Drawing on a broad range of archival sources that have been available but underutilized since the 1980s, in Pirates and Publishers, Fei-Hsien Wang studies those in modern China to whom copyright and intellectual property rights (IPR) mattered most—authors, translators, publishers, and booksellers. Turning in particular to the archives of the Shanghai Booksellers Guild (SBG) in the Shanghai Municipal Archives (SMA), she tells this China-centered story from the inside, starting in the late 1890s, when the term banquan (copyright, or the “right to printing blocks”) was first introduced from Japan and the West, to the mid-1950s, when copyright legislation faded away, and even on into the 1990s, when it returned as part of China's WTO application.
Researchers believe they have long known—witness the success of William Alford's To Steal a Book is an Elegant Offense (1995)—that piracy and the lack of copyright were normative and unchallenged in China's modern media history. In Wang's characterization, Alford argues “that the character of Chinese political culture and Confucian traditions prevented imperial China from developing an indigenous counterpart to Western copyright law” and “without the pressures exerted by Western gunboats … China would never have adopted IPR doctrines” (7). In Wang's telling, Mainland Chinese scholars, conversely, advocate an “an alternative history of copyright in China that fits the reform era's political agenda” (7). Part of what makes Pirates and Publishers new, exciting, and profoundly important is its deployment of new materials via a new method that transcends the limitations of these two conceptualizations.
Prior to Alford, and starting in 1984 with the appearance of Leo Ou-fan Lee and Andrew Nathan's “Beginnings of Mass Culture: Journalism and Fiction in the Late Ch'ing and Beyond,” and, then, a year later, with T.H. Tsien's Paper and Printing (part of the Joseph Needham series Science and Civilization in China), Western scholars involved in discussion of China's modern print media have tended to fall into one of two groups. Most focus on newspapers, periodicals, and ephemera. A second group covers the social history of books, both traditional and modern.
At first glance, Wang's work appears to fit solidly into this second camp. However, upon deeper scrutiny, it becomes clear that Pirates and Publishers, with its coverage of Chinese notions of intellectual property as they relate to publishing in general, has broad implications for both groups. Apart from the value of bridging the divide between these two scholarly lineages, and in addition to its direct contributions to the history of copyright in China, Wang's book also speaks indirectly to issues of trademarks and patents. All three—copyrights, trademarks, and patents—have played out in global headline news for at least the past decade and are clearly related to ongoing issues in Sino-Western trade.
Chapter 5 is, in my view, the centerpiece of Pirates and Publishers. I base this claim not only on my reading of the book but also on my first-hand, direct knowledge of the challenges involved in piecing together the story of the SBG. Heavy citation of the SMA collections in Chapters 5, 6, and 7 makes clear that Wang is the master of these SMA materials. She lays the groundwork for Chapters 5–7 in Chapter 1 and then introduces essential background in Chapters 2, 3, and 4.
Wang's Chinese copyright story actually starts in Japan. There, copyright came to be known by the new term hanken (misleadingly suggesting “the right to printing blocks” [43]). The term was coined by Fukuzawa Yukichi in 1873. Fukuzawa was himself afflicted by publishing pirates who included even officials in the new, Westernizing, Meiji government. With the neologism, Fukuzawa tried to emphasize copyright as a form of private property created through mental effort. In 1875, Japan first wrote Fukuzawa's new term into law. A quarter of a century later, a revised copyright law, now based on the French model, readied Japan to join the Berne Convention.
At about the same time (1898–1903), hanken was introduced to China as banquan (same characters, different pronunciation). Well-known reformers Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, both active writers and publishers, may have been the first to use the new term, suggests Wang. Although the Qing court initially opposed the concept on “national security” grounds, Shanghai publishers, now profiting from their commitments to spreading Western or New (as opposed to Confucian or Old) Learning, petitioned the government for banquan protection. By surveying contemporary newspapers, Wang is able to show that the term banquan appeared regularly in journals, books, etc., confirming that the term, which had not existed in Chinese before 1898, was familiar to readers by 1903.
Chapter 2 discusses the commodification of Western or New Learning and the extreme publishing disorder that resulted even as modern publishing became centralized in treaty-port Shanghai. Wang starts by discussing the Western missionary publishing entity known as the Society for the Diffusion of Christian Knowledge (SDCK, 1887+), which may have been the first openly to call for copyright protection against piracy. She then moves on to engage Chinese-established, Western-style publishing firms. What initially concerned SDCK—the potential benefits of copyright protection against piracy—now began to interest the modern Chinese publishers as well, particularly as educational and civil service reforms replaced the orthodoxy of the Old Learning with the New, necessitating production of innovative but labor-intensive publications.
Chapter 3 studies the efforts of late-Qing translator Yan Fu to secure a contract with both copyright protections and royalties. Yan and his landmark renderings of Western learning are familiar from a variety of intellectual and cultural studies that reach back to the 1960s. However, in comparing Yan to Fukuzawa, Wang argues that Yan should be considered just as important for becoming one of the first Chinese authors positively to promote banquan. Unlike his contemporary translator Lin Shu, for example, Yan did not wish to sell his manuscripts just once for a single lump sum. Neither did he desire, like Liang Qichao, to run a publishing empire devoted to his own works and projects. Instead, anticipating future Chinese writers, Yan sought initial payment and then long-term royalties based on reliable monitoring by his publishers. In tracing Yan's move in 1903 from Civilization Books/Wenming shuju (whose proprietor complained that copyright made publications too expensive, indicating he knew what it was even if he was not committed to observing it) to the better-capitalized Commercial Press, Wang builds her case around Yan's new contract that spelled out his and his publisher's mutual rights and obligations (110–11). The terms found in Yan's contract eventually became standard in the Shanghai publishing world, argues Wang, indicating Chinese awareness then of the need to protect authors’ rights.
Chapter 4 engages the knotty problem of mechanisms used by publishers, authors, and the late Qing state to regulate copyright prior to China's promulgation of formal legislation in 1911. Two foreign treaties—the 1903-revised Sino-American and Sino-Japanese commercial treaties—now introduced copyright protection for foreign works prepared specifically for the Chinese market. In addition, two indigenous forms—individual protection issued by local officials as a favor to the petitioner and copyright protections issued by the new Ministry of Education—assume importance here. Both of the latter drew on the state's long-standing recognition of the social and cultural importance of books, even as books’ status was redefined in the rapidly changing knowledge economy. And both Chinese forms remained vulnerable to the state's unpredictable enforcement. By 1910, the new Qing Imperial Senate did issue a version of Japan's 1899 copyright law, requiring that copyrights be registered with the state and emphasizing that copyright was an individual's private right to a form of intangible property (156–57). However, with the Qing now on life-support, the SBG's own copyright regime took on even greater importance.
Chapter 5 is where Wang gives wings to the SBG, the various incarnations of which now become the most significant institutional actor for the remainder of her book. First mentioned on page 12, the SBG, originally located in the Chessboard Street section of treaty-port Shanghai where New-Learning publishers and booksellers congregated, may have been formed following a suggestion from the missionary publisher SDCK. In the beginning, the SBG drew on both the Chinese tradition of merchant guilds (even as it abandoned their mutual aid services) and early twentieth-century Qing government commercial reforms (which themselves were at least partly influenced by the SBG model, Wang argues). Along with a second publishers’ organization with overlapping membership that was eventually merged into the SBG in 1928, the SBG set out quite deliberately to create, regulate, and protect the booksellers’ understanding of banquan. Pursuing these goals topped the SBG's agenda until the end of the Republic in 1949.
From 1906, however, the SBG registered not copyright (banquan) per se, but shudi (master copy), that is, the means used by the publisher to produce his books. In this way, Wang shows convincingly, the SBG's policies reflected, not the modern, Western idea of copyright, but something more akin to Fukuzawa's misleading “right to printing blocks,” which itself had been anticipated by the older, pre-Fukuzawa Chinese notion of cangban (“possession of the printing blocks,” 174). To clamp down on piracy, the SBG publishers wanted to inventory existing books, group them by mode of production, and then protect their owners by registering banquan, which, the reader by now knows, really meant shudi. Formulation of this kind of transnational, historically rooted, but very subtle argument paying close attention to the underlying meaning of terminology requires rich documentation but also imaginative reconstruction and rhetorical finesse.
Chapter 5 then explores various kinds of cases presented to the SBG by its member publishers. At chapter's end, the issue of “parallel ‘copyright’ regimes” (the state's code versus the industry's customary system) emerges, anticipating the divide that would remain between state and SBG banquan regimes until 1949. In 1923, the SBG revised its bylaws, making clear that it now controlled what became known as “industry-accredited banquan.” Into the 1920s, this customary copyright remained viable even as the state's formalistic one withered. By 1928, with the establishment of the newly centralizing Nationalist Party government, however, it became clear that the SBG's accredited banquan regime had geographic limitations.
Chapters 6, 7, and the Conclusion follow naturally from Chapter 5. To demonstrate that the SBG took its banquan regime seriously even in the face of the Nationalists' weakly enforced 1928 copyright law, Chapter 6 discusses the SBG's “Detective Branch” (1931–37), headquartered in Beijing's old booksellers' district Liulichang but active through-out northern China. The New Culture Movement (1915–21) had changed the meaning of New Learning and a new type of bookseller had emerged in Shanghai, but this bookseller had the same concerns with IPR as previous ones. With Nanjing replacing Beijing as the capital, Beijing intellectuals and their hangers-on now fell on hard times. Piracy became big business there, with its networks extending widely throughout the north. Like the SBG itself in the previous period, the Detective Branch now found itself having to maneuver between its employer's banquan regime and that of the Nationalists. Although Shanghai publishers had begun to protest Nanjing's publication and censorship rules, doing the same in Beijing could now get publishers or pirates onto the Nationalist government's “most-wanted” reactionary subversive lists as copyright cases turned political (240–41).
Chapter 7 delves into China's publishing and piracy systems after the establishment of the PRC. A third of the chapter focuses on Beijing, with the rest covering Shanghai. Chinese Communists, themselves not infrequent pirates before 1949, are shown to have been ambivalent about enforcing copyright until shoddy or opportunistic knock-offs started to undermine Marxist-Leninist ideology. In reconstructing the efforts of the reorganized SBG (!) to rein in piracy in the new socialist framework, Wang, like many others, chips away at the conventional before/after dividing line of 1949. Lastly, the chapter discusses the new remuneration system that sought to guarantee fairer treatment to authors, even as piracy crept back into Chinese Communist Party ranks underserved by the PRC's official Xinhua Bookstore.
Throughout these final chapters, numerous case studies take the reader into the daily struggles of publishers, authors, translators, detectives, etc. Contrary to Alford's claim that a shared disrespect for intellectual and individual achievement and property facilitated China's adoption of the 1928 Soviet Copyright Law in the 1950s, Wang demonstrates that the Chinese Communists tried hard to copy and apply copyright law. Even they, however, had little immediate success. Instead, they shifted to modifying work relationships and recalibrating pay scales. By 1956, publishing firms were nationalized and authors became “cultural workers.”
In 1979, at the dawn of the reform era, China's State Council again took up the issue of copyright law. Wang argues that the remaining thorniness of the issue is suggested by the early appearances of Trademark (1982) and Patent (1984) laws and by the delay of Copyright Law until 1990 (when it was achieved only after years of effort and some twenty drafts). In the end, foreign-style copyright laws still put out shallow roots in China, but do not mean, argues Wang's entire book, that Chinese publishers and authors did/do not value copyright protections. On the contrary, looking closely at the day-to-day operation of intellectual property regimes over the course of the twentieth century, as Wang's book does, confirms that they did.
Wang's book adds substantially both to long-standing and more recent general historical scholarship on modern China. In Wang's retelling of that history, long-familiar major historical actors such as those mentioned earlier along with Timothy Richard, Cai Yuanpei, Qian Mu, Bao Tianxiao, Ye Shengtao, Hu Yuzhi, and others appear, but under new guises. Less familiar characters such as publishers Zhang Yuanji, Lufei Kui, Lian Quan, and Wang Yunwu along with detective Shi Zuocai and his arch-enemy, the Beijing publishing pirate/“reactionary” Cheng Huanqing, figure as well. Further, one of the most important overall achievements of Wang's book is that it will help to “normalize” Chinese copyright history for historians and legal scholars alike, even if they disagree with some of her specific legal interpretations. Now, China specialists as a whole will be better equipped to answer questions about this topic and related matters.
Wang's research is deeply rooted in relevant Chinese-, Japanese-, and Western-language materials. It is also illuminated by a judicious recipe of legal, economic, cultural, and social history leavened by historical imagination. Judging from the citations in Wang's book, sources came, among other institutions, from the SMA and Shanghai Library; China No. 1 Archives; Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs archives and National Diet Library; Taiwan's Academia Historica and the Institute of Modern History Archives at Academia Sinica along with its specialized libraries; US National Archives at College Park (especially RG 59); and the Chicago, Harvard-Yenching, Princeton, Cambridge, National Taiwan, Waseda, and Keio university libraries. In addition, Wang drew on historic Chinese periodicals, many in microfilm or hard-copy reprints, as well as online databases. By my survey, Pirates and Publishers lists some 350 published works (many of them collections of primary sources) in the three language-groups listed above.
Wang uses her archival and published sources to make original, insightful, even brilliant arguments that, while clearly located within recognizable lineages of empirical social, cultural, and legal historiography, also extend that historiography in innovative and important ways. Wang writes vigorous yet nuanced jargon-free narrative and analytical prose. She knows how to tell a story. Her writing in this book will undoubtedly appeal to both scholars and laymen.
