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What do Oprah Winfrey and Wen Jiabao have in common? They can both catapult
obscure works into bestsellers. The American television host opened a book club,
a segment on her extremely popular talk show, in 1996 and has since recommended
dozens of books, increasing their sales by as much as a million copies each.
Hence, the "Oprah effect".
The Chinese premier mentioned in a visit to Singapore late last year that
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is his bedside reading. Since then, the Roman
emperor's thoughts and insights have had half a dozen Chinese translations
published, all of which are selling briskly. There is a bilingual
Chinese-English edition, a special edition for adolescents and even a
Meditations-style volume by one of the translators. All of them carry the
tagline "a book Premier Wen Jiabao reads every day".
China has book critics, but their impact pales beside that of politicians.
The Chinese version of The World Is Flat is on the recommendation list of
several high-profile leaders. When Wang Yang, then Party secretary of Chongqing
municipality, encouraged city officials to read it, 1,000 copies were sold in
one day, emptying the city's entire inventory. Later, when Wang assumed the
equivalent position in Guangdong province, he invited author Thomas Friedman for
a visit.
A year ago, the Party secretary of Jiangxi province asked subordinates at
an official meeting whether any of them had read the New York Times columnist's
deep thoughts on globalization. Few hands shot up. Imagine the sales volume of
that market!
When I interviewed Xia Deren, the mayor of Dalian, he gave me a copy of
this book as a souvenir. I knew the mayor was featured in the book. And it was
my guess he had bought hundreds of copies and gave them away as gifts.
This could be the envy of American politicians. President George W. Bush is
said to be a bookworm, yet the release of his reading list, which includes such
titles as American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, Polio: An American
Story by David Oshinsky, and Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky, has not
created miracles for their sales.
A comparison of the marketing strategies for Microtrends: The Small Forces
Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes by Mark Penn and E. Kinney Zalesne reveals a
cultural chasm: In Amazon's introduction, the book is positioned as an "exercise
in nano-sociology" for "culture buffs, retailers and especially businesspeople
for whom 'small is the new big' will value". The Chinese title, as it appears on
book retailing sites, is Microtrends: Jointly Recommended by Bill Clinton and
Bill Gates. Here, the power of politics and money add to the prestige.
That explains the sudden popularity of titles concerning Barack Obama, the
American president-elect. In the week after the election, the giant Zhongguancun
bookstore in Beijing reported an 80 percent increase in sales of these titles,
many of which were hastily assembled from online sources.
A search of Dangdang.com, one of the largest online retailers in China,
early this week turned up 14 titles in all. Ranked at the top, by sales, is
Obamanomics, written by John Talbott and translated into Chinese. At the bottom
of the list is The Audacity of Hope written by Obama. In between is a bunch of
quickly put-together volumes set to cash in on Obama's election.
In the old days, Chinese leaders were reluctant to publicize their reading
lists. According to Southern Weekend, as late as 1987, when the Communist Party
magazine Outlook asked Hu Yaobang, then Party secretary, to "promote reading",
Hu said it was inconvenient for him to specify titles for recommendation.
The Fifth National Reading Survey, published in July 2008, reveals that the
reading rate of books has halted its decline and rests at 48.8 percent, which
translates to 4.58 volumes per capita (for the year 2006). The Southern Weekend
interviews show the reading rate among government and Party officials hovers
around 20-30 percent. These people have to wade through tons of documents every
day, and for leisure they opt for newspapers instead. Unless assigned as a
specific task by their boss, a book could be the last thing on their to-do
list.
The report says the current reading craze engineered by top leaders could
dissolve overnight once they leave office. The turning point for official
enthusiasm with reading came in 2002 when the CPC report initiated the idea of a
"study-oriented society".
In every hotel room of the Party School of the Central Committee of CPC,
there is a set of four big tomes, each devoted to Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, says Professor Chen Xuewei of
the school.
Beyond that, the reading list reflects the personal opinions of each
official, big or small. The current trend is to endorse titles that help broaden
one's vista, notes Ye Duchu, another professor of the Party School. "What used
to be forbidden zones are no longer forbidden, but you have to have a global
view. That's the biggest change in the past 30 years." Besides, book
recommendation is not only top down, but could be bottom up as well. "Nobody is
an expert at everything," Ye adds.
Strictly speaking, Premier Wen Jiabao was not asking everyone to read
Meditations. He was saying he had read the book more than 100 times. Then
publishers discovered how great and relevant this classic was. If you think
about it, this slim volume says a lot about the personal philosophy and stoicism
of the premier and, by extension, the way he governs the country and the
policies he helps formulate.
Another title Wen has recommended, "no less than five times" according to
media reports, is Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It is less of a
runaway hit than Meditations, but has 10 Chinese versions. The premier's
endorsement has no doubt given a boost to its sales but its real value, given
China's brush with natural disasters and corporate scandals, lies in the morals
and ethics espoused in the book, which have come as a timely antidote.
In the final analysis, the success of the two classics is more a cultural
phenomenon than a business one. The sharp eye of the publishers was certainly a
factor but it was the ideas in them that resonate with present-day Chinese. The
premier was, in a sense, using them as a moral guiding light. |
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发表于 2016-7-9 23:56:09