable loss of tradition, yet also marveling at the opportunities provided by change.
 Photo of the cliffs of Guanxi from National Geographic's May China issue What sets Ai Shaoqiang apart from Amy Tan is his use of concepts that only native Chinese readers can appreciate. When he points to the lack of family support networks, retirement funds, and retirement homes in China, he quotes Mencius to make a profounder point: when the family unit ( jia) dissolves, so will the country as a whole ( guo). In a similar vain, he traces the preference for male heirs back to an old dictum from the Book of Poetry, which advised parents to let sons dress in silk and sleep on beds, but to let daughters sleep on the ground and wear coarse cotton. There is a fatalistic tone here, as if the centrality of family and the bias toward males are immutably woven into China’s social fabric.
Traditional themes likewise appear in “Pearl River Delta: Sea of Cities”, an article by the urban historian Wang Bang. Wang paints a nostalgic portrait of Guangdong in the early eighties, when it was still a sleepy countryside suffused with the sounds of nature. People bragged about making the journey to the provincial capital from their rural backwaters. The notion of peaceful immobility - when the wheels of commerce were not oiled - traces its origins to Laozi, who envisioned a world of self-sufficient farming communities living in earshot of one another. As Timothy Brooks shows in The Confusions of Pleasure, the reactionary gentry of the late Ming conjured up similar images of rural serenity when threatened by social mobility, urbanization, and commerce.
It is predictable, then, that Wang Bang offers a rather gloomy panorama of Guangdong today. Poly-centric and interdependent, it is a maelstrom of labor migrants, high-rise forests, and 24-hour fast food venues. Production and consumption have been disaggregated, as satellite towns are characterized by the mono-production of underwear, refrigerators, or Van Gogh canvasses. Wang notes the disappearance of history (“Does a street have memory?”) as cityscapes are transfigured and lifeless “cultural squares (wenhua guangchang)” emerge. Environmental degradation, labor abuse, and prostitution are the order of the day. To illustrate the anything-for-cash attitude of Guangdong migrants, he uses the metaphor of a “thin magnetic card” that no longer beeps when it’s topped up with money. To appease readers, Wang ends on a brighter note - after all, Guangdong is positioned on the vanguard of Chinese media and culture, and the railway networks planned for 2020 might “give people more freedom of mobility and hence more opportunities.”
The subtlety of Wang’s pessimism makes Peter Hessler look a bit like an elephant in a china shop. Although Hessler is a strong authority on China in Western circles, his writing seems a bit presumptuous in Chinese. His narrative on teaching English to Chinese students might give foreign readers a lot of insight into China’s younger generation. But do Chinese themselves really want to hear all that again?
 br /> Photo of holiday travelers in a train station from National Geographic's May China issue In another article called “The Road Ahead”, Hessler comments on the good and the bad of social development in Zhejiang province. He starts off lauding improved infrastructure and the stellar work ethic of the locals. Yet then he goes on to list all those things that are still wrong with Zhejiang and, by extension, China. The decentralization of governance has led to chaos, as drivers are slapped with random traffic fines and the government colludes with developers in murky real estate transactions. He even resorts to an American superiority complex: during industrialization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, US cities witnessed the organic growth of institutions - the courthouse, the church, the library - and factories were forced to become more efficient due to labor shortages. China, by contrast, is witnessing the growth of cities based only on factories and stores, creating a “human rights challenge” rooted in a lack of institutions. And because labor power is in abundance, “competition is ruthless, but it’s not the sort that leads to innovation.” In Hessler’s view, China will remain a low value-added economy with a weak education system.
To some degree, imported articles are burdened with the biases of their foreign authors. Articles by Leslie T. Chang and Brook Larmer further prove that fact. Chang describes the pressure that bourgeois parents place on their single children, and the subsequent stress that children suffer amid ostensible “prosperity”. But isn’t Chang judging these children by US standards of childhood and teenage life?
Larmer reveals how socialist planning and economic development have fomented environmental disasters in northwest China. Yet is she really being constructive when she interviews the aging engineer of a dam from decades ago, or pokes fun at soldiers shooting “rainmaker” rockets into the air? While she concludes with a few words about government efforts to improve environmental governance, the reader is left with a very gloomy picture.
The Pitfalls of Political Correctness
When politically sensitive issues are at stake, the US and Chinese versions steer a different course. In the US, it is to reinforce popular notions about China; in China, it is to get past the censors. This is unfortunate for readers on both sides of the Pacific.
In a two-page feature on “culture”, the US edition displays permuted Mao oeuvres by Chinese artists like Gao Qiang - the celebrity of Factory 798 - and makes the hackneyed remark: “As attention shifts from making revolution to making money, and intellectuals debate Mao’s legacy as hero or villain, artists cash in on politically charged, tongue-in-cheek versions of the Buddha-like face”. Mao was apparently a “king of kitsch” even in his own lifetime, an argument backed by Andy Warhol’s portrait of 1972.
As expected, the Chinese version steers way clear of Mao. It places “popular media” in the stead of “culture”, providing a chronological narrative of progress in Chinese news-making. The text is a bit pedestrian: news was first made for non-political purposes in 1981, investigative TV news began in 1993, the first privately owned news corporation appeared in Guangzhou in 1997, SARS stimulated more timely reporting in 2003...The saving grace here is a word about Sister Furong and the Mantou Murder Case, one of the more hilarious results of internet democracy.
Sadly, both versions are oversimplified. A mainstream US audience with preconceptions of Orwellian media control in China would profit much from a “popular media” segment, rather than being fed more about Mao. On the other hand, Chinese readers would benefit from a less sanitized version of its media’s evolution, with a word or two thrown in about the lack of press freedoms.
In a section entitled “politics”, the US version does talk about the state of Chinese media, but in an excoriating way. Entitled “Cutting Off Dissent”, it shows the pinky-less hand of the artist Sheng Qi, which was self-mutilated in commemoration of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest. The text next to the image asks the prosaic question: “Can the ruling Communist Party continue to suppress political dissent among one-fifth of the world’s population?” Newsrooms are hounded by “daily directives” sent down from on high, and the Internet “serves as a surveillance tool for the party, which slaps dissidents with demotion, dismissal, and imprisonment”. All this is given authority by Reporters Without Borders figures (China ranks 163 of 169 nations in the press freedom assessment) and the acerbic writer James Mann, author of The China Fantasy: Why Capitalism Will Not Bring Democracy to China. This portrayal seems a bit harsh - no mention is made of the positive developments outlined in the Chinese version on “popular media”.
The Chinese version of the “politics” section, meanwhile, is a terribly drab text called “The Long Road to Reform”. Like the “popular media” bit, it proceeds chronologically: power was given to regional governments in 1982, taxes were administered separately by province in 1984, State Council Departments were decreased from 40 to 29 in 1998, more emphasis was given to government service provision in 2003...The public policy gurus at Caijing Magazine would roll their eyes at this. The average reader might just yawn and turn the page.
A Skewed Image?
Of course, the ultimate selling point of NG is its photographs. That is where nothing should get “lost in translation”. No doubt, the pictures are poignant, and likely the reason why many Chinese readers will buy the May edition. But do they provide a just representation of China?
 Photo of "addicts" being treated by "nanometer wave machines" from National Geographic's May China issue
The contrast between the city and the countryside provides a ready motif for many photos. The reader is dazzled by aerial shots of rapeseed fields in Jiangxi and of sheer cliffs in Guangxi. Ethnic minorities make their usual cameo appearance, with Dai people in traditional garb and a Tibetan equestrian in full flight. Next to this image of rural splendor are placed the masses and the new buildings that characterize the cities. Hordes of people stream into Guangzhou train station and out of a Christmas tree factory in Shenzhen. The glitzy lights of Pudong epitomize the new downtown, American cardboard cut-out houses the new suburbia.
Images are more gripping when they focus on extremes. The super-rich are thus well-represented: newly-weds sit in a convertible with Mickey Mouse mascots in back; female models eye a pure-breed husky at a Shanghai show for rich lifestyle accessories; crocodiles crawl on the floor of a five-star seafood restaurant, awaiting their fate on a gourmand’s plate. Subversive figures are also depicted, notably a headbanger at Xueshan Rock Festival in Yunnan and a thirty-something rocker jamming in his Beijing flat. An odder image shows internet addicts sitting in “nanometer wave machines”, space helmet-like contraptions that aim to cure them.
 Photo of models admiring purebred Huskeys from National Geographic's May China issue As fascinating as all these images might be, they lack a certain mundaneness. Where is the average Joe Schmo? Where is the grey satellite town? Somehow all these images aren’t “real” enough.
Ultimately, National Geographic has a lot left to prove. It needs more homegrown texts, combined with more selective use of translations. It also needs to find more clever ways of steering clear of the censors. Its photographs might gain another dimension if more Chinese were allowed to stand behind, rather than just in front, of the camera.
That said, even if they don’t agree with much of what it says, Chinese readers will find “Focus on China: Instant and Eternal” worth their 20 yuan.
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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Black is in this week. Southern People Weekly (南方人物周刊) devotes a large chunk of its current issue to the earthquake in Wenchuan and, like the nation's newspapers, uses a mostly-monochrome front page design.
Articles in the feature include a chronology, individual anecdotes from survivors, and a discussion with experts on why the earthquake wasn't predicted.
All of this is accompanied by a huge number of photos; interestingly, Premier Wen Jiabao appears in just one image.
China Newsweek (中国新闻周刊) follows last week's mostly black cover with a cover image of the flag in Tian'anmen Square at half-mast, and the headline "National Martyrs" (国殇). Like Southern People Weekly, the magazine's title logo is black-and-white.
The subhead, and the title of an introductory essay to this issue, reads "From grief, draw the power to grow": 
China, please do not cry over the disaster!
Despite that day in Wenchuan when the rivers turned color and the earth collapsed.
Let it not be tears that are written into the annals of history about 5-12; rather, let it be a splendid history, the bravery and tenacity of the Chinese people in the face of a world-shaking disaster.
In chaos we see the hero's true colors!
We have seen General Secretary Hu Jintao striding across fallen walls, giving the utmost encouragement to the officers and soldiers of the emergency squads;
We have seen Premier Wen Jiabao walking swiftly to visit each and every critical disaster zone after the earthquake;
We have seen 100,000 government troops, like a flood of iron, work miracle after life-saving miracle;
We have seen ordinary people go forth to rescue, like a newly-formed "battlefield rainbow" that has shown forth bright and beautiful over ruins after the earthquake!
...
Compared to the Tangshan Earthquake of 32 years ago, today's China is very different. The growth of civic spirit, China's economic development, people's accumulation of wealth, social progress, and China's governmental transformation have moved forward together. Large numbers of NGOs, businesspeople, and individual citizens are taking part, and in response to urgent calls, they have opened up a "second front" apart from the "main battlefield" launched by the government.
 Oriental Outlook (瞭望东方周刊) went to press before the State Council's announcement of the national mourning period, so its cover (and the reporting inside) emphasizes the relief effort that was still in full swing over the weekend.
A short photo-essay in the middle of the magazine presents scenes of the relief effort after the Tangshan Earthquake in 1976. The photos of cracked roadways, shattered buildings, forlorn-looking survivors, and PLA soldiers armed with shovels could easily have been taken in Sichuan this year.
The current issue of South Wind View (南风窗) features two major stories. The first, naturally, concerns the earthquake. Premier Wen Jiabao appears prominently, but the most interesting article asks "Why did schools collapse so badly?"
Reporter Li Beifang interviews some survivors, and then tries to determine whether schools in the quake-hit areas were actually any worse off than other buildings. Li notes that in the Kobe Earthquake of 1995 in Japan, schools were the best-preserved buildings, to the point that local governments used them as temporary shelters in the earthquake's aftermath.
Buried in the middle of the article is this quote, which probably could be used to sum up the entire situation:
Actually, low-quality school buildings are a common phenomenon across the country. It's a question of design and workmanship, and the earthquake just violently threw this problem up in front of our faces.
The second feature concerns Wang Yuanhua, a classical scholar who passed away on 9 May at the age of 88. Wang was famed for his studies of Wenxin Diaolong, the classic of literary criticism written by Liu Xie in the 5th Century.
Most other magazines reported on Wang's death this week, but South Wind View has four complete articles, including an interview with critic Wu Hongsen that reproduces some of Wang's correspondence with Wu. (Southern People Weekly, incidentally, has an interview with Wang himself, from 2006.) This article is from Danwei.org
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Black is in this week. Southern People Weekly (南方人物周刊) devotes a large chunk of its current issue to the earthquake in Wenchuan and, like the nation's newspapers, uses a mostly-monochrome front page design.
Articles in the feature include a chronology, individual anecdotes from survivors, and a discussion with experts on why the earthquake wasn't predicted.
All of this is accompanied by a huge number of photos; interestingly, Premier Wen Jiabao appears in just one image.
China Newsweek (中国新闻周刊) follows last week's mostly black cover with a cover image of the flag in Tian'anmen Square at half-mast, and the headline "National Martyrs" (国殇). Like Southern People Weekly, the magazine's title logo is black-and-white.
The subhead, and the title of an introductory essay to this issue, reads "From grief, draw the power to grow":
China, please do not cry over the disaster!
Despite that day in Wenchuan when the rivers turned color and the earth collapsed.
Let it not be tears that are written into the annals of history about 5-12; rather, let it be a splendid history, the bravery and tenacity of the Chinese people in the face of a world-shaking disaster.
In chaos we see the hero's true colors!
We have seen General Secretary Hu Jintao striding across fallen walls, giving the utmost encouragement to the officers and soldiers of the emergency squads;
We have seen Premier Wen Jiabao walking swiftly to visit each and every critical disaster zone after the earthquake;
We have seen 100,000 government troops, like a flood of iron, work miracle after life-saving miracle;
We have seen ordinary people go forth to rescue, like a newly-formed "battlefield rainbow" that has shown forth bright and beautiful over ruins after the earthquake!
...
Compared to the Tangshan Earthquake of 32 years ago, today's China is very different. The growth of civic spirit, China's economic development, people's accumulation of wealth, social progress, and China's governmental transformation have moved forward together. Large numbers of NGOs, businesspeople, and individual citizens are taking part, and in response to urgent calls, they have opened up a "second front" apart from the "main battlefield" launched by the government.
Oriental Outlook (瞭望东方周刊) went to press before the State Council's announcement of the national mourning period, so its cover (and the reporting inside) emphasizes the relief effort that was still in full swing over the weekend.
A short photo-essay in the middle of the magazine presents scenes of the relief effort after the Tangshan Earthquake in 1976. The photos of cracked roadways, shattered buildings, forlorn-looking survivors, and PLA soldiers armed with shovels could easily have been taken in Sichuan this year.
The current issue of South Wind View (南风窗) features two major stories. The first, naturally, concerns the earthquake. Premier Wen Jiabao appears prominently, but the most interesting article asks "Why did schools collapse so badly?"
Reporter Li Beifang interviews some survivors, and then tries to determine whether schools in the quake-hit areas were actually any worse off than other buildings. Li notes that in the Kobe Earthquake of 1995 in Japan, schools were the best-preserved buildings, to the point that local governments used them as temporary shelters in the earthquake's aftermath.
Buried in the middle of the article is this quote, which probably could be used to sum up the entire situation:
Actually, low-quality school buildings are a common phenomenon across the country. It's a question of design and workmanship, and the earthquake just violently threw this problem up in front of our faces.
The second feature concerns Wang Yuanhua, a classical scholar who passed away on 9 May at the age of 88. Wang was famed for his studies of Wenxin Diaolong, the classic of literary criticism written by Liu Xie in the 5th Century.
Most other magazines reported on Wang's death this week, but South Wind View has four complete articles, including an interview with critic Wu Hongsen that reproduces some of Wang's correspondence with Wu. (Southern People Weekly, incidentally, has an interview with Wang himself, from 2006.) This article is from Danwei.org
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 Translation, 2005.02 Two literary magazines bid goodbye this year. Eslite Reader (诚品好读), published by Taiwan's Eslite Bookstore, published its final issue in April before what it calls a temporary haitus, And Translation (译文), published by the Shanghai Translation Publishing House, will call it quits at the end of the year.
Neither magazine has been around long enough to become an institution. Eslite Reader launched in April 2000 (its previous incarnation, Eslite Book Review, lasted from 1992 to 1996), while Translation started in 2001. But their deaths, even if temporary, have brought about yet another round of hand-wringing over the decline of literary culture.
Eslite had the good manners to inform its readers in a notice from the editorial department that hinted at future plans
The rise of the Internet and Web 2.0 have quickly replaced unidirectional communication of information. As a print media entity that has run for a number of years, Eslite Reader is carefully considering new media possibilities. To make preparations and to plan as early as possible, we choose to put the magazine on hiatus with this issue and to say "goodbye" to readers.
Translation's shut down, on the other hand, had been rumored for weeks before the Jiefang Daily finally verified the news in a 29 April report, writing, "The subscription and editorial departments finally confirmed: Translation will cease publication at the end of the year. This news has not yet been publically announced, but it is basically fixed."
The paper speculated that the price of paper had something to do with the decision to shut down the magazine:
Opinions diverged on the notion that economic concerns had caused Translation's shutdown. Some said that literary magazines' pure drive for profit was a shame, while many other netizens expressed understanding: "You can't look toward a small group or collective to sacrifice their own interests for the betterment of society."
An informed individual said that this is the year for literary magazines to close down. First there was Eslite Reader at the beginning of the year, and now Translation is coming to the end of a sentence.
At the beginning of 2008, the news that the price of paper had gone up permeated through the publishing world, with periodicals reacting several months later than the book market. The price of paper for an ordinary 320-page, 16mo book would rise 1.8 yuan, and when a magazine like Translation is no thinner than the average book, that means that the contracting marketplace for pure literature comes under even more pressure. An employee of Xinhua Bookstores said that that the rising price of paper won't have very much effect on the book market: "If someone really likes a book, a mere two yuan won't be enough to dissuade them from buying it." But for a periodical, a price adjustment is a long-term measure that has implications for general planning and market positioning.
Of the purely literary magazines run under the auspices of Shanghai Translation Publishing House, Window on the World (世界之窗) ended a few years ago, and with this shut down of Translation, it is left with just the parent magazine, Foreign Arts (外国文艺).
But the newspaper also reported that Translation was not easy for readers to obtain:
In the conversation on STPH's online BBS, readers reacted calmly to the news of Translation's shut-down. Many people said that the magazine was as difficult to buy at the newsstand as the similarly-positioned World Literature (世界文学). If you wanted to read it, you could either subscribe or use the online e-magazine version. One netizen said, "I went to two provincial capitals but couldn't find it."
Translation had run the annual Casio Translation Contest for four years. The event was intended to bring up a new generation of literary translators, but no grand prize was ever awarded.
 Eslite Reader, 2008.04 Writing for Beijing's China Times, Nanshan Li paints a rather depressing picture of literary review magazines, comparing the fate of Eslite Reader to the death and resurrection of Read magazine a few years ago:
The Eslite Reader hiatus can't help but bring to mind the closure and restart of Read.
In 2001, Read came out under an urban, middle-class banner, as China's New Yorker, extolling the beauty of writing and ideas. Reading each issue was, for people of my generation, a beautiful reminiscence. City columns by Du Li and Jie Chen, nostalgic articles by Bei Dao, avant-garde original fiction, and its natural, elegant prose and relaxed tone all made this a magazine worth rereading. But four years later, Read shut down for want of funds. At the urging of the readership and the intellectual community, it resumed publication half a year later. The new publication [now known in English as Book Town] proclaimed, "Sketching out what we envision as good writing: it would be knowledgeable but not shallow, interesting but not forced, opinionated but not vulgar; and knowledge knows no east or west, interest covers both home and abroad, and opinions are neither left nor right." The ubiquitous Yu Qiuyu became editor-in-chief. Even if old readers had criticisms of the new magazine, for a publication possessing an independent voice unfettered by advertisers to return from the death and continue living was good fortune that all book-lovers could cheer. So we should not be too demanding; all that we ask is for it to continue to improve, that as it provides items of interest, it also continues to keep the spark of ideas aflame.
Though we may be separated by a vast distance, the hearts of all readers are as one: we sincerely hope that Eslite Reader can return as early as possible. Even if it returns like Read, that is still cause for rejoicing. Apart from increasing prices and advertising problems, book industry insiders believe that the decline of Taiwan's book industry is one major reason for the end of Eslite.
The downward slide of the industry directly leads to a drop in sales and a decline in book buyers. In this climate, a magazine like Eslite Reader, based on book reading, will naturally find it hard to buck this trend. And actually, it's not just Taiwan: the mainland's book industry is in swift decline, too. There are fewer and fewer good books, and book magazines don't have a bright future.
Daisaku Ikeda once said, "Without reading books, people will not only become superficial but they will be left behind by the forward march of society." It seems that thin sheets of paper actually bear the weight of human civilization. Reading is not just for the acquisition of knowledge; even more, it is conditioning for the soul. Humanity's limited energy determines the following reality: we can try our whole lives, but there is no guarantee that we'll be able to read all the good books in the world by ourselves. So let us leave the work of selecting and introducing good books to magazines like Book Town and Eslite Reader. For if books are the ladder to human progress, then literary review magazines are like the finely-crafted handrail on that ladder, giving us unexpected pleasures as we climb. For the sake of those pleasures, let us preserve and protect that handrail.
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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The Chinese edition of FHM magazine is four years old this month, and to celebrate, they have published a 32 page special and outsize pullout poster, titled 'Olympic epic photo spread — the journey of the sacred flame'.
It's features four models engaged in combat and sport, with art direction that appears to be inspired by Zhang Yimou historical films.
One of the models is Dai Feifei (戴菲菲), who has a blog. She has posted several of the photos to her blog, and written a short post about the photo shoot, translated below:
Got the photos from FHM 4th Anniversary Photo Special
I was invited to participate in the FHM May issue cover feature which is being published now. Because it's the fourth anniversary of the launch of the magazine, they had really strict requirements for the quality of the content, especially the cover feature.
We used three whole days to shoot it starting really early every morning and shooting until we were exhausted late at night. Of course such hard work and effort has resulted in this epic set photos with an Olympic theme: The journey of the sacred flame.
I hope everyone sees these photos and feels affected by their spirit of bravery and combat and their power, then all the work will have been worthwhile.
Perhaps the Olympic torch relay would have gone more smoothly if they had used these models to carry the torch.
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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 Film moguls look to the future. Two men in black stare out from the cover of the 25 February issue of Sanlian Life Week On the right is Han Sanping, CEO of the China Film Group, the state-owned media giant that backed last winter's blockbuster The Warlords. Next to him is Wang Zhongjun, head of Huayi Brothers, a fast-rising, Li Ka-shing backed media company that produced The Assembly, which beat The Warlords at the domestic box-office.
The cover feature, "Chinese Cinema Recovers Lost Ground" is a lengthy investigation of the current state of the Chinese film industry. Domestic films have topped foreign films at the mainland box office for five years running, and annual revenue has been increasing by 25% per year. The small coverline reads "3,527 screens worth 5.1 billion RMB." Yet industry professionals are divided about the future direction of Chinese cinema.
Here's an analysis by Jiang Wei, general manager of EDKO Film Distribution, in which he talks about the importance of finding an audience, and states: "the vast majority of movies should not be filmed":
I believe that when you're developing the script during production, you ought to be very clearly positioned. I am filming this for an audience: what sort of films to ordinary audiences like? There are only three emotions that you can convey to ordinary audiences: you can make them happy, you can make them sad, or you can make them angry when you tell them the truth. When you lock up an audience in a theater for an hour or two, you are providing a sort of liberation to their mind and their soul. If the audience can let out their feelings through your movie, then I'd call it a good movie. But if there is a strong self-awareness in the creative process, then the film has problems. The biggest failure in distribution in 2007, I believe, was The Sun Also Rises. I think it's a good movie, but I didn't understand it.
When a film is put in front of you, you must first assess whether it's for the general public. Perhaps it's only for a particular audience. If you don't even accomplish this basic step, then the movies you shoot won't be appropriate for the marketplace. What I mean by "appropriate for the marketplace" is not a commercial or artistic differentiation; rather, it's whether or not a film is well-suited to the public. It is still possible for good movies, movies that set a high artistic standard, to be appropriate for the general public. Many filmmakers can't fit their brains around this notion....in 2007, Secret (不能说的·秘密), Flash Point (导火线), and Invisible Target (男儿本色) were worth looking at. They were not big-budget films, but they still performed well at the box office....
...Hollywood is always producer-centered; a director is only a general manager, not the top boss. There are very few Hollywood directors who have say over the final edit: this shows how commercialized things are. The rules of the market do not permit anyone to go outside the lines. Hollywood production has limited tolerance for deviation. For example, passing deadlines, going over-budget—under normal circumstances, these are absolutely not permitted. It is a strict system in which everyone plays according to the rules of the game.
Over here, writing and production is director-centered, to the point that the screenwriter, director, and producer are sometimes a single person. You cannot deny that some individuals may be all-around geniuses, but this speaks to the fact that things are not professional and detailed enough. For us, film production is stuck at a relatively early stage; for true commercial-oriented operation, we must break the director-centered system. If we wish to move in the direction of the market, then we need to give support to all areas of professional experience, and this is not doable if we rely solely on the ideas and abilities of a single individual. I think that the vast majority of movies should not be filmed. Before they are filmed, did anyone think about what the movie was being shot for? Everyone says, I'm shooting this for the marketplace, but have they truly worked out who it is that they are showing it to? The Sun Also Rises, for example, is a probing, personal film. I am able to accept and appreciate it, but can ordinary audiences accept and enjoy it? All of its problems came as a result of its mistaken initial positioning.
Elsewhere in the feature, Sanlian interviews directors Ning Hao (director of Crazy Stone) and Golden Lion award-winner Wang Xiaoshuai, as well as China Film Group head Han Sanping, who talks about the soft power of Chinese film, and how the industry is currently losing out to a more agile Hollywood:
What have we been doing the past few years? We have been transitioning China's film industry from the planned economy to become part of a market with Chinese characteristics. We've spent years preparing ideas, the market, policy, and production, we have finally been successful. This is one area of industry in one country that is being developed, and we are about to enter that industry. But we must pay careful attention to the questions of national identity and national characteristics that exist in that industry. In other words, how do we imbue works with Chinese characteristics, with Chinese-language characteristics? This is a big issue. It's a source of pressure and a challenge.
Sanlian: Why is it such a big issue?
Han Sanping: Movies are too universal. Film has a much stronger sense of universality than art forms like music, dance, fiction, culture, or visual arts. If they aren't handled well, then even though they might be Chinese in content, they will belong to another country's culture. Mulan, for example: Disney's Mulan won't necessarily satisfy Chinese people. Movies today need to be high-tech, but our science and technology lags behind. America's film industry is crossing national borders to obtain material without regard to the source or the culture. If we do not work hard, then everything could be completely appropriated by Hollywood.
Sanlian: When I interviewed Ang Lee, he mentioned the same issue. He believes that modernization means westernization, because the language of film was established by westerners.
Han Sanping: Ang Lee was talking about form; I am talking about content. I've read a screenplay written by an American about the Generals of the Yang Clan. How would you assess Mu Guiying and Yang Zongbao? That would involve aspects of culture: it has taken shape out of traditional morality. In this American's script, Mu Guiying kills Yang Zongbao for the interests of the country and of the people. This judgment obviously comes as a result of their particular standpoint, but why shouldn't we have them accept our value system instead of us always accepting theirs? Of course, they're the powerful ones now, but our efforts will eventually allow us to reach that point. Differences exist between the values and morals of China and the west. Good and bad, and right and wrong, are hard to distinguish, so we've got to work hard so that they'll have to accept us. Therefore, I believe that this value system should be expressed through film. This is an expression of China's soft power.
Han brushes aside questions about the censorship system, saying only, "The party is calling on us to open up our thinking further, but of course things will still move step by step."
 Oriental Outlook, 2008.02.28 That statement was made in response to the Sanlian journalist's observation that in terms of subject matter and performance, things were freer in 2007 than they had ever been. Coincidentally, the same idea appears in the current issue of Oriental Outlook magazine. "Film censorship is more relaxed now than ever," reads the coverline underneath an image clipped from the poster for Lost in Beijing (which reportedly was still playing in theaters several weeks after being banned).
Oriental Outlook talked to Zheng Dongtian (郑洞天), a professor at the Beijing Film Academy who is also on SARFT's review committee. Much of the article is a retread of the wide-ranging cuts demanded of Lost in Beijing before it was released, but the magazine elicits a number of interesting anecdotes concerning the review process.
Wang Renyin (王人殷), the former editor of Film Art magazine who serves on the review committee as an "outside expert," uses Fragrant Vows (芬芳誓言, 2000) as an example when discussing Lost in Beijing's cuts:
After the first review of Lost in Beijing, the committee listed fifteen areas that needed to be cut or revised. One demanded that "all scenes in the film of political symbols such as Tian'anmen, statues of Chairman Mao, sales of Cultural Revolution era posters, and flag-raising ceremonies must be deleted."
Wan Renyin explained that special care must be taken in handling things like the statues of Chairman Mao, which could easily cause problems. "For example, the movie Fragrant Vows had a scene like this: two people are having sex on a bed. The next image is of a bust of Chairman Mao. Right afterward, they can't perform. What sort of impression does this give? Films are created by editing, and one plus one is not two - things get drawn out. That sort of scene is one we'd consider deleting."
Zheng reveals some behind-the-scenes information on why a ratings system is not likely to be implemented in the near future:
Actually, everyone on the review committee is hoping for a ratings system, but there's a sense that now is not the time—people feel that once movies are rated, there will be ambiguity, that the rating system is so that people can do sex and violence, Cat III films...I participated in two drafting discussions, and something was written out five or six years ago. At first there were three grades, but then it was cut down to two because they felt that the designation "Category III" wasn't appropriate for China. Now, no one is willing to start anything for fear of future problems.
And he discusses the question of homosexuality:
Zheng Dongtian told Oriental Outlook that there aren't any formal, detailed rules on this issue, but his judgment is, "the entire movie, from start to finish, cannot be a single homosexual love story." That is why films like Happy Together, Lan Yu, and Brokeback Mountain could not be shown in mainland theaters. And the Spring Comes, although it shows a homosexual relationship, does not "simply tell a homosexual love story from start to finish," so it passed the censors.
So why was 2007 the most permissive year for film? Zheng Dongtian justifies that judgment by pointing to the fact that the board is rejecting fewer movies. In his four-year tenure he only recalls rejecting Summer Palace and a Hong Kong triad film (possibly Jiang Hu, which was rejected in 2004). He also points to Li Yang's Blind Mountain as a good example of the censors' leniency. That film was given the go-ahead, unlike the director's earlier effort, Blind Shaft.
However, Blind Mountain reportedly had to alter its downer of an ending, in which a father goes on a murderous rampage when he is unable to recover his daughter who is being held against her will in a small village. The approved ending was more socially-responsible: with the help of the police, the father is able to rescue his daughter from the village where she is being held. Zheng points out that in a nod to social realities, the raid takes place at night, because the police are too underpowered to face the villagers during the daytime.
Wang Renyin concurs with Zheng's assessment, noting that many of the movies that have made it to screens in recent years would not have been approved in an earlier era. Crazy Stone is the example she uses (although that wasn't a 2007 film). She concludes, "So long as a film doesn't have any political problems," it will be approved.
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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 Yazhou Zhoukan
January 20, 2008 Hong Kong-based newsweekly Yazhou Zhoukan (亚洲周刊) was informed by its distributors last December that it could no longer accept subscriptions from mainland China.
Under Chinese press regulations, as an overseas publication, Yazhou Zhoukan was never able to be sold outside of high-end hotels, and its subscriber base was limited to overseas passport holders.
Translated below is a column by Tsui Sio-ming (崔少明), a Hong Kong journalist who was involved with Yazhou Zhoukan in its early days, when the magazine was little more than a digest of regional newspapers.
The mainland newsweekly South Wind View recently recruited Tsui to write a column about Hong Kong media based on his own experiences in the sector. Tsui was involved with the founding of both Yazhou Zhoukan and Jimmy Lai's pioneering weekly, Next Magazine (壹周刊).
My Life in Magazines
by Tsui Sio-ming / SWV
Recently, Hong Kong newspapers ran a piece of incongruous news, the gist of which was that hotels on the mainland can no longer sell the Ming Pao Group's newsweekly Yazhou Zhoukan, although foreign nationals and citizens of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau are still be able to subscribe.
Foreign reporters are free to conduct interviews in China because of the upcoming Olympics, so many people believed that policies would be loosened rather than tightened. But the circulation of information is directed, and in general, its inflow is restricted while its export is relaxed. That is, foreign journalists may freely gather information for export, but bringing in information still requires discretion. From the perspective of the mainland, the magazine's covers were highly provocative. But that's just the standard set of tricks used by magazines in Hong Kong and Taiwan; it's not unique to that particular magazine.
Frankly, if you want to talk news, it's only the current Yazhou Zhoukan (abbreviated YZ, perhaps the only Hong Kong magazine that uses the Pinyin version of its name as its English title) that delivers. When the magazine was launched two decades ago, it was the equivalent of the mainland's Reference News (参考消息).
I joined the team during YZ's planning stage and worked for two years following its formal launch. I left around Autumn, 1989. I'd even written a lead editorial back then. Later, an "enthusiast" wanted to start a "city weekly," and the boss recommended me. So after YZ, I became one of the senior members of Next Magazine.
When I was at YZ, the magazine was a little brother to the English-language Asiaweek (AW), which at the time was a competitor to the Far Easter Economic Review (FEER), the pioneering English-language east-Asian newsweekly. Although it could not compete in influence, it nonetheless occupied a stable position in southeast Asia. At that time, China's economy was gradually opening up, and the vibrant atmosphere held a vast thirst for information. Michael O'Neill, the New Zealander who founded AW, added a Chinese-language edition in the hopes of expanding northward.
This idea was common idea in the Hong Kong media world, but the key was making it a reality. O'Neill was a newsman; he was not proficient in Chinese, but he believed in the superiority of the AW model, which he copied for the Chinese edition. AW was printed in full color, comparable to the South Wind View you're reading now. In comparison, the Chinese-language publications in many places of southeast Asia at the time were crudely-printed with tightly-controlled news. The Chinese language was practically ostracized, so Chinese readers were naturally flabbergasted at the prospect of a current events magazine printed in color. But Hong Kong did not lack for full-color magazines, and the AW content model was not a sufficient selling point.
What was the AW content model? Originally, the magazine was supposed to cover all of Asia, but manpower was limited, so it mainly relied on rewrites: picking and choosing from wire reports and the newspapers from across Asia that were air-mailed to Hong Hong, and then doing a comprehensive rewrite. Your own news-gathering would make up less than half. This was incredibly common in the Hong Kong media world. The city's newspapers were small-scale, and for some stories it was impossible to send someone to the scene, so you'd record TV and radio reports and use them as a "staff report." At the most, you'd call up someone involved and quote a sentence or two.
Although this violated intellectual property rights, there was no way to cover everything that happened every day, so in most cases a line or two would be sufficient. But it was different for a weekly. If rewrites made up most of the content, then you couldn't call it "news"—it'd only be a "digest." Of course, given the demands of life these days, being able to quickly and easily read up on the week's major events is an important thing. Bearing the name "Asiaweek" meant that YZ could not just report on Chinese affairs: it had to talk about the Middle East and Southeast Asia, too. But Hong Kong's buildings were climbing as fast as its stock market, and it cared little for those "backward regions."
O'Neill's deep belief in the superiority of the AW model was founded on the fact that after the scribes had finished pasting their clippings up into a draft, another research team would verify each word against the clippings before the magazine hit the streets, in order to insure that everything was completely accurate. However, if you pick up any three Chinese-language newspapers, you'll discover that their reports on a single incident are far from identical—not just in their positioning, but in details as well—meaning that the reader has to judge which version is most responsible. So which clipping should a scribe rewrite into a report? And which clipping should a researcher verify the report against? If you trust in something merely because it has been printed in a newspaper, that's dogmatism, not checks and balances.
This system reduced newsmen to "word processors." YZ ran only 50 to 60 pages a week, and the boss had final say in the subject matter. Everyone else in the editorial office just sat at their desks, a newspaper in one hand and their manuscript paper in the other. The writers were responsible for rewriting the newspapers, while I and the other editors took charge of rewriting their manuscripts. Five days a week. We rarely made any phone calls to an outside line.
I worked quickly, so most of my time was spent waiting to get off work. The pay was decent, but it was a waste of my youth. Later, when I submitted my resignation, the foreign boss invited me to dinner to urge me to stay on. But a colleague who knew me relatively well and who was quite well-liked by the boss told him: he has the title "assistant manager," but he's really just a "glorified copy-editor."
As for the editorial I mentioned earlier: it wasn't actually a YZ editorial, but rather the boiling-over of Hong Kong's public opinion. The manager couldn't write Chinese, and as his right-hand man I was duty-bound to do it. Per YZ practice it was published unsigned. We had this rule to make it a collective product, not the work of any single individual. But apart from the typing (because PCs were not widespread, we still wrote out drafts by hand) and copy-editing, I took did all the work for that piece. To tell you the truth, authors' names were not attached for fear that competitors would recruit them away.
Links and Sources
- South Wind View 《南风窗》. "My Life in Magazines" 我的杂志生活. 2008.1.30-2.12, #351, p 94. Not currently online, but it may appear in the archive of South Wind View columns on Tsui Sio-ming's blog
- Image from Taobao
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 I am Joe's mainland Chinese edition. Reader's Digest has broken into the Chinese market.
A licensing agreement with the Shanghai Press and Publication Development Corporation brings the general-interest magazine to the mainland, where it is published under the name Puzhi (普知, "general knowledge"). The first issue hit stands in January (it's actually a double issue that covers February as well). It opens with a brief history of the magazine, from its founding in 1922 up through the 50 editions in 21 languages that are published today.
Of course, this is not the first Chinese-language Reader's Digest in existence—there are editions in both Hong Kong and Taiwan. And it's not even the first magazine of that name on the mainland.
In 1981, the magazine now called Duzhe (读者) was known as Reader's Digest (读者文摘). It caught the attention of the American magazine as early as 1982, when circulation had reached 420,000, but it wasn't until the 90s that the IP lawyers got involved in earnest. The Chinese publication finally changed its name in March, 1993.
The two magazines are similar in scope, but with its glossy printing and 12 yuan price (compared to Duzhe's newsprint and 3 yuan), Reader's Digest is obviously going after a different readership.  Is this supposed to be funny? If you've read the English-language edition, you'll find much that's familiar in Puzhi. The usual departments are all here—humorous anecdotes, medical miracles and scientific discoveries, inspiring stories of real-life heroes, and quotes from famous people. There's an advertising insert section, just like you find in the US (this one's 12 pages long and devoted to the Beijing Olympics). Even the Word Power feature has been adapted for Chinese readers: improve your vocabulary by taking a quiz on obscure terms from ancient classics.
Although translations make up a hefty chunk of the content, there is original Chinese-language material as well: this issue contains an interview with Andy Lau and a profile of zoologist Pan Wenshi.
Translations can only go so far, anyway. It's one thing to read, say, a gripping account of one woman's fight with a cougar; it's another when you're puzzling over a translated joke that doesn't make any sense.
Fortunately, Puzhi continues the Reader's Digest practice of paying readers for their contributions—380 yuan for funny anecdotes and 1000 yuan for real-life stories—so future issues should have more accessible humor.
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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 Phoenix Weekly
January 5, 2008 Phoenix Weekly starts the year off with a cover story on Joseph Stalin and the Great Purge. It's been seventy years, more or less, since Stalin consolidated his control over the Soviet Union through widespread arrests, show trials, and executions. Huang Zhangjin, head of the magazine's editorial department, wrote this four-part feature that leads off with a reference to President Vladimir Putin's commemoration of purge victims on 30 October, 2007.
The articles present a general history of the Purge, a look at Stalin's motives and the Moscow Trials (titled "For the good of the party, we suggest you slander yourself"), and a history of the "red meat grinder": the KGB and its directors.
The series is available on Huang's blog (where it appears under the title Красный террор, "Red Terror").
Other features in this issue:
- The Xiamen PX project may move to Zhangzhou, although a final decision has not yet been made. The article is basically a run-down of the whole situation.
- Also on the cover is a story on the "Olympic Dream for Darfur" organization and other attempts to link the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games to issues of foreign policy, human rights, and the environment.
- There's a photo-essay by Wang Hong, who spent time with border forces in 1986. Some of these photos are identical to those published in Southern People Weekly's similar story back in November.
The magazine also includes a special report on the Shan State Army, which the government of Burma considers to be a terrorist organization. Phoenix journalist Wang Qing conducted an interview with Colonel Yawd Serk, head of the SSA. Here are his thoughts on China:
Phoenix Weekly: What do you think of Sino-Burmese relations?
Yawd Serk: China is a friendly neighbor to the Shan State, and we want to cultivate a good relationship with China. We don't want China to stand idly by; we want it to be concerned with problems in Burma.
PW: What kind of attention do you want from China?
YS: First, and most importantly, is to tell the Burmese military to stop the slaughter, to stop killing civilians. Second, have the Burmese government respect the peace agreement. If there is chaos in the Shan State, many refugees will flee to China and Thailand. We do not wish for the people of the Shan State to become refugees and flee to other countries, but they are in a difficult situation. If China can act, if it can be a mediator and get all armed parties to sit down together for talks, that would be good.
PW: You believe that China can be of more use, that it is better able to solve Burma's problems?
YS: Yes. I think it can. China has invested a lot in Burma; we do not want to see China just chase after profit. If they invest but profit does not make its way down to the people, we do not endorse that. We hope that China can increase stability in Burma. However, the Burmese army is smart; they won't simply listen to what China says. They will use India and Russia to resist China. If they are pressured by China, they can play the India or the Russia card.
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Shanghai Eye reports on the demise of an expatriate oriented magazine published in Shanghai:
Rumour has it Shanghai’s NVR magazine, a rip off of The Week, is no more. Most nodding dogs agree, this was likely to happen.
Owner That's Shanghai is looking pretty ropey too, and now comes with a “RMB 18″ price sticker. Hmm, and SH magazine is going out too, recent rumour has it staff have been thrown out the windows at an alarming rate, even for a free English language Chinese city magazine.
So that leaves City Weekend, joyfully rubbing their hands, counting their pennies and shooting anything that looks like content. Or maybe the old dame of Shanghai’s English language city mags, Shanghai Talk, maybe the only one left. This is like watching the world’s oil suppliers fall to the whims of happenstance. Or is it all an evil plot??
Two thoughts:
1. The idea of doing a news magazine that aspires to be "the only news source you'll ever need" (despite being published in China in partnership with a State-owned entity) is quite ridiculous. English-reading expatriates get quite enough of anodyne nonsense passing for journalism in the China Daily etc.
2. Perhaps your correspondent is biased, since he was the founding editor of the two publications mentioned below, but the English language media in Beijing is simply much better than in Shanghai. That's Beijing, which is operated by a different company than the Shanghai version, is fat, full of ads, and often contains good and informative writing and regular humor columns by people who actually know how to write, like Kaiser Kuo. They also publish a growing range of books.
Beijing also has Le - TimeOut Beijing which has pushed the envelope of expat rag content with columns on gay and *** issues, some great cartoons and good writing about urban life in Beijing.
Le - TimeOut was recently sold to SEEC, the Chinese media company that produces Caijing magazine. According to TimeOut editor in Chief Tom Pattinson, the entire editorial team is staying together and they are looking forward to a year of expansion with their new, powerful and well-funded owners. So how about a website fellas?
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 Southern Metropolis Weekly, 28 December 2007 Southern Metropolis Weekly's annual retrospective returned last week in a special issue titled "SM 2007."
This year's wrap-up is more approachable than last year's, whose relentless egao really demanded familiarity with the situations that were being parodied. This year's theme, "Double-Sided 2007," allows the year's major events to be presented alongside the spin that various interested parties came up with.
The new Labor Contract Law—in particular, the media storm surrounding efforts by a number of major companies to restructure their employment contracts before the law took effect on the first of this year—leads the pack of controversial issues, followed by the case of Peng Yu, the Starbucks affair, the black kiln scandal, Wang Shuo's return, the dodgy stock analyst, and dozens of other big news stories. All told, the magazine picks eighty-two "double-sided" stories for 2007, along with ten "two-faced" celebrities, including Putin, Yang Lijuan and, of course, Wang Shuo.
In the issue's foreword, editor Chang Ping describes how the magazine arrived at this year's theme:
Passing a year in SM
by Chang Ping / SMW
1
A few weeks ago, a friend asked me about keywords for 2007. I blurted out "true and false" (真假). By then, the cardboard baozi troublemaker had already been sent to prison, netizens were battling the South China Tiger, the fake white collar income standard had just come out, the market outlook had suddenly clouded over, and there was even a question mark hanging over the photo sent back from Chang'e I....from economic development to cultural choices, from personal integrity to government authority, it seemed that everything had come under suspicion.
In addition, some things that seemed rock-solid, like the statement from the Shaanxi Forestry Bureau, turned out to be unable to stand up to scrutiny, while some things that seemed weak and flimsy, like the nail house, or Xiamen public opinion, turned out to be far stronger than we imagined.
It was in this space between true and false that we spent the last year.
2
Do you remember the year-end special issue of Southern Metropolis Weekly last year? It was called "Reverse News Dictionary: Restructuring 2006," and had a picture of an upside-down elephant on the cover. Many things last year were disappointing to all of us, so we cooked up a world to pursue a different historical possibility. Yes, it was a summation and sublimation of that year's break-out egao (恶搞) , a salute to egao in egao form.
Who would have thought that in 2007, egao would come off the Internet and into real life, out of the imagination and into reality? Formerly uproariously funny, it became something simply dumbfounding; clearly-defined right and wrong turned into something where true and false were hard to distinguish.
So we no longer have to construct a fictional world, nor do we dare. Upended phenomena were all over this year's news. Like the old saw goes, reality is stranger than fiction—better, more brutal, sharper, and more ridiculous.
This special year-end wrap-up is actually very simple, nothing more than a comparison of the facts. But they'll surprise you once you take a look. This year was filled with ups and downs, life was fraught with tension, society faced deep contradictions, and the future awaits the proper choice.
It was in this space between right and wrong that we spent the last year.
3
Finally, we decided to to name this special issue "Double-Sided 2007" because we discovered that many things require you to judge between true and false or black and white, while even more things can reasonably be seen as double-sided or multiple-sided. We wish to lay them out first and then to screen, to understand and then to trim.
Speaking of cuts, the movie Lust, Caution is a prime example. If cinemas had both an original and a bowdlerized version, then there would be no need for so many people to make their way to Hong Kong, nor would there be no evidence available for critics. Nevertheless, we have judged Tang Wei as one of this year's "two-faced" personalities.
Our idea is that while presenting the real and fake, we can also confront the diversity of the world.
It was in this diversity that we spent the last year.
4
When we wrote out the English abbreviation for "Southern Metropolis" and "double-sided" (双面) as "SM," we had the terrible realization that this was also the abbreviation of the English word "sadomasochism." The double-sided mixture of real and fake in 2007 made this a year of SM.
SM is one form of love. In an age of devastation, the poet [Ai Qing] wrote, "Why are my eyes always filled with tears? Because I have such a deep love for this land." And such is our view of 2007: Why is it always such a painful struggle? Because we have such a deep love for this land.
It was in SM that we spent the last year.
Links and Sources
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 Guo Jingming, Luoluo, Cai Jun, Sharon, and GirlneYa. Over the past year or so, the biggest names in young adult literature have used their fame to launch magazines. From the launch of Guo Jingming's Top Novel and Ming Xiaoxi's Princess at the end of 2006, through Sharon's M-Girl in October,
The industry calls them "mooks," or magazine-books (杂志书), and traces their origin to Japan. They have the colorful layouts and periodic publication of a magazine but are printed and bound like books, making them both long-lasting and attractive to young consumers. The concept of a book-like magazine is not a new one, but its application to the young adult market is relatively recent.
Technically, some of these new mooks are actual books; because of the way that periodical publication is regulated in China, it sometimes makes more sense to publish under a separate ISBN for each issue rather than going to the trouble to obtain a magazine registration number (it also may help a newly-launched title by allowing its issues to remain on sale longer). Each issue of Top Novel, for example, is a separate book published by Changjiang Literature and Arts Press.
There's quite a large market for these mooks, which cost around 12 yuan per copy (with a few outliers), more than twice what conventional short story magazines like Stories or Wuxia Stories sell for. According to a report in Southern Weekly this past September, Guo's Top Novel has reached sales of 500,000-600,000 copies per issue. GirlneYa! has a circulation in the neighborhood of 160,000, and book agent Lu Jinbo estimates that Sharon's new magazine M-Girl is somewhere in the middle.
But their importance is not limited to sales numbers; these magazines are often just one part of a multi-pronged media strategy. They may be used as platforms to serialize novels that will later be released as stand-alone volumes, or to run teasers for books that have already been published. A number of authors are involved in film and music projects that are connected to the magazines.
Here are short profiles of six magazines from some of the most well-known YA authors:
 Top Novel, December 2007 Top Novel (最小说)
Founded: November, 2006
Type: Mook. Beginning in January, 2008, Top Novel will begin publishing as a true periodical using the license of Birch Forest, a magazine of student literature put out by Changjiang Literature and Arts Press.
Famous Name: Editor Guo Jingming, author of such best-sellers as City of Fantasy and River of Sorrow.
Age Range: 13-17. Guo's other marquee project, the I5land series, is aimed at "people between the ages of 16 and 25, including high school and college students, as well as white-collars who have just started their careers," according to Li Bo, general anager of the Beijing office of Changjiang Literature and Arts Press, which publishes both series.
Cost: 10 yuan (this will likely change with the format switch)
Offerings: Campus literature, lavishly-illustrated sentimental essays and prose poems, reader interaction section at the back.
Current Serial: Guo's Tiny Times (小时代), like River of Sorrow, this is being promoted as an "all-new style."
 Princess, December 2007 Princess Monthly (公主志)
Founded: December 2006.
Type: Magazine. Originally published using a license from Young Life (少年人生), it now comes out under the Feixia (飞霞) label.
Famous Name: Ming Xiaoxi (明晓溪), a prolific author of Korean-style YA romance, edits.
Age range: According to the Southern Weekly article, "Lu Jinbo believes that China's book market has entered an age when secondary-school students occupy a dominant consumer position: 'Post-80s writers like Han Han, Guo Jingming, and Zhang Yueran have extended their readership to 16 and 17-year-olds, while GirlneYa and Ming Xiaoxi have readers in the 12 to 16 age range'."
Cost: 10 yuan
Offerings: General YA fiction, tending toward romance but incorporating fantasy and adventure. Some of the writers have connections to the Novoland fantasy project. Managing editor Shen Hanying told Southern Weekly, "I don't want Princess to be personal brand. I want to give a dream world to girls who like to dream: a rose colored fable, a glittering crystal conservatory, an extravagantly lovely pumpkin carriage, miraculous rose magic books, candy houses overflowing with fragrance and love, a place where you can drink your afternoon tea in the sunlight while reading lucid, transparent, romantic fairy tales..."
Current Serial: Vivibear, a writer who reportedly lives in Sweden, follows the popular Search for the Dragon (寻龙记) with Fantasy Knight (骑士幻想夜), inspired by Arthurian legends.
 GirlneYa!, November 2007 GirlneYa! (火星少女)
Founded: March 2007
Type: Magazine. Published under CN63-1052, the periodical license for Happy Youth (快乐青春), a Qinghai-based youth lifestyle magazine. The Chinese name of GirlneYa! translates as "Martian Girl."
Famous Name: Editor GirlneYa (郭妮), a prolific YA author. The magazine is the creation of Lu Jinbo, a successful book promoter.
Cost: 12 yuan
Offerings: 320 pages | |
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