Big business
Another type of China book that has proliferated in recent years promotes a different type of understanding: business. Books promising access to untold fortunes in Chinese markets have been commonplace on bookshelves for the past decade, and there is no sign of a slowdown.
"Before I began to write The China Executive in 1999, there had been no books published on the topic of 'China business' as such," says author Wei Wang. "But by the time my book was published in 2006, a large number of books on China business began to appear on the market."
Many of these titles performed well. Books such as Tim Clissold's Mr. China and James McGregor's One Billion Customers sold particularly well and garnered much mainstream attention. But Wei Wang suggests caution when approaching books that promise easy solutions to the challenges of doing business in China.
"While these titles as a whole represent a development in the field of China business thinking, there has sometimes been too much of a disconnect between what people read about China and what they find when they arrive because of the authors' backgrounds".
Edward Tse, author of The China Strategy, reiterates the point, and argues that it can often be counter-productive to take advice from people who may not have first-hand experience of doing business on the ground in China.
"Often authors don't live and work in China and visit only occasionally. They write about China from long distances and some rely mostly on third-hand sources of information. China changes so fast and is such a large and complex country, it is rather hard for authors to fully capture China. By the time a book comes out, some of its contents may be somewhat outdated already."
The issue of timing is important, according to Wei Wang. While China is moving so far and publishers are putting pressure on authors to produce work quickly, he argues that the best books are often the result of a little more contemplation.
"An important ingredient is time, sufficient time to reflect on one's experience, to digest others' ideas, and to develop a meaningful structure. Yet, when one writes under the pressure of the deadline set by a publisher, it is difficult to do these things properly."
Whether his advice is heard among the clamor to produce more and more titles on China is another issue. Either way, there can be no denying that readers have unprecedented access to books on the country.
"The more books there are about China, whether that's literature or secondary responses to China by Anglophone speakers, the better," says Lovell. "Certainly over the time I've been working on China I've seen the number of books available multiply quite dramatically.
"I'm sure that the trend will continue. I think the story of the rise of China is one of the most interesting and complex stories in the world today, and the more sources and responses we have on it the better our understanding will be."
Li Aoxue contributed to this story.
Source: China Daily
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