In ongoing efforts to understand the historical significance of the post-Mao present, China's accelerated development and engagement with global economic, administrative and technological systems has suggested to many a thorough commercialization of life in China, and concomitant revolution from socialist to consumer consciousness.Footnote 1 To others, the market rationalization of various domains of life indicates an emergent form of neoliberal subjectivity, necessitating a reassessment of life in China in terms of individual self-interest and governmentality.Footnote 2 By way of contrast to these analyses, which posit a rapid and radical transformation in Chinese thinking and behaviour, this article turns to the published biographies of Chinese individuals that became runaway bestsellers in Beijing and Shanghai, to find a different narrative of China's journey from the Mao era to the present.
The seminal works of Perry Link on the function of popular literature in socialist China under Mao, and of Shuyu Kong 孔书玉 on bestsellers and the consumer publishing industry after Deng, both anticipate and inform much of this research.Footnote 3 Where Kong finds that the post-1980s commercialization of the publishing industry has left state authorities in a dilemma between maintaining political control on the one hand and achieving consumer popularity or commercial success on the other, however, I posit a more complex relationship between governance and enterprise as having developed in China today. Equating commercialization with political deregulation, Kong sees a binary if “tenacious struggle between the state and the market,” and takes the linear view that “it is highly likely that the present deregulation process will continue and that government control over the literary publishing industry will steadily recede, as it already has to a great extent.”Footnote 4 Against this teleological narrative of the present, I suggest that the “opening up” initiated by Deng Xiaoping's economic reform has not meant the simple waning of central government power, but rather its reconstitution into new and equally formidable modes of authority.
To this extent, I follow Perry Link in approaching the historical movement away from Mao through the question of how “good” (hao 好) work is defined. Seeking to explain “the socialist Chinese literary system” of the 1950s from the standpoint of the 1990s, Link finds
there is a great puzzle about the question of value in China's use-dominated art. Despite the general mediocrity, in the daily life of readers and other “users” of literature, some works were often called “good” while others were not. People who used evaluative terms were not making claims about high art, but neither were they applying the terms randomly or meaninglessly. One could say “X is a good story” while another nodded agreement – or expressed dissent – and both would assume that something measurable was at issue. What was it? What makes a literary work “good” when art is not very much involved?Footnote 5
Link adopts philosopher John Rawls' theory of value to define the good as “making sense for a certain purpose,” and thereby broadens the study of publishing in China into a task of understanding “the sense-making of other human belief systems.”Footnote 6 Link's intervention then consists in enumerating various “uses” of literature in socialist China apart from ideological education, which might otherwise have gone unnoticed by an outsider – entertainment, learning about other parts of China, testing out new ways of socializing, and expressing the self, to name a few.Footnote 7 Working on the basis of such a means-ends definition of the good, however, Rawls, and hence Link too, must halt his analyses at the question of “intrinsic” value or “the elements that we feel intuitively to be involved in the more ineffable aspects of literary value … leaving us hardly closer to final analytic clarity.”Footnote 8 To avoid this impasse, this article thus departs from Link by conceptualizing the good not in relation to particular, pre-determined “uses” but as a value both given within and constitutive of a living system of practice. I examine not only discursive representations of “the good life” in bestselling biographies, but also the practical parameters of “the good book” within the economic and administrative operation of the publishing industry that produces them. I then look at the unique relationship between the two, to see what has become of the “good” since the Mao era.
The Biography in Chinese Literature
A classical form in the tradition of Chinese literature, the biography (zhuanji 传记) has weathered much tumult in modern Chinese politics to remain a staple part of popular literary consumption today. Inflected by modern, Western influences from the mid 19th century onwards, the classical Chinese genre was explicitly reworked into the service of mass political education during the Mao era, but since economic reform has seen a great expansion and diversification of content.Footnote 9 Previously focused exclusively on government leaders and revolutionary heroes, biographies are now written about everyone from former emperors to current business tycoons, scholars and poets to Olympic athletes, and common folk to music and movie celebrities. A protean genre that bleeds into history (lishi 历史), documentary or reportage literature (jishi wenxue 记实文学 or baogao wenxue 报告文学) and “celebrity publishing” (mingxing chuban 明星出版) among other categories, biographies now constitute a large sector of the consumer publishing industry in China.Footnote 10
Works of Chinese biographical literary theory (zhuanji wenxue lilun 传记文学理论) explain the popularity of the genre in terms of a human need for stories about the past that biography's unique blend of history and fiction is particularly able to fulfil.Footnote 11 Publishing industry journals, meanwhile, analyse the situation more strategically, for the best way to capitalize on this seemingly innate market appeal. True-life stories are said to satisfy a human need for role models and figures to identify with, and for the vicarious expression of nostalgia. Figures of success in present-day China are thus said to represent excellent stories of struggle and triumph that can offer inspiration and psychological support to readers in their own lives.Footnote 12
Such qualities, or competitive advantages, in a manuscript are crucial in what has since the 1980s' economic reform become a marketized and highly competitive book industry, where between 10 and 20 per cent of the titles published in a given year account for approximately 80 per cent of that year's book sales.Footnote 13 From the early 1990s in particular, rising costs of production on the one hand and increased competition for sales on the other have put pressure on publishers to optimize profit by trying to produce “bestsellers,” or sell many copies of a single title rather than moderate quantities of several.Footnote 14 This change comes together with a shift in consumer perception, from viewing books as lifelong sources of edification to seeing them as entertainment products for one-time use only. Consumer demand thus comes to be determined by the caprice of the craze or wave (chao 潮), further pressuring publishers to sell as many copies of a title as possible, within the short period of marketability that it has.Footnote 15
The net effect of these changes is an industry structure in which a small handful of bestsellers regularly achieve a disproportionate level of market domination over the vast majority of titles produced. The frequent appearance of biographies within this small group of market winners suggests not only that the aforementioned publishing strategists have got something right, but also that the narratives which bestselling biographies carry attain a far wider readership than one might otherwise expect. This article draws from six such titles, all of which maintained a top-ten ranking for recorded sales in Beijing and Shanghai for a consecutive period of more than one month between 2003 and 2005.Footnote 16 Although widely varied in the lives they represent, I argue that all six stories unfold within a common narrative of the national self from 1949 to the present – one that might thus be thought of as the bestselling history of the PRC.
The Biographies Examined in this Study
“All I can think about the past now is, doesn't it sound terribly frightful?” – Yao Ming, My World, My Dream
The six bestselling biographies that I draw from are those of Yao Ming 姚明, China's basketball hero and representative to the world of American sports; Liu Chuanzhi 柳传志, founder and CEO of the world's third largest PC maker, Lenovo; Wang Meng 王蒙, writer, former minister of culture and vice-chairman of the Chinese Writers Association; Yang Jiang 杨绛, renowned writer and translator of Cervantes' Don Quixote; Liu Yangdong 刘仰东, a self-identified “ordinary child of 60s and 70s Beijing”; and Jiang Zemin 江泽民, former President of the PRC.
Yao Ming's biography tells the story of a talented youth who, born into the post-Mao period of China's increasing openness to the world, is able to realize his potential and dream of becoming a globally renowned basketball player. His passage from a high school basketball court in China to the private jet of the Houston Rockets professional American team is portrayed as a “successful crossing of the cultural chasm between China and America,” through which Yao has come to be “living the American dream.”Footnote 17 Yao's living conditions are described by continuous contrast to those of his parents, who were basketball players in China during the Cultural Revolution. Yao shudders at the thought of them training with cheap equipment, sleeping six to a room and hoarding food stamps to get by.Footnote 18 As an outgrowth of this earlier generations' suffering, Yao's own wealth and fame is thus framed as reform-era “proof that the ancient civilization of China can not only enter the global arena of competition, but can even achieve remarkable results in it.”Footnote 19
Liu Chuanzhi's is a similarly rags-to-riches tale of a group of students who worked out of their basement shack in the 1970s, until their engineering genius was finally unleashed by Deng's 1984 declaration that economic reform was a “vitally urgent requirement.” Liu recalls sensing a change in the air, as “two billion urban dwellers experienced the most important psychological revolution in history: poverty and oppression became unbearable, and people began earnestly and honestly to pursue prosperity, and a new life.”Footnote 20 The openness to global trade and technology that economic reform introduced made it possible for Liu and others like him not only to bring the benefits of information technology to the Chinese people through software designed for Chinese language needs, but also to bring China to prominence in the global information technology industry.Footnote 21
In a more cultural domain, Wang Meng's biographical reflections commemorate literary figures from his generation of older revolutionaries, while also affirming the greater wisdom of Deng's reforms and the path that China has taken since. Eulogizing the hot-blooded patriotism of the old guard, Wang nevertheless now retrospectively sees this passion as necessarily culminating in the Cultural Revolution, compared to which chaos the cool sensibility of the current generation is by far the wiser alternative. The revolutionary convictions of Wang's youth are thus sublimated into a sincere love of country that, passionate but naïve, is not betrayed but rather fulfilled by the more realistic and practical economic sense that has replaced it.Footnote 22 It is the responsibility of the current generation to see that these reforms bear economic fruit, he says, to serve as an offering to the revolutionary generation who may then finally rest in peace.Footnote 23
Of a slightly earlier generation, the wife of the renowned writer Qian Zhongshu钱锺书, Yang Jiang, tells the story of her family's passage from the pre-1949 Old Society, through the political and economic turbulence of the Mao era, up to the recent death of both her husband and her daughter. Melancholy in tenor, Yang's story depicts the family of CCP-affiliated intellectuals as quietly dedicated to their literary rather than political work, and indeed as having suffered through each political movement in utter bewilderment rather than ideological conviction. Family togetherness was the one thing they sought, but by the time the social stability that is necessary for this was achieved, old age and death had already caught up with them.Footnote 24
Writing as an “ordinary child of 60s and 70s Beijing,” Liu Yangdong meanwhile remembers only the everyday objects and activities that were the quintessence of neighbourhood and school life in those days. A paean to this lost way of life, his story wistfully recounts “the little things” that made up community living, and yet resignedly forswears them as necessary sacrifices to the cause of development.Footnote 25 Despite his personal doubts that childhood and children today are any better than they were in his time, Liu's sense of the need to move on from the senseless battles of the Cultural Revolution reconcile him to the present with a nostalgia that remembers the props but forgets the stakes of its dramatic past.Footnote 26
At the other end of the spectrum, Jiang Zemin's biography narrates the life of the man and the nation in parallel, tracing this humble politician's rise as an “engineer rather than a theorist” and a doer rather than a thinker, alongside the nation's progress from revolutionary idealism towards practical reform, material development and stability. The hagiographic story credits Jiang with successfully continuing Deng's reformist effort to enable China “after decades of humiliation, to step back on to the path of renewal.”Footnote 27 Enumerating the many improvements brought about by Jiang's determined commitment to material facts, the biography declares that “Chinese people today have more personal freedoms than they have ever had at any time in history,” and that in this China which he helped create, “no one would be willing to return to the past.”Footnote 28
The Continuity of Past and Present
Though widely varied in the lives they recount, all these biographies unfold within a common framework, that is, a narrative of China's national history as the process of increasing material comfort that results from the nation's collective maturation from naïve political passions to sound economic sensibility.Footnote 29 In each life story, the rise in material fortunes from the 1970s to the present is depicted in animated detail, as a real historical change that the individual directly experiences. Political events that occurred over the same period, by contrast, are portrayed as distinctly removed from, if not irrelevant to, the individual's reality. Yao Ming and Liu Chuanzhi's life stories were indeed only made possible by the falling away of politics from other domains of pursuit. (Yao chuckles affectionately at basketball players in the Cultural Revolution, who trained not to win matches but to become a good Party member, and whose technique was subject to the critique of farmers, workers and soldiers who knew nothing about the sport.Footnote 30) Although intellectuals with close Party connections at the time, both Wang Meng's and Yang Jiang's experiences are characterized only by a private commitment to China's literature, the task of translation, and protecting fellow intellectuals from the meaningless “tempest” and “typhoon” of Cultural Revolution politics.Footnote 31 These movements are portrayed as a vague mélange of distant and barely comprehensible issues; participation in them was a passive and confused acquiescence in formal rituals, while real intellectual life was carried on in private. As an active though young participant in these movements, Liu Yangdong on the other hand confesses that he and his friends may have read the Marxist-Leninist classics that abounded, but “never really understood any of it,” and now remember nothing from the Communist Manifesto except its opening line.Footnote 32 Indeed, even Jiang Zemin cuts a barely political figure as the electrical engineer from Changchun First Automobile Works whose practical, problem-solving orientation translates into a political philosophy of pragmatic experimentation rather than commitment to ideological agendas. “A policy might work or it might fail,” he is quoted. “If it fails, amend it. If it succeeds, keep it. All that matters is what is most beneficial (youli, 有利) for China.”Footnote 33
Thus the same historical path from Mao to the present is traced in all these personal histories. This is a linear narrative of national maturation, from heady politics and material deprivation in the old days, to post-political pragmatism and economic prosperity in the present. Politics in general comes to be represented as a thing of the past, whereas the next generation, both Wang and Jiang agree, will be more mature and inclined towards rational analysis rather than driven by emotionality, for not having suffered the trauma of China's earlier period.Footnote 34 Yao and Liu are living testimonies to this truth, and precursors of greater achievements yet to come. The Chinese Basketball Association, for instance, is reassured by Yao's path to success that the future will be characterized by “a more balanced way of thinking [that] will no longer follow earlier perspectives in placing the nation above all else, but rather will also consider the interests of the individual player and of the sports industry.”Footnote 35 Liu, meanwhile, spells a veritable renaissance for China's business and innovation world when he does not hesitate to tell Premier Zhu Rongji 朱鎔基 himself that the greatest threat to all entrepreneurs is the “government risk factor” of opacity and erratic change in the bureaucracy. With the new leadership's willingness to put enterprise before bureaucracy, streamline oversized government organizations for greater efficiency, and allow economic rationality to function unfettered by political theory, Liu finds “all of China inspired to head into the future undaunted.”Footnote 36
Rather than a betrayal of the older generation's spirit, this shift from an “ideologically correct” to an economically rational conception of progress and success is portrayed as the very fulfilment of their revolutionary values, which are retrospectively sublimated into a timeless love of one's country (aiguo xin 爱国心). All six individuals now look back at that generation's youth as a time of innocent idealism that gathered into foolish and destructive impulsiveness during the Cultural Revolution. The economic reforms that come with the movements' end thus do not reverse the Chinese socialist revolutionary process, but rather set China back on its proper path towards it after ten years of being derailed. In this bestselling historical narrative, material improvements since the 1980s are represented as the happy product of a new and hard-won national outlook – one that has finally awoken to the need to place real, material concerns above hollow ideology and stagnant protocol; which is rational rather than possessed, sensible rather than idealistic, mature rather than naïve and thus productive rather than destructive. Wang captures the sentiment best in his passionate endorsement of the new enlightenment:
Those who now understand (mingbai ren 明白人) reject the practice of calling a deer a horse, staring at a plum to quench ones thirst, or drawing a bun to alleviate ones hunger. Those who understand reject using emotions, especially extreme and so-called noble emotions, as a substitute for reality, logic and common sense. Those who understand certainly would not consider socialist stalks better than capitalist seedlings, because the more one understands, the more one understands the necessity of rice.Footnote 37
If the life stories that are told in these bestselling biographies are of Chinese individuals' successful pursuit of material stability and well-being, their contextualization within the history of the nation as a whole is one that conflates these individual desires with the original intentions of the collective, Communist revolution. In this discursive appropriation of the past by the present, those aspects of socialism that had aimed higher than the pursuit of private interest are eclipsed. This narrative of the national self is thus premised not only on a new understanding of the past, but also on a new understanding of well-being, or the good life itself. In this shift to a self-consciously economic rather than political lens, a reconstitution of the good thus occurs away from the Maoist ideals of collective unity and socialist commitment, towards those of individual prosperity and entrepreneurial genius. In the current self-narrative of China, it is this new conception of the good that makes it possible to think of the present in continuity with the past.
The Publishing Industry
“I know I sound like a true capitalist now” – Yao Ming
This complex of discursive continuity premised on conceptually reconstituted terms operates not only within bestselling life stories but also in the functioning of the publishing industry that produces them. In this domain, Mao's exhortation to “do publishing well” (renzhen zuohao chuban gongzuo 认真做好出版工作) by getting better books to more people runs continuously through the leadership of Deng and Jiang, and up into the present.Footnote 38 Structural changes to the publishing industry introduced by Deng's economic reforms, however, have given a new practical meaning to this old discursive phrase. Tracing the reorganization of financing, production and regulation in the publishing industry since Mao thus sheds light on the unique combination of change and continuity that characterizes its relationship to the present.
National consolidation of China's publishing infrastructure under the state-owned Xinhua Book Company began shortly upon the CCP's victory in 1949, and by 1957 had either incorporated or closed down all 244 private printing presses then in existence.Footnote 39 All income generated and losses incurred by publishing activity in China would henceforth be borne by the new CCP government, which was also directly in charge of determining all published content. Parallel to this process, the government undertook to increase radically the volume of publication, which it now concentrated in key areas of socialist development such as engineering and technology, agriculture and animal husbandry, and socialist theory and fiction.Footnote 40 A General Administration of Publication (chuban zhongshu 出版总署) was set up as the policy-making organ responsible for implementing Mao's conviction that literature should function exclusively for the socialist education of the masses.Footnote 41 And while the strict, top-down measures that it used partially account for the extensive control it was able to achieve over the nation's publishing activities, they does not explain what historians such as Bonnie McDougall find most “remarkable about the Chinese literary and performing arts establishment” during the Mao era – namely, that all its members “(with a few important exceptions) remained loyal to the interests of the state and to its rulers.”Footnote 42
To understand the operation of such a system, the socialist conception of publishing work as providing ideological guidance to the reading population must be taken into consideration as a behaviour-determining value. The “interest of the state and its rulers” at this moment in China's history was to maximize the efficacy of publishing as a means for bringing Marxism and socialism to the masses, while minimizing the material drain of this undertaking on the limited resources at the young nation's disposal. The need to select literary material that would go furthest towards this goal made it only sensible to implement such procedures as the 1952 “three-inspection rule,” which subjected every manuscript to triple inspection for political content; the 1955 law allowing the State Council to stop production and confiscate any book opposed to government policies; and the 1961 requirement that all publications be rigidly categorized so as to facilitate the Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Propaganda monitoring the quality of books in circulation.Footnote 43
Managing a publishing industry thus constructed for political rather than economic efficacy meant increasing the production and distribution of books that were interesting and relevant to people's everyday lives, without compromising the ideological function of reading in the process.Footnote 44 The problem was always a shortage of suitable reading material for the masses, or as Mao wrote in 1955, “there aren't enough books,” and “they are too expensive.”Footnote 45 By contrast to the present, however, the solution during the Mao era was not to involve the manipulation of content in the interest of volume. In a 1960 report entitled “The revolution in publishing must continue,” Deputy Minister of Culture Qian Junrui 钱俊瑞 emphasized that the necessary relationship between quantity and quality in publishing was one of “vigorously raising quality, and appropriately increasing quantity.” The value of mass accessibility (tongsu 通俗), he said, should not be transformed into mediocrity (yongsu 庸俗).Footnote 46
Economic profitability thus subordinated to political function in the business of publishing for the masses, the financial burden of production and distribution was fully managed by the central government. State ownership of the publishing apparatus and central economic planning in general meant that resources could be distributed according to this priority of content, so that ideologically good works were often distributed at fixed low prices, sometimes even free, despite a general and sustained shortage of paper. Publication and distribution of state-commissioned and state-funded titles thus reached into the millions, at the expense of all other forms of literature. This practice was taken to its extreme in the Cultural Revolution, when the few publishing houses that remained in business were compelled to produce Mao's Works almost exclusively, while the central Publishing Bureau itself was converted into the Mao Zedong Works Publishing Office.Footnote 47
This, then, was the scene upon which Deng arrived in 1977 and which he, sounding much like Mao before him, declared a problem of
paper supply being very tight, exacerbated by the severe wastage of paper that results from printing too much of certain things that do not need to be printed, and none of certain things that should be. A more reasonable arrangement (heli anpai 合理安排) is very important … The printing of scholarly theses and articles of merit (you jiazhi 有价值) must be guaranteed. Under current publishing conditions, important works (zhuzuo 著作) exist but take many years to get out, and in this way we strangle ourselves to death (zheyang jiu ba ziji kunsile 这样就把自己捆死了).Footnote 48
Mao's call to “do publishing well” was thus carried on in a new State Council exhortation to “bring publishing work up to the mark as urgently as possible” (jinkuai ba chuban gongzuo gao shangqu 尽快把出版工作搞上去).Footnote 49 What this meant in practice, however, was to be radically reconstituted by structural changes to the publishing industry brought about by Deng's economic reforms. New policies aimed at improving the industry's efficiency gradually withdrew state funding from publishers and allowed them to retain their profits. Made responsible for their own finances, publishers were pushed towards becoming commercially, rather than politically, viable businesses. At the micro-level, this could take the form of monetary bonuses offered by the state to publishers who successfully met their profit targets.Footnote 50 At the macro-level, publishing houses were administratively converted from state-run institutions (shiye 事业) expected to prioritize the public good (gongyi 公益), to state-owned but self-managing enterprises (qiye 企业) expected to ensure their own profitability.Footnote 51
Strategies for succeeding in this new financially competitive environment shifted from the late 1970s' method of simply putting out all non-political reading material available, which in the immediate wake of the Cultural Revolution easily found consumers, to “title selling” in the 1980s: quickly turning over new and catchy titles in the hope of capturing buyers' increasingly evasive attention by sheer novelty. The trend shifted again in the early 1990s, towards focusing resources on making a small number of highly profitable, runaway bestsellers.Footnote 52 While tough on individual publishers, this new mode of operation has led to massive growth in the industry as a whole, from 105 publishing houses in 1979 to 570 in 2005, and from a total output of 17,000 titles in 1982 to over 190,000 in 2003.Footnote 53 Much of this growth has occurred since the early 1990s, when accelerated reform and concomitant growth led to a ten-fold increase in total market sales, from 4.2 billion CNY in 1992 to 43.5 billion CNY in 2002.Footnote 54
As the operational axes of the industry shifted, so too has the mode of its governance. Whereas publishing houses during the Mao era were directly controlled for content, central governance of the newly market-oriented publishing industry takes the indirect form of technical and administrative regulation of processes. Thus while the new priority of commercial values necessitates some “opening up” or loosening of political control over content, central government involvement is not relinquished, but rather is reconfigured and built into the industry's rapidly growing infrastructure, in the form of proliferating legal regulations and professional training programmes.
Framing the problem of publishing in this milieu as a matter of productive and distributive efficiency, directives from the Ministry of Culture and the National Publishing Administration (guojia chuban zongshu 国家出版总署), later renamed General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP, xinwen chuban zongshu 新闻出版总署), encourage publishers and retailers to separate politics from enterprise, and adapt themselves to the consumer by actively marketing titles and improving services.Footnote 55 Meanwhile, systematic procedures were put in place requiring publishers to acquire legal permission for printing each manuscript on the one hand, and for the National Publishing Administration to eliminate all unauthorized publishing activities on the other. In 1982, for example, ISBN numbers were introduced and legally required of all publications. The National Publishing Administration was given exclusive authority to issue and rescind numbers, and thus to manage all publishing activity. The currently resulting system is one of publishing enterprises governed by ISBN regulations, rather than publishing institutions directly run, but far less systematically regulated, by the state. If deviation from the central government's agenda under Mao took the form of printing politically prohibited content either intentionally or for lack of better socialist education, deviation now primarily comprises circumventing legal regulations for the sake of private profit. Soon after the ISBN requirement was introduced, for instance, a brisk trade emerged in which state-owned publishers would sell their allocated ISBN numbers to illegal, private printers, who would use them to publish their own highly marketable but officially unsanctioned manuscripts.Footnote 56
As such industry developments surface, the GAPP has not sought to eliminate the guilty by fiat and confiscation as before, but rather has continuously extended the reach of its administrative regulations to incorporate such emergent domains of activity. The conversion of publishing houses from institutions into enterprises, for example, makes it possible for state-owned publishers lawfully to collaborate with private persons or groups, to produce officially monitored and yet highly marketable publications.Footnote 57 A number of new laws also reach down to the micro-level of everyday practice, including stipulations against book retailers accepting commissions from publishers, and against publishers accepting payment from writers or supplementing writers' fees with non-monetary forms of payment. On its 2004 introduction of an Administrative Licence Law, the GAPP triumphantly reports:
The law standardizes the range, category, procedure, supervision, and fee of administrative licensing. In accordance with the law, the GAPP announced 45 items still requiring administrative licensing. In 2003 and 2004, it abolished 173 regulations and legal documents. In 2004, the GAPP continued to screen projects for administrative examination and regulations on licensing, keeping 36 of all original items as approved by the State Council. In accordance with the law, the GAPP reviewed the basis, conditions, procedures, duration, and agency of administrative licensing, and specified each item … These measures are of great significance in promoting the transformation of government functions, strengthening and perfecting macro-management of the press and publishing industry, and encouraging administration by law, regulation, and scientific methods.Footnote 58
As such “hard” regulations are made increasingly intricate and exhaustive or watertight, they are also matched by the “soft” encouragement of training programmes that familiarize employees with new legal and administrative protocol for publishing, and by conferences and research workshops on the responsibilities of publishing and its proper management.Footnote 59
The banner of “doing publishing well” thus runs continuously from Mao, through Deng, to Hu Yaobang's 1980 call to publishing workers to “make more books, and make good books” (duo chu shu, chu hao shu 多出书, ，出好书), Jiang Zemin's 1993 exhortation of the industry to “make more good books, to help in building the socialist spirit” (duo chu hao shu, cujin shehuizhuyi jingshen wenming jianshe 多出好书, ，促进社会主义精神文明建设), and the numerous speeches, reports, journal articles and histories of publishing that continue to echo it.Footnote 60 Under the structurally new conditions of a commercially competitive publishing industry, however, “doing publishing well” since Deng has come to mean maximizing profits by capturing consumer favour on the one hand and through administratively systematic and thus cost-effective financial management on the other. The notion of the “good book” has been correspondingly reconstituted, in practice though not in name, from a work that is ideologically edifying to its readers if not financially viable to a commodity that is maximally profitable without being threatening to the national goals of stability and economic development in its content. A common motif in current publishing industry journals is thus to observe that publishing work in China has for too long seen only the ideological character of its activity, and been blind to its commercial commodity character (shangpin shuxing 商品属性).Footnote 61 Books, they report, can no longer be treated as special items whose exceptional value warrants external subsidization from the state, but rather must be seen as ordinary commodities whose production must be justified and financed by their own market value. “Good books are no longer written, but rather are made (zuo chulai de 做出来的). They may be cultural products, but they are also an industry like any other.” Thus while a good book should have a beneficial effect on society, it must first be financially independent, or able to “earn its keep.”Footnote 62
Conclusion
“No matter what, times have changed; times are good now and I am very proud of Yao Ming” – Yao Ming's father, on whether or not his son has become too much of an entrepreneur
The bestselling history of national maturation from political passion to economic rationality thus finds its reflection in the very publishing that produces it. Just as a reconstituted notion of the good life is prerequisite for the individual's self-narrative of continuity with the past in bestselling biographies, so too is a new notion of the good book essential to discursive continuity within China's publishing industry. At both levels, the new sense of goodness represents itself as continuous with the socialist past, by appropriating the latter in a way that makes it only sensible to now pursue an economically rational, or marketized, future. If individuals such as Yao Ming and Liu Chuanzhi reflect this successful turnaround, so too does the central government's involvement in China's publishing activities. Whereas the CCP had formerly sought direct political control over the entire publishing industry, it now participates as both the industry's indirect or regulatory authority and as a highly productive competitor within it. Central government presses such as the People's Education Press, People's Publishing House and China Youth Press, for instance, market their established reputations for officially recognized high quality, and remain among the most profitable publishing houses, with the largest total assets.Footnote 63
As the State Council and GAPP continuously restructure the publishing industry, it is often these mainstay presses of the central government that most benefit from the change. In 1999, for instance, the GAPP allowed publishers, printers and distributors to merge into conglomerates or “publishing groups” (chuban jituan 出版集团), to maximize operational economies of scale. Seventeen publishing groups were formed, of which the China Publishing Group (CPG) was by far the largest, comprising such industry heavyweights as the People's Publishing House, People's Literature Publishing House, Commercial Press, Zhonghua Book Company and SDX Joint Publishing Company, as well as the Xinhua Book Company and China National Publications Import and Export Co-operation on the distribution side.Footnote 64 In 2004, the largest publishing organizations in terms of total assets were The People's Education Press (2.33 billion CNY), followed by the CPG (2.32 billion CNY).Footnote 65 In the same year, the CPG became the first publishing group to be converted from institution to enterprise status. The market strategies it could thereby adopt enabled it to increase its sales revenue in 2005 by 21.7 per cent, and its total assets by 23 per cent.Footnote 66
The CPG is thus both a successful realization of the new, market-oriented publishing industry and a formidable expression of the central government's presence within it. It is in the role of such players that the boundaries between enterprise and administration, economic competition and political management, remain blurred despite central government claims to be working towards their clearer separation.Footnote 67 The CPG, for example, is like all other publishers subject to supervision by the Ministry of Publicity and the GAPP. Unlike the others, however, it is officially designated as “singled out in corresponding national plans, exercising the rights of contributors over its member units and assuming responsibilities for the maintenance and enhancement of the value of state-owned assets.”Footnote 68 Its president, Yang Muzhi 杨牧之, is also a former deputy director of the GAPP.
Changing the rules as it plays the game, the central government thus pursues rhetorically communist goals under market-competitive conditions that make these old terms meaningful or productive in a different way. The CPG, for instance, describes its aim as follows:
The aim of the CPG is: guided by Maxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theories and the representation of the advanced culture, the modern productivity and the interest of the people, keep the direction of “two serves” (serve the people and the socialist country) and adhere to “two hundred” policies (let one hundred flowers bloom, one hundred schools of thought contend), publicize the lines, guiding principles and the politics of the Communist Party of China, carry forward the national cultural heritage, spread advanced culture, improve the quality of the whole nation and nurture national spirit.Footnote 69
While it may be tempting to read this manifesto as merely formal adherence to a hollow Party line against all evidence of a radical about-turn in policy, such an interpretation sheds no light on the complex of discourse and practice, continuity and change, that constitutes publishing and politics in contemporary China. Rather, such rhetoric is more productively seen not as betrayed but as reinvested with new meaning, when deployed within a different milieu. Retaining the claim to work in the interest of the good has made it possible for both individuals and governing institutions in post-Mao China to keep a narrative of self in place, while the good and governance itself are reconstituted along fundamentally different axes of operation. In the new, market-based system, the authority of the central government thus remains, while the activity of governance is relocated from direct intervention to ensure the ideologically socialist values of published content to technical regulation and the indirect disciplining of market processes, which are now expected to produce the collective good in the form of rapidly increased national wealth. As a competitive producer in this market, the central government further capitalizes on its position as both bureaucratic authority and incumbent industry monopolist, to use its privileged access to material and human resources, established reputations and extensive distribution networks, in order to increase sales revenues.
While this unique configuration of elements may appear to be an unthinkable and unsustainable contradiction on the surface, this study has shown that a mutually reinforcing relationship actually exists, at both the individual and institutional levels, between socialist self-narrative on the one hand and market-oriented practice on the other. Economic reform is both generative of and generated by a new conception of the good in contemporary China, a shift from “socialist” past to “socialist' present.” The interests of the people are thus now defined and served by commercially competitive enterprises, while the quality of the socialist nation is defined and improved by its industries' development towards market efficiency. If Jiang Zemin is, as his biographer would have it, best understood not as President but as “the CEO of contemporary China,” this is so not in the sense of a sudden and thorough transformation of China from a socialist ideological collective into a capitalist system of self-enterprising and self-governing individuals. Rather, the truth of this sentiment lies in its reflection of the complex mixture of rationalities that constitute value and motivate action in a marketizing economy that retains its socialist self-narrative. To understand contemporary China as anything other than a distorted (hungry, dishonest, delayed) version of the modern West, such discursive continuity cannot be dismissed as hollow, but must instead be understood in the embedded complexes of reason and practice within which they are at work.
