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Except for a few stray drifting bits of white fluff, the plague of willow and poplar catkin that descends on Beijing every spring seems to have left us at last.
Every year when the willow cotton arrives, I am reminded of the novel Flying Catkin (飞絮), published in 1926 by Zhang Ziping, a Shanghai-based writer who was one of China's most popular novelists in the 1920s and early 1930s.
Zhang's career is an interesting one. Together with Yu Dafu and Guo Moruo, he was a founding member of the Creation Society. Alluvial Period Fossils (冲积期化石), a semi-autobiographical novel published in 1922, holds the rather meaningless distinction of being the first full-length novel of the May 4th period.
But Zhang's popular image as a trashy romance novelist was shaped by his later works, and the controversy over his books has echoes in today's publishing industry. In the late 1920s, Zhang struck out on his own, setting up a publishing house, running magazines, and publishing an astonishing number of novels within the space of a few years — so many that he was accused of hiring hack writers and slapping his name on their work (compare to Hai Yan).
Flying Catkin tells the story of Liu Xiuxia, a young woman torn between her education and the love of two men. Her father wants her to accept the proposal of Lü Guang, a professor recently returned from overseas, but Xiuxia has already pledged her heart to her childhood sweetheart Wu Mei, a struggling writer. As the novel progresses, Xiuxia's affections drift from from one suitor to the other like a puff of willow cotton carried on the wind. She's ultimately raped by Wu, marries Lü, then leaves him when she finds out she's carrying Wu's child. The novel's tragic romance struck a chord with readers: it went into successive printings and sold tens of thousands of copies, making it one of the author's most successful works.
Xiuxia is typical of Zhang's protagonists: indecisive young women whose lives are subject to horrible events beyond their control. But Zhang shouldn't be given all the credit for the novel's success: he adapted (or lifted) it from a Japanese novel serialized in Asahi Shimbun in 1919, when he was a student in Japan. When Flying Catkin came out in print, Zhang felt it necessary to explain the connection in order to head off any charges of plagiarism. Here's a translation of the preface:
Over the summer break I read the story 归儿日 serialized in Asahi Shimbun and thought that it was quite well-written. With nothing to do in the summer, I got the idea of translating it day by day to make a bit of spending money. The school didn't provide any stipend at the time, so life was hard. And the weather was too hot, so I had no creative drive of my own. I simply translated the story every day for about a week. Later on, however, I discovered that there were too many thing that I couldn't translate, and as I read further, I found that the writing wasn't as good as the beginning. I was disappointed, but I also felt that it would be a shame to simply burn all those translated manuscripts. So I worked over my translation into the deformed Flying Catkin. Later, for various reasons, and because I was afraid of criticism, I never sold the manuscript. After the founding of this publishing house, I presumptuously gave it a slot on the press's booklist — it's quite shameful, really.
At any rate, Flying Catkin can't be called a purely original work. You could call it an imitation of 归儿日, or you could say that it was written after various suggestions in that novel.
At any rate, when I read the last half of that book, I felt that both it and Flying Catkin were both clumsy works; I feel a deep regret over this.
Also, I must add one more thing: I completed this manuscript before I finished reading 归儿日.
8 April [1926]
Zhang declined to name the original author, and even the title is unclear (in my simplified-character version, it's given as 归儿日, but one scholarly paper lists it as 帚え日). Other works were "inspired" by Japanese sources as well: later scholars have made a convincing case that Spring in Meiling (梅岭之春), a short story about a girl's affair with her uncle, was an unattributed rewrite of Shimazaki Toson's New Life.
 Steamy As a relatively early-period work, Flying Catkin is still fairly tame: the female protagonist is only involved with two men, and the obligatory rape scene is handled with a "fade-to-black." Novels of the late 20s and early 30s were much more explicit; shown here is the cover of a 1993 reissue of Happiness at Last, whose back-cover copy describes it as "the story of an affair between five men and one woman."
On the basis of his success as a writer, Zhang lectured in "fiction studies" at a number of universities. But his lack of a humanities degree (he studied geology in Japan and published science texts in addition to fiction) led some critics to comment that the universities were merely taking advantage of his celebrity status to attract additional students.
Zhang's "fiction studies" and his predilection for cookie-cutter romantic triangles led Lu Xun to formulate a classic definition of Zhang's work in an acerbic bit of commentary published in the journal Mengya in 1930:
Now let me distill the essence of The Complete Works of Zhang Ziping and "fiction studies" below as an offering to those admirers, an imaginary dish of plums to quench their thirst. That essence is: △.
That wasn't the last time that Zhang tangled with Lu Xun. In 1932, he began serializing the novel Crossroads of Time and Love in the newspaper Shen Bao. The following spring, the serialization was terminated by supplement editor Li Liewen, and Zhang was mocked by Lu Xun and left wing writers as having been "cut off at the waist" and rejected for going beyond the boundaries of decency. Scraps of doggerel and invective filled the pages of Shanghai's literary magazines, and the episode ultimately marked the beginning of the end of Zhang's fiction career. Although his works continued to sell throughout the 30s, he turned his energies to science writing and translation during the remainder of the decade.
In the 1940s he published one last original novel, The New Scarlet Letter (新红A字), a surprisingly well-written romance set in Shanghai under the Wang Jingwei government, but his association with the puppet government earned him a prison sentence after Japan's surrender.
Of course, the parallels with authors today aren't exactly one-to-one: after the founding of the People's Republic, Zhang worked as translator for the Commercial Press until 1955, when he was arrested as a counter-revolutionary. He was sent to a labor farm in 1958 and died there the following year.
Still, when the publishing industry is murmuring about setting up a rating system for books to protect children from literature's slide into the gutter, or when people wring their hands over recalcitrant plagiarists like Guo Jingming, Zhang's novels of the 1920s and 30s remind us that mainstream culture was nothing sacred even in the legendary days of the May 4 movement.
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This article is from Danwei.org
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 Guo Jingming can definitely afford Prada. An annual list of the top 25 authors in China, ranked by earning power, was released earlier this week. As usual, the Chinese media has had a great time getting quotes from authors about how the whole thing's wildly inaccurate and then running op-eds making fun of them for protesting too much.
Guo Jingming, who ranked fifth on last year's list, is tops this year, with estimated royalties of 11 million yuan. Last year's leader, essayist Yu Qiuyu, drops to 10th place this year. Han Han (#3 last year) is now in 12th, and other popular writers like Eryuehe (#2 last year) and Su Tong (#4) have dropped off completely. CCTV lecturers Yu Dan and Yi Zhongtian are in second and third place, respectively (Yu for the first time; Yi moved up from seventh. His response: "Yay! I've improved!")
There's some question as to whether Guo Jingming deserves to be #1, not just because he writes frivolous fiction for teens, or because he still refuses to issue a court-mandated apology to the author whose work he plagiarized, or even because his induction into the China Writers' Association with the backing of Wang Meng means that he's now part of the establishment. No, it's because his role as editor of Top Novel, a fiction magazine, and I5land, an anthology series, means that a good deal of his book-related income can't strictly be called "royalties."
His former collaborator Hansey, who led a group of editors to break away from Top Novel magazine in late September amid complaints of overwork and underpay, told the Shanghai Morning Post that because salaries at the magazine were fixed, Guo Jingming "took away more than 95% of the magazine income." Wu Xiaoyao, who compiled the rich list, said that Guo really only earned 3 million in royalties this year; remainder of the 11 million figure came from his magazines, making him more of a publisher than an author.
Lu Jinbo, the publisher behind Han Han and Wang Shuo, make a similar observation. He also remarked that the numbers across the board would be more realistic if they were knocked down 30%.
The Beijing News reported complaints from a number of other authors:
Even though Lu Tianming complained loudly on his blog that he was wrongly entered on the list - that his real earnings last year were far from 2.5 million yuan - this reporter was led to believe that a number of authors on the list actually made even more than the figure reported for their income. Ms. Zhang, a representative of Red Bookstore, which publishes the works of Sharon (Rao Xueman), stated outright: "Sharon's income is more than the 5.2 million on the list." Sharon herself just smiled, and said only that she could confirm that the number made public was not correct. Qin Yingzhi, marketing manager at the Boji Tianjuan Book Distribution Company, which handles Cai Jun's books, revealed that Cai Jun's income was definitely higher than the 4.05 million mentioned on the list. And Yang Hongying, who placed 7th with 4.8 million yuan, dodged the question, saying only that the figure was incorrect; the correct figure could be found at the tax bureau.
Lu Tianming's argument is pretty convincing:
In 2007, I published no new books and finished no new books or TV shows. The only thing was a 5000-copy reprint by People's Literature of my County Party Secretary, and I have yet to get my hands on the royalties for that. And how much can I get for 5000 copies? I suspect that you all know the answer. Apart from this, I received a bit of royalties from reprints, like Changjiang Publishing House's reprint of Pure Snow and People's Literature's first edition of County Party Secretary, but that too was just 10,000 copies.
He goes on to list a few more minor sales and a couple television adaptations that were completed several years back, but none of them seem popular enough to put him among the 25 highest-earning writers (particularly since he wasn't on the list list last year).
Zheng Yuanjie, who moved from eighth place to fourth this year, responded to the list with a complaint about publishers. Last year, the popular children's fairy-tale writer called the royalty numbers bribes; in a blog post this year, he hails the list as a way to keep publishers honest:
Normal Chinese publishing houses pay fees to authors in two main ways: royalties, and a base manuscript fee plus a fee based on print numbers. The two methods are closely tied to the print number; that is, there is a direct relationship between the print number and the fee amount. So the print run of a book has a direct influence on an author's income. It is difficult for authors to precisely supervise the print numbers of their works. Out of profit motives, a publisher may violate professional ethics and hide the true number from the author, thereby seizing the wealth that by rights belongs to the author. In the 1930s, when Lu Xun discovered that publisher Li Xiaofeng was hiding print numbers from him, he exploded in anger. Evidently, Chinese publishers' practice of hiding print numbers from their authors is firmly entrenched.
In the 1990s, my twelve-volume series, Zheng Yuanjie's Zodiac Fables was published by a certain children's book publisher in the south. Before signing the contract, the publisher and I engaged in a brutal round of back-and-forth dealing over the royalty issue. By haggling over every little detail, the publisher had me absolutely convinced that it would not hide the print numbers from me: even an idiot knows that if you can hide the numbers, why go to all that trouble to wrestle with an author over figures? But what I experienced later astounded me: that publisher hid more than 100,000 copies from me. To say that it struck me like a bolt from the blue would be putting it lightly. After that, I found out that another partner had been hiding figures from me. The matter of money is insignificant; the question of trust is a big deal. Piracy is done by people you don't know, but hiding print numbers is plotted by your acquaintances and even your friends. The latter is even more detrimental to an author's enthusiasm to create.
I do not know how many Chinese publishing houses have dirtied their hands by hiding print numbers from authors; I only know that it is even worse for Chinese literature than piracy. Even when you take away the economic elements, when an author knows that his book has a circulation of 200,000 copies, it builds up his confidence much more than if he thinks he has only 20,000 copies in circulation. And confidence spurs an author to create even more outstanding works.
From then on, my books have been published with houses that are immensely trustworthy and have an ethical bottom-line. Now that my Pipilu series is in the hands of the 21st Century Publishing House, my interests and confidence are guaranteed.
Even so, I will not reject other avenues of print number supervision. The "China Authors Rich List" can serve that end. The list relies on royalties calculated from sales figures for each author's works obtained from bookstores across the country. I believe that this list can work to protect the economic interests of a portion of those authors. If you are certain that you have not received that much money, you may make an inquiry with your publisher. Authors have neither the time nor the energy to personally investigate how many books all of those bookstores across the country have sold. Now there's someone to do it for you. Subtract the royalties you've actually earned from those public figures, and we'll have reason to suspect that publishers are hiding print numbers from us.
The literary slave mentality that "publishing books is how publishers take care of authors" can be put to rest. When your works go into circulation they become a commodity, and they have surplus value.
To put it another way, hidden print numbers are a misrepresentation of quality. Third-rate, junky quality.
Post-80s author and race-car driver Han Han believes that 10 million yuan is the upper limit for a Chinese author's annual royalties in the current marketplace. He calculated his own earnings at 2 million and change, substantially less than the 3.8 million reported on the list:
This year, I published one book, The Glorious Day, which gave me 2 million yuan in royalties, or 1.6 million after taxes. My earlier books were still selling, so I got a few hundred thousand there. So my royalty income might be a bit above 2 million. Aside from that, my income from racing is around 400,000. My income is transparent - it's all right there, there are no secrets.
...in the publishing machine, authors seem to sparkle, but they can't make all that much money. For example, the 14% rate I get is already pretty high. Any higher than that is BS.
The Rankings
- (5) Guo Jingming (郭敬明) - young adult books and magazines: 11 million
- (-) Yu Dan (于丹) - Lessons from The Analects: 10.6 million
- (7) Yi Zhongtian (易中天) - popular history, particularly Three Kingdoms: 6.8 million
- (8) Zheng Yuanjie (郑渊洁) - children's fairy tales: 5.7 million
- (-) Sharon (饶雪漫) - YA books for girls, Sandglass: 5.2 million
- (-) Wang Shuo (王朔) - My Millenium, Letter to My Daughter: 5 million
- (9) Yang Hongying (杨红樱) - children's lit: 4.8 million
- (-) Cao Wenxuan (曹文轩) - children's lit: 4.5 million
- (-) Wang Yuewen (王跃文) - corruption novels: 4.35 million
- (1) Yu Qiuyu (余秋雨) - essays on culture and history: 4.3 million
- (-) Cai Jun (祭骏) - thrillers, 19th Level of Hell: 4.05 million
- (-) Du Liang (都梁) - military fiction: 4 million
- (3) Han Han (韩寒) - YA, The Glorious Day: 3.8 million
- (-) Bi Shumin (毕淑敏) - mainstream fiction, Female Psychologist: 3.65 million
- (11) Annie Baobei (安妮宝贝) - romance, Padma (莲花): 3.5 million
- (-) Wang Hailing (王海鸰) - domestic melodrama: 3.2 million
- (16) Hai Yan (海岩) - crime fiction, Jade Guan-yin (玉观音): 3.15 million
- (-) Yan Chongnian (阎崇年) - history: 3 million
- (-) Zhang Muye (张牧野) aka Tianxia Bachang (天下霸唱) - adventure, Ghost Blows Out the Light
- (-) Lu Tianming (陆天明) - corruption novels, Pure Snow: 2.5 million
- (-) Shi Zhongshan (石钟山) - military writer: 2.3 million
- (-) Dangnian Mingyue (当年明月) - popular history about the Ming Dynasty: 2.25 million
- (24) Liu Xinwu (刘心武) - popular literary analysis, particularly Dream of the Red Mansion: 2 million:
- (-) Yang Zhijun (杨志军) - Tibetan Mastiff: 1.8 million
- (14) Jia Pingwa (贾平凹) - Shaanxi-centered fiction, Gaoxing: 1.5 million
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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 In this house there are many Mansions. Visit the classics section of a Chinese bookstore looking for one of the Four Classic Novels and your eyes might glaze over as you survey the choices before you. Critical editions, photo-reproductions, illustrated abridgements, and graphic novel versions line the shelves.
Recent GAPP data cited in a Mirror article last month revealed that between 1950 and 2005, more than 230 different editions of Dream of the Red Mansions were published, along with over 210 editions of Romance of the Three Kingdoms and over 190 versions each of Outlaws of the Marsh and Journey to the West. A survey of the current inventory of the Beijing Book Building found 94 separate Red Mansions editions issued by 66 different publishers.
Not all of these books are selling, however. GAPP numbers have nearly 50 billion yuan worth of books warehoused every year (based on cover price). The Mirror calculates that since reprinted classics make up around 40% of a given year's titles, they must make up the same percentage of warehoused books, though the paper's figures are used somewhat haphazardly. At any rate, it makes for a stunning headline: "20 billion yuan worth of reprinted classics get pulped every year."
What attracts publishers to the classics? Money, for one thing. Of those 94 editions, 56 were literary editions and 38 were children's books. The literary editions had an average price of 60 yuan; the Mirror estimates the cost per book at one-third of the cover price, or around 20 yuan. For many resource-poor publishing houses, issuing new editions of classics is a moneymaking shortcut.
On the other hand, not all classics are in oversupply. Writing in The Beijing News last week, Wang Dong discussed the difficulties that book lovers have in tracking down the only editions of classics that have long been out of print:
Is it so hard for classics to be reissued?
One of the most annoying things for readers is that there are always a few classic works that disappear for years after their first edition and rarely have multiple printings; a nagging itch that never finds relief. For example, the edition of New Anecdotes of Social Talk annotated by Mr. Yu Jiaxi is a gem among annotated editions of Social Talk, but after the China Books edition of 1983, there has been nothing else for 25 years, leaving many enthusiasts waiting in anticipation. There's Wang Chuanshan's acclaimed On Reading the "Comprehensive Mirror", which is included in the Collected Works of Wang Chuanshan, but a standalone volume is practically nonexistent on the marketplace. Then there's the bible of all things Liang Qichao, the Chronological Biography of Liang Qichao, which also was not reissued following a first edition in 1983. In today's used book markets, it's hard to find even at 300 yuan a copy...there are countless other books like these, leaving us perplexed: is it so hard to reissue classic works?
I personally believe that the surface reason that classics do not get reprinted is because they are too hard to sell. That is, there is little market demand and profits are small. For example, On Reading the "Comprehensive Mirror" had a true print run of a few thousand and it still took a long while to sell out. It can't compare to the seduction of the hundreds of thousands of copies that Guo Jingming can sell in a short time. Publishers are participants in the market economy, where sales volume is everything, so it's not strange that they should ignore the classics. However, why is there so little demand for classics? To answer this question, we must get down to the deeper reason why classics do not get reprinted: the public lacks the ability to read, or should I say consume, classics. They are wary of the profundity of classics, or else they think them useless. They would rather spend their time reading Guo Jingming and Annie Baobei. Hence classics are confined to a minority of scholars and demand is tiny. Classics are spiritual treasures of a people; it is a great loss to let them lie fallow for so long. Therefore, the main task now is to popularize the classics and raise the public's ability to absorb them.
The imbalance doesn't have to go on forever. Huang Song, office director for leadership team of the National Plan to Reorganize Ancient Book Publication, says that the wide range of choices will be reduced in the future to a small number of quality editions:
We are currently undertaking a general investigation into the nation's ancient books. Following the investigation, we will put forth a standard edition of each work, and that edition will be authoritative....From now on, unless substantial new material is discovered related to a particular ancient book, publishers will not put out new editions. This means that editors will not need to duplicate their efforts, publishers can save on resources, and readers will have more effective choices.
It doesn't seem all that likely for something like Red Mansions, when thorny issues of authorship have yet to be resolved. But when they do decide on a standard, authoritative text, maybe the Cao Xueqin museums will finally have settled on a standard image of the author that can go on the cover.
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This article is from Danwei.org
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GAPP just released a report on the state of China's publishing industries in 2006. The report concluded that, while China's copyright-related trade has made strides, the "unfavorable copyright trade imbalance" hasn't fundamentally reversed.
In support of this conclusion, the report cited figures showing that 12,386 copyrighted publication titles "from elsewhere" were sold in China in 2006, while China exported only 2,057 copyrighted publication titles. The report includes comments from industry experts saying that the competitive power of China's "book products" is still relatively weak. Chinese books that "walk out" into the international arena will have to "carry a heavy load over a long distance."
To anyone with passing familiarity with the quality of media published in China, the fact that China imports vastly more publications than it exports should be no surprise. Years of censorship, restrictions on market access, rampant copying and ingrained corruption have taken their toll on product quality. As a result, reporting and non-fiction writing in China tends to be simplistic (or simply propaganda) and include inaccuracies; comprehensiveness and analysis is rare. Fiction writing often lacks the drama and plot developments that characterize storytelling that captures a global audience.
The "unfavorable copyright trade imbalance" — or, put another way, the absence of international demand for Chinese publications — reflects the global market's assessment of the quality of Chinese publications. China would be well-advised to accept this lack of demand as a function of market forces, rather than crying unfairness or discrimination. Pushing Chinese publications into an unwilling market will only leave international audiences with a sour impression of Chinese media. If China thinks the copyright trade imbalance is unfavorable now, think how much worse it will be after global readers have slogged through "The Selected Works of Jiang Zemin" and sworn, "Never again."
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