Harry Potter Weaves His Magic in China

ON a stormy night so severe that dozens of trees were knocked down in the inner-Beijing suburb of Dongzhimen, local girl Zhang Jing braved the harsh weather and empty streets to make her way to a cinema. Inside harry potter and the Order of the Phoenix was playing on the silver screen. “HP fans” with Zhang Jing’s dedication are by no means rare in China. Despite hitting local screens a month behind the global release date, enjoying only limited publicity and suffering from a small number of film prints in circulation, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was a certified blockbuster in China, grossing over RMB 110 million in just nine days.

“Harry Is Alive!”

The popularity of The Order of the Phoenix film was only matched by the frenzy of interest in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final book in J.K. Rowling’s magical series. The book’s global release date on July 21 followed hot on the heals of the release of The Order of the Phoenix film on July 13, making July a “Potter festival” for many children.

As a series that has achieved total sales of 325 million copies worldwide in 70 different languages, the release of the final Harry Potter adventure was always going to be a big event. Terms like “premiere” and the long queues usually associated with the world of movies rather than books characterized the day Deathly Hallows was published. On the morning of July 21, excited fans lined up in front of bookshops around China to obtain an English-language version of “HP 7” as it’s known to the fans. Most of those queuing were senior high school and university students, as well as other English-reading Chinese fans, all eager to know Harry’s final destiny. Would Harry die? Would Professor Dumbledore live again? Would Voldemort be defeated? And who or what were the Deathly Hallows?

Yang Yiliang from Zhengyi Middle School in China’s Shandong Province was one of those who lined up that morning to find out the answer to these questions. He had studied English after school for a long period in order to be able to read the final Harry Potter book the day it was published in English. Upon obtaining a copy, he turned to the last page and nearly shouted with happiness. The book concluded with the words: “The scar had not pained Harry for nineteen years. All was well.” Harry was alive! Yang Yiliang sighed with relief.

Of Broom Sticks and Book Sales

Three days after the release of HP 7, Jiang Li of the Planning Department of Shanghai’s City of Books was growing anxious. In the past 72 hours 2,000 of her 3,000 copies in stock had gone out the door. Supplies were getting dangerously low C if fans couldn’t get the book here they would simply go elsewhere. Anxiously she awaited delivery of the next batch.

This situation was in stark contrast to the local release of HP 1 (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) in 2001. Li Ya from the Marketing Department of China National Publications Import and Export (Group) Corporation remembers with smile, “Sales at that time were not high, and there was no favorable warm-up after half a year. It wasn’t until the first Harry Potter movie hit screens in China that book sales took a favorable turn.”

After a slow start in China, Harry Potter is now not merely a character, but a name synonymous with an enormous industry involving books, films and merchandise. According to the People’s Literature Publishing House, the authorized publisher of the Chinese edition of the Harry Potter series, the first three HP adventures in Chinese sold a total of 350,000 copies across the country. Encouraged by the exploding HP community, the same publisher is confident it can sell 1 million copies of the Chinese-language HP 7. Chinese fans are crazy about everything associated with the sorcerer, from books to movies, toys to clothes. It is said that England is planning “Harry Potter Tourism,” which will no doubt attract large numbers of Chinese fans itching for more HP action.

Hot sales of the English-language HP 7 in China have also given impetus to other foreign-language titles, such as The World Is Flat, The Devil Wears Prada and Prison Break. Less popularanthologies of poetry and essay collections have also registered improved sales in the wake of the HP juggernaut.

Broken Wings of

Imagination?

In a recent survey of 100 kids by a local TV station, a high proportion said they preferred Harry Potter to the classic Monkey King character of the Chinese story Journey to the West. One child even asked, “Who is the Monkey King?” Why are Chinese children turning to a foreign-language book for entertainment? And where is the Chinese Harry Potter?

As Yang Zao from the Institute of Literature Research at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences notes, the popularity of Harry Potter is a universal phenomenon that goes beyond race and country, and the character is imbued with some admirable virtues. The little enchanter who flies with a broom possesses a commendable collectivist spirit, often treating his friends’ jeopardy as his own, wearing the scar on his forehead like a badge of virtue. And Chinese children’s embracing of British literature does not necessarily mean they wish to wholly embrace a British lifestyle. Rather, Yang Zao believes that the HP vogue suggests a paucity of imagination in locally produced children’s literature. As one reader commented on the Internet, “Our wings of imagination have been broken.” Although there are over 10,000 children’s books produced annually in China, few works leave readers with the deep impression created by the HP world of spells, sorcery and galloping centaurs.

A new generation of Chinese writers have initiated a home-grown wave of “fantasy” and “magic” works, often based on stories and characters from Chinese legends, Japanese animations and Western texts. Writers like Yi Zhongtian, Yu Dan and Zhu Deyong have all been pushed as the “Rowling” of china, but none have generated the kind of industry that exists around the HP “brand.” As Zhu Lili, associate professor at Nanjing University’s School of Journalism and Communication points out, Chinese culture doesn’t possess the dominant global status enjoyed by Western culture, making it much more difficult for these works to attain an international audience.

When asked “Why doesn’t China have its own Harry Potter?” Huang Qiang, deputy chief editor of Gansu Reader Publishing Corp, replies calmly there is no need for concern. “The emergence of truly classic works is infrequent and rare. Even on a global scale, something like the Harry Potter phenomenon is exceptional, and only happens every few decades.”

So children around the world may be waiting some time for another Harry Potter to fly into their lives. In the meantime, they can look forward to the next HP movie, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, due to hit cinema screens some time in 2008.