For Chinese Intellectuals, A ‘Window on the World’ Reopens at Beijing Book Fair

Zhang Zhao, a teacher at the Beijing Computer Institute, sat at a booth at the 1988 Beijing International Book Fair late last week, scrutinizing a computer handbook.

“What’s nice is that we can see books from all over the world here, and they’re rather new books,” Zhang said. “If we wait until foreign books are published in China, they’re already a bit old.”

He said he would recommend some titles for his school’s library to buy. But the $19.95 computer handbook is “impossible for me to buy myself, because it’s too expensive,” he said.

Half a Month’s Salary

For someone in Zhang’s position, the book’s price might well amount to half a month’s salary.

During the weeklong book fair that opened Thursday, about 100,000 Chinese intellectuals--including scientific or technical personnel, scholars, librarians and publishing company officials--are expected to visit the Beijing Exhibition Hall to examine 60,000 titles shipped here by 1,095 foreign publishers. Most will have received free tickets through their place of work, though some tickets will be sold at the door.

The emphasis is on nonfiction books of potential value to China’s modernization drive.

Another 30,000 titles from 335 Chinese publishers, some in Chinese and others in foreign languages, also are on display.

Window on the World

The exhibition, the second in a series scheduled every two years, serves China as an important window on the world.

To most foreign publishers, the fair is a chance to get a foot in the door of a potentially important market.

W. Bradford Wiley, chairman of John Wiley & Sons, one of the largest foreign suppliers of books to China, said his company’s efforts here now are only “nominally profitable.”

“We’re looking at this as something that’s going to grow and change,” he said. “We’re interested in entering into co-publishing agreements with a spectrum of Chinese publishers.”

China is only now drawing up a domestic copyright law; it has not joined any international copyright conventions. With no legal restrictions against pirated translations or reproductions of foreign books--and with tight limits on the use of foreign exchange--China is a market offering most publishers little hope of large profits any time soon.

But potentially it may be “an enormous market,” said Fred Kobrak, former president of Collier Macmillan International. “The reason people come here is because one has to start staking out a claim in China. . . . A country that has nearly one-quarter of the population of the world eventually has to be in the market for intellectual property.”

Several American publishing officials expressed optimism that China will join international copyright conventions in a few years.

“Increasingly, it is being recognized that copyright violation is theft,” said Nicholas A. Veliotes, the Assn. of American Publishers president.

Kobrak said the Chinese “want to become respectable members of the international community.”

If the Chinese economy develops as leader Deng Xiaoping desires, “meaning individual efforts, more capitalist-type initiative . . . modernization, and Western economic structures,” then “I think there will be a copyright law passed in this country,” he said. “And then within about two years--perhaps it may take longer--they will join one of the international copyright conventions.”

For now, access by ordinary Chinese to foreign literature mainly is through pirated reprints or unauthorized translations printed by official publishing houses. The selection of titles available this way has grown greatly in recent years.

Liao Kang, a teacher at the Foreign Languages Department of Beijing Normal University, said he ordered about $250 worth of books for his department at the book fair, where he found the selection of non-technical works was “not too good” and included too many books available domestically as unauthorized reprints.

“A lot of them can easily be bought on the domestic market,” he said. “You can see them all the time. There’s no need to bring them to a book fair. For example, I just saw a set of Charles Dickens novels at the Oxford University Press booth. These are 19th-Century novels. We have all of them in various domestic editions.”

Many visitors to the book fair have been serious but frugal shoppers, assigned by schools and research institutes to select recent technical publications for purchase by their employers.

Xu Chuanzhong, a researcher at the Zhengzhou Mechanical Engineering and Construction Institute in Henan Province, arrived at the fair with a fistful of more than 50 carefully researched index cards, each listing a title that his school might want to buy.

“We get the catalogues, but the information in them is limited,” Xu said. “To decide whether we should buy the books, we should come here and see them.”

Xu said if he can locate all the books the school is interested in, he might place about $3,000 in orders.

The 1986 fair led to about $2.7 million in orders for foreign books but no prediction has been made of expected sales from this year’s event, according to a Chinese official involved in the planning.

Many visitors can only dream of obtaining the books that they see. For some, the temptation to try to steal them has been too much to resist.

“We caught about 150 to 160 people trying to steal books on the first day,” commented He Ping, an official with the China National Publications Import & Export Corp., sponsor of the fair.

Lo Chihong, who helped run the exhibit set up by Hong Kong-based Sino United Publishing, said that at his booth, “some books were stolen, but not too many.”

“People who come here have to order the books, and these books are rather expensive, and it’s mostly their workplaces that buy them,” he said. “Some individuals want them for themselves and take them away. This is quite natural. It can happen anywhere.”

Ren Mengzhang, vice president of the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang, a city in northeastern China, said he and two colleagues “came to Beijing just for the book fair, but after getting here, it hasn’t seemed very ideal to us.”

“The number of books is rather limited,” he said. “If there were more art and literature books, then it would be all right.”

But Li Xuefeng, a sculpture instructor at a Beijing art institute, said he enjoyed finding many books he “cannot normally see.”

“I like to visit bookstores when I have spare time,” he said. “So this time, I came here to look at books.”