Are you a Shanghai resident yearning to read “Fear: Trump in the White House”, Bob Woodward’s harrowing account of the most dysfunctional presidency in modern US history?
If so, that’s too damn bad. Because it’s not available in your country and neither are hundreds of other titles from American authors.
According to an amusing little piece published by The New York Times on Friday, Beijing has brought the release of American titles to a veritable “standstill” in the Chinese market, in what appears to be yet another front in the protracted Sino-US spat.
The Times lists a hodgepodge of other books that now find themselves in limbo, including novels by Cormac McCarthy and Lisa Halliday, as well as historical works and treatises on morality in politics.
Just as the PBoC never responds to Bloomberg’s faxed requests for comment about monetary policy, The Communist Party’s Central Publicity Department (which dictates which books can and can’t be published and when) did not respond to inquiries from the Times, sent, as per usual, via fax.
If you’re wondering whether this is a big deal, the answer is apparently yes. Just as US farmers aren’t enamored with the prospect of losing access to one of their largest export markets, neither are publishers particularly excited about being “cut off from a big market of voracious readers”, to quote The Times, which also notes that China is the second-largest publishing market on the planet, behind the US.
As for whether this is a coincidence, it’s not. “The reasons for the delayed publication of each title are not clear [but] publishing industry insiders describe a near freeze of regulatory approvals”, the article goes on to say. This is on top of an increasingly restrictive environment that, under Xi, has seen the government move to curtail the total number of approvals and favor Chinese authors and works viewed as consistent with Party ideology.
Obviously, this could result in publishers simply throwing in the towel on the whole process, from obtaining the rights to publish American titles in China to culling the translators you’d need to do the job.
One editor at a Beijing-based publisher described America as one of China’s “most frequent and profitable” sources of books. In 2017, for example, some 6,000 copyrights for American titles were sold to Chinese buyers, according to the National Copyright Administration.
But, the business is now more “risky”, the publisher said.
The overarching message is that the trade war is accelerating (and, one might say, validating) what was a slow-moving process to curtail the influence of foreign media, from books to films to academic work.
The Times correctly warns that this could end up feeding into the “de-coupling” narrative which recently found expression in the financial world via a variety of proposals for cutting off the flow of capital to China.
“Some people in the book world see a slowdown in American books released in China as a troubling freeze in the exchange of ideas on both sides”, The Times writes, adding that “though the two countries remain tightly woven economically, leaders in both are openly talking about a day when the two become less dependent on each other”.
