China Takes Over China Books: The Longer Story

by Sally Taylor -- Publishers Weekly, 11/10/2003

Henry Noyes must be smiling these days. The company he founded to disseminate information about the People's Republic of China has at last become China-owned.

The China-born grandson of the first American Presbyterian missionaries in China, Noyes, now 93, left China in 1919, at age 8 and determined then, he writes in his autobiography (China Born, CB&P 1989), to return and "settle the unfinished the missionary business of the Noyes family."

It was 56 years before he returned, and by then he had devoted 15 years to being China's sole distributor of books and magazines into the USA. China Books and Periodicals, which Noyes and his wife, Gertrude, founded in 1959, with no capital whatsoever, had become a "bridge of friendship between two great peoples," as the Noyeses had dreamed. And it would get stronger still.

All trade with China had been cut off by the U.S. Government in 1951, when Mao and his Communist followers took over the country and Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan. Still, books and periodicals were coming in from China, Russia and other socialist republics, mostly through the work of Margaret Cowl. She wanted to pass on the Chinese part of her list, and helped the Noyes get a license from the U.S. Treasury Department to import printed matter from China. It was the only such permission ever issued during the 20 year trade embargo with that country of nearly 1 billion.

China Books & Periodicals began in Chicago, where the Noyeses were living. They started just as the growing philosophical schism building between the Russian and Chinese Communists were splitting loyalties in the U.S.A. as well. The Noyes quickly discovered their titles were no longer accepted by most of the left-leaning outlets on Cowls distribution list. As she had warned them, these were siding with the Russians.

Noyes himself made a $99 bus tour of America to find new outlets for his books and periodicals from China. It was Louis Swift of L-S Distributors in San Francisco who convinced him to go west, and base his company in San Francisco.

Noyes remembers the 1960's as a "germinal period in American culture and we found ourselves in the center of new movements fertilized by a confluence of intellectual and political cross-currents."

China Books & Periodicals flourished, attracting a growing number of young politicized people who would eventually be known as hippies. Civil rights for the blacks and repulsion of the U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam were among their highest priorities, along with a more socialist policy in the U.S.A. They saw the massive political experiment in Communist China, especially the freehand given China's youth during the Cultural Revolution, as a great hope for the future of the world.

It was not exactly the Christianity that his father and grandfather had preached in China. But to Noyes, as to many others, Chinese Communism seemed to be a real solution for the thousands of years of suppression of the Chinese peasants. Noyes was among those converted, in his book he says, "…the Chinese will take the Western world back to school and teach us how to refashion an economy and morality that puts humans first, not dollars."

Noyes insists that he saw his efforts as "commercial, not political" and all the admiration for China that lifted the company up to its height in the mid 1980's was really, for Noyes, just about making information from China available to the world.

The company's first breakthrough in book sales, as opposed to periodicals, which came first, arrived in 1967, in the form of a little title with a red cover called Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung.

"We sold over 250,000 copies across the country the first two years," Noyes recalls in his memoirs, "and over a million in the following 15." Eventually, when China ceased publication of "Mao's little red book" as it was known, CB&P continued to have the book printed in Hong Kong to satisfy U.S.A. demand.

Now that CB&P is China owned, Mao's little red book will be printed by the biggest China-owned printing firm in Hong Kong, C&C Printing. Current General Manger Greg Jones says there is a big back list in the U.S.A., even though there hasn’t been a market for the book in China in decades.

In 1975, near the end of the disastrous Cultural Revolution in China, Noyes returned as an Honored Guest of the Communist Chinese. The author saw the brighter side of what was happening in the country of his birth. In part of his description of that trip, he wrote:

"As we turned into the gateway of the Luoyang Commune, I remembered my father's description of one of those riverboat trips. When the peasants owned their land like Ohio farmers, he had said, they would be freed from landlord oppression. All China one day would develop brotherly relations as the old feudal system broke down under the impact of Western democracy and the Christian religion. His prophecy was not wrong in essence, but it was a revolution, rather than conversion, that won a new life for Chinese peasants."

Even after trade was resumed with China and the company lost their exclusive arrangement with imports from the PRC, China Books and Periodicals continued to thrive. At the height of their operations, there were 50 employees and a flourishing publishing business, Greg Jones recalls, as well as a national distribution network and the retail outlet on 24^th Street in San Francisco.

In June 1989, darker side of China's single party government was dramatically illustrated by the satellite broadcast of the face-off between thousands of unarmed students and the Chinese Army in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Demand for literature approved by the Chinese Government slumped. The Noyes family held on tenaciously through the nineties, but when China's largest exporter of books and periodicals offered to buy up the company, they began to negotiate.

This summer, after 43 years of operations, CB&P belongs to the people of China. The company is owned by Sino United Publishing Group (SUP), which has deep ties to the PRC. At Frankfurt this year, PW interviewed Huang Youyi, Vice President of China's powerful government-owned China International Publishing Group.

It is not this company's first foray into U.S. publishing. And they have had a hand in their own U.S.A. publishing and distribution operation, Cypress Books, for two decades, with offices in New York and San Francisco. A decade ago the SUP, which is based in Hong Kong, bought another San Francisco-based Asia-related concern, Eastwind Book Store, in the city's old Chinatown.

Nor is Huang himself new to the U.S.A. He was one of the first PRC publishers to study in the USA and UK, earning an MA in History from UMass in the 1970's. He then did an internship at Pantheon and credits Andre Schiffrin with many of his best publishing skills today.

One controversy that was a topic at Frankfurt involved the editing of the Chinese version of Hillary Clinton's book by the PRC publisher, Yilin Press. PW asked if such editing was common in China.

Huang said no. He blames that particular confrontation on the Chinese publisher's lack of international experience.

"The problems Random House had would never happen with our group," he told PW. "Most books in China aren't having trouble with the Government, and the more sophisticated publishers understand and accept the standards of their international partners in translation rights. This was a regrettable confrontation."

One of China's 500-plus authorized publishing houses, CIPG has the deepest experience with overseas publishers and their reach is strengthening. Together with their counterpart in Hong Kong, Sino United Publishing, Ltd. (SUP), they have been expanding through acquisition and with new projects, particularly in the lucrative U.S. market. China Books is one of these new projects.

They are also launching a new publishing house in San Francisco, Long River Press, also a joint venture between the CIPG and SUP, with distinguished publisher Mingqiang Xu as CEO and Editor in Chief. Two new titles are being released in November 2003, one on the Chinese basketball star, Yao Ming, the other, a translation on Sun Tzu's Art of War.

Xu, a contemporary of Huang, and former editor in chief at the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing, will be guiding the distribution services at China Books and Cypress Books as well as the new lists at Long River Press.

While much will be streamlined among the various activities of the companies, Xu told PW in San Francisco that he feels Long River has the biggest growth potential. A new "Art of China" series, and "Mini Chinese" language series for specialized business and travel are already in production. Xu hopes to expand to range.

"We are interested in topics of Southeast Asia as well as U.S. authors on Asian subjects, and I'd like to represent Chinese authors for translation into English," he told PW. "There is a lot of potential growth in these areas."

Part of the plan is to consolidate all operations under one roof somewhere in the San Francisco Bay area.

Greg Jones will remain in charge of China Books. Chris Robyn is the Editor at Long River and Marketing Manager for Cypress. And Henry Noyes can rest in peace. For more details, visit the Web site at: www.chinabooks.com.

« Back | Print