During my time at PaperTigers, I always hovered at the edges of what seemed like a magic, inaccessible world: the world of Chinese children's books. I have seen many (often very good) books about China published elsewhere, sometimes bilingual, sometimes in Chinese; I have seen small samples of actual Chinese books at book fairs; and of course, I have heard Western publishers talking about the Holy Grail that the Chinese children's book market could represent. Given these past experiences, I jumped at the chance to visit the 2004 Beijing International Book Fair.

Based on my earlier exposure, I had the impression that the majority of children's books in China were traditional stories retold (both Chinese and Western) or imported books, without much originality in terms of artwork or writing. Unfortunately, what I saw at the Beijing Fair confirmed this impression completely.

In general, the quality of children's books, especially if compared to the elegance of today's Chinese books for adults, was a little disappointing. In many cases, not only were the children's books cheaply produced, but the illustrations in them were often bad copies of already poor foreign illustrations, lacking in originality and skill. There were exceptions: the Hebei Fine Arts Publishing House stood out for the beauty of its books, in particular its
Science Fiction series for teen-agers, while the Zhejiang Juvenile and Children's Book Publishing House publishes many retellings of traditional legends, and does so with a bit more grace than most of its competitors. It looks as if each province has its own publishers that work autonomously and usually distribute their books within their province. Often they seem to be doing the same books - I saw at least ten different children's versions of The Dream of the Red Mansion and Journey to the West (two very popular classics of Chinese literature). There are publishers that reach the entire country, but usually they are conglomerates (like the People's Literature Publishing House, publisher of the Harry Potter books) who happen to do children's books.

Reading for leisure doesn't seem to be very encouraged, especially in young children, although the offerings for young adults seemed more varied. The situation might be changing, though, thanks to - surprise surprise - Harry Potter... His adventures have been best sellers as in the rest of the word, and have stirred up a debate among Chinese writers on whether Chinese tradition could offer inspiration to create a similar world-wide blockbuster, with writer Yang Peng declaring rather provocatively that "There is not much imagination in Harry Potter." Potter's popularity has inspired numerous unauthorized China-made stories, the most interesting of which is Harry Potter and the Porcelain Doll, where our hero goes to - who would've guessed - China! Unfortunately, I didn't see actual copies of the pirated books, but if you want to find out more, this website has interesting info, as does Wikipedia.

Aside from Harry Potter, the Chinese Legend of Nezha (based on a folktale) is said to have surpassed the sales of Harry Potter in 2004, and the cartoon is a big success. Mulan is another beloved character whose story is abundantly retold. Aside from these two classics, other characters that were wide-spread were Walt Disney characters, Teletubbies, and the super-popular Tin Tin.

In some sense, Chinese children's literature is still in its infancy, and there is a lot of work to do to improve the quality of the books, their availability and to develop the reading habits of youngsters. Having just started to discover the world of Chinese literature for adults, I very much look forward to reading original native stories for children, and I don't doubt that they will begin to appear very soon. I will keep you posted!

posted: January 2005