Bestseller Lists:Imprints Left by Time

ECENTLY a list of bestsellers of the last ten years aroused heated discussions. From celebrities’ biographies a decade ago, to contemporary titles on how to live healthily, the changing nature of bestsellers reflects the shifts in Chinese life.

Famous Lives

In 1997 the bestsellers list belonged to celebrity authors. Ni Ping, a famous anchor on CCTV, published her autobiography Rizi, or Days, which notched up sales of more than a million. Hosting an entertaining program with an audience rating of 18 percent, Ni had influence over 200 million viewers. Readers found out from the autobiography that the star was also a common person who had the same problems as everyone. In her book, Ni told people that she wanted to live a common life, and expressed her views on life, marriage and family, which made readers like her even more and drove her career to new heights.

Ni’s successor on the program, Yang Lan, was another best-selling author that year. As an anchor for four years and a Golden Microphone winner, Yang left China for the US in her heyday. After graduating from Columbia University in 1997, she began to make her own TV programs. Her book Pinghai Linfeng, or Feeling Wind by Sea, was a collection of essays recording her experiences working in television and overseas. She shared love stories as well as her views on life. The book achieved instant success, selling over 500,000 copies in 1997. Facing Life with Smiles, by well-known comic actor Jiang Kun, was also a hit that year.

All the bestselling authors the following year were famous people in different fields, like Yu Qiuyu and An Dun, two masters in cultural circles.

Ever since CCTV anchor Zhao Zhongxiang published Suiyue Suixiang, or Random Notes of Years, back in 1995, the advantage of publishing works by people already famous has been widely recognized by publishers. At a time when the Internet was not yet popular, traditional media, especially TV, was the main channel through which people acquired information. So it was no surprise that TV anchors were able to become stars of the publishing industry. The public wanted to knowwhat celebrities’ lives were like, so star authors’ books were guaranteed sales in those years.

But the fad was over soon. Now bestsellers are created on the Internet. Even though Yang Lan now has her own company and is even more famous than 10 years ago, she would now find it much harder to achieve the same publishing success. Information on stars is now just a click of a mouse away.

Helping Kids Achieve

Guidebooks for parents are perennial favorites amongst China’s readers. In 1998, The Learning Revolution, co-written by American educator Jeannette Vos and New Zealander Gordon Dryden, was listed at the top of the bestsellers. It was reprinted nine times in China, and sold around 10 million copies. It introduced learning methods and new views highly praised by teachers and parents. Clever Company, the book’s promoter, bought prime time space on CCTV and invited famous director Xie Jin to be in the advertisement. “Reading this book can help us change the life of our kids,” the elderly and highly respected director said. Both these advertisements and parents’ enthusiasm for books that might help their children be successful contributed to huge sales. The book broke a Chinese record by selling 250,000 copies in one day.

In 1999 the number of Chinese youngsters attending college started climbing sharply, reaching 1,596,800 students that year, some 513,200 more than the previous year’s intake. Meanwhile studying abroad became increasingly popular as well, and parents and students became concerned with gaining places in America’s Ivy League universities. In 2000, Harvard Girl Liu Yiting became the year’s bestseller. Her parents’ divorce didn’t have a negative affect on this girl, who was recruited by Harvard and drew much attention from other parents. This book has been reprinted over 70 times and has sold more than 2 million copies. The book market quickly filled with similar titles, including Enter Harvard Easily, and My Benben Enter Cambridge.

Even now these kinds of books can still be found on bestseller lists, although they don’t sell quite so easily anymore. In a country where examination-oriented education dominates, parents still believe higher marks give their kids a higher social status.

Opening the Gates of Wealth

Enter any bookstore and you will find masses of books telling you how to choose stocks or double your wealth. The first book about getting rich in China was Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. The title overrun American bestseller lists in 1999, and reached China the following year. It topped the nation’s book sales for 18 consecutive months, and stayed in the top 10 for two and half years. Sales reached 5 million copies, but a survey showed more than 30 million people had read it. Rich Dad, Poor Dan brought the concept of Financial Intelligence Quotient to China, a real shock for a country where talking money was traditionally regarded as disgraceful. The media called it the “enlightenment of Chinese financing,” and the book became an object of study at Renmin University and other colleges.

Other imported money-focused bestsellers followed suit. In 2002, Spencer Johnson’s tiny Who Moved My Cheese? kept Chinese talking about cheese all year, although no one in this country really likes the odd smelling food. Since it met people’s enthusiasm for career success, sales reached a million copies that year.

From self-help to career planning to economic hotspots, the reading agenda was set by social changes as well as publishers’ promotions. The 2007 bestseller was War of Currencies, which also sold a million copies. In this novel, the author expressed his view that “controlling money means control of society,” which was criticized by academia. It was even listed in the Top 10 Bad Books in the morning newspaper Xiaoxiang Chenbao.

But criticism has not been an impediment to people’s enthusiasm for money-orientated books. The country’s double-digit growth from 2002 to 2008, and the expanding real estate and stock markets spurred the money-focused book market further. In 2007, total sales of finance books in China surpassed 100 million copies, outperforming all other genres. Although the financial crisis emerged in the second half of 2008, the genre remained popular, with titles like Subprime Mortgage Crisis, Breakdown of US Dollars, and George Soros Leads You Out of Financial Crisis all selling well.

Fast Food,

Traditional Culture

With Confucius as its representative, Chinese traditional culture has drawn more and more attention from the West. Chinese have also been cultivating their interest in the wisdom of their ancestors. Some colleges have added traditional culture to their curriculums, and education officials have called on the public to read the classics.

The popularity of two scholars showed that Chinese liked the classics, but not enough to read them. Professors Yi Zhongtian and Yu Dan were popular with the public after they translated classics into modern Chinese.

The CCTV program Lecture Room acquainted the public with Professor Yi. The academic from Xiamen University was invited to give speeches about figures in the Han Dynasty (206BC-AD220) and the Three Kingdoms (220-280). His words were plain and funny, meeting people’s demand for more historical knowledge.

Copyright on Tasting the Three Kingdoms I was obtained by the Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing Group, which promised the author an initial print run of 550,000 copies and 14 percent royalties. Thus far, over 2 million volumes have been sold. The second book of the series has been a hit too, with a first print run of over a million. According to the publisher, Professor Yi’s six books have generated profits of close to RMB 100 million in the last two years.

Yu Dan, a professor at Beijing Normal University, became a household name through the same program. She gave speeches about The Analects of Confucius in October 2006. A month later, all her speeches were collated and published by Zhonghua Book Company, and sold a record of 4 million copies. The title has now been reprinted more than 20 times. Copyright for Japanese and English versions have been purchased. In March 2007, her second book After Reading the Book of Master Zhuang was published. This work collected Professor Yu’s thoughts after reading the Taoist classic written by Master Zhuang and his followers. One million copies were sold within 13 days.

The popularity of history and the classics has produced cultural parvenus, as well as scholars and professors. The 2006 bestseller list saw Things of the Ming Dynasty I at the top of the history genre. This book was a collection of blogs by Dangnian Mingyue, a 26-year-oldhistory researcher and public servant from Guangzhou. He told history using Internet slang and expressed non-mainstream views, attracting over a million hits on his blog. Six volumes of his work have now been published, with sales of over 3 million copies.

Professor Yi was sued by readers for 50 mistakes in his books, and when professor Yu Dan attended a signing session in a bookstore, a man protested by wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words, “Confucius is worried and Master Zhuang angry.” Things of the Ming Dynasty was listed as a 2008 Bad Book, and it was regarded as a non-nutritional multi-vitamin. But it still enjoyed great popularity. Many reviewers said reading reinterpreted classics was like chewing gum that others had already chewed. In other words, it was worse than eating leftovers. But against the backdrop of modern fast food culture, an enthusiastic response from the market was to be expected.

Traditional Chinese

Medicine

Qu Limin, an associate professor at Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, published a few books about health, but drew little attention. The situation changed in July 2008, when she published Health from Head to Toe, which was listed as a number one seller in many bookstores and on the Internet.

Qu’s advice included eating good meals, resting, doing more exercise, and not being angry. She analyzed common health problems, from disease symptoms to pathogens, as well as ways of preventing diseases.

Qu is not the only one to have gained fame from the popularity of preventive medicine. The first was Wu Qingzhong from Taiwan, author of Guide to Using Your Body. Although not a professional doctor, Wu used plain language to introduce the system of traditional medicine and how to prevent common diseases. Sales of 500,000 copies led to him publishing another book in 2008, The Body Recovery Project.

Shortages of medical resources result in many problems for patients, like the difficulty of getting a bed in a hospital and the high cost of treatment. Health preservation books provide a potential solution. Better Depend on Yourself Than Ask for Help from Doctors, a bestseller in 2007, was released by Jiangsu Literature and Art Publishing House. This book has now been published in a third edition, with the slogan, “The best way to improve China’s health condition.”

Now books like Guide to Using Your Body have become gifts given by bosses to their staff, in order to show their concern for their employees’ health. Talking about her book, Qu said we should “not take pills at random, and we should trust that our bodies are cleverer than our minds.” Many traditional medical practitioners admit that the popularity of these titles has created a broader market for traditional medicines.

Chinese Reading Rate

China publishes more than 300,000 titles every year, making it the world’s biggest book producing country. The nation also has about 250 million netizens who are not used to reading paper anymore. According to a survey by the China Institute of Publishing Science in July 2008, the Chinese reading rate (the percentage of people who frequently read books against the entire population) was 48.8 percent, compared to 60.4 in 1999, 51.7 in 2003 and 48.7 in 2005. Meanwhile, the Internet reading rate climbed quickly to 44.9 percent, increasing from 3.7 in 1999, 18.3 in 2003 and 27.8 in 2005. In 2007, Chinese people purchased an average of five books per capita, 80 percent of which were textbooks. Among interviewees who didn’t read, 43.7 percent of them said the reason was “lack of time.” Among those who were not used to reading books, 45.9 percent were aged 18-19.