By just about any measure, Jane Friedman's flag-planting announcement at the Beijing Book Fair last week was an impressive event. In a ballroom crowded with almost exclusively Asian journalists, and over the strings and brass of classical music, the Harper CEO conducted a press conference about the company's initiative to copublish, with Chinese publisher the People's Literature Publishing House, five "new and classical works by Chinese authors." In the two-hour long q&a that followed, Friedman made it clear that this, among other initiatives including the launch of a new online English-Chinese dictionary, was the publisher's way of "embracing" Chinese literature and culture.
It is also a way to give the company a foothold in the "new" China, a market so desirable, mysterious and potentially lucrative, that it has called to mind the old Fran Lebowitz line about the weather: Everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it. While most major publishers are quietly working on, or at least contemplating, establishing relationships here, Harper is among the first to make a big show of doing it. And that's a big step in a country where, just the day before, a government operative at another press conference insisted that Western companies would never be permitted to publish here at all. Copublishing, the official said, is the only possibility—and then, only with strict government supervision.
So Harper's move is strategically brilliant—the copublishing venture has the full support of the government-run General Administration of Press and Publication—even if the specifics of the deal are vague. Executives have chosen only one book to copublish (and that's a children's book by a 12-year-old China-born American who e-mailed her manuscript to Friedman) and were unclear just what they meant by "classics" of Chinese literature. Would Harper be copublishing books going back as far as 1919, after the last emperor, or only those that had been published since Mao? There was no clear answer. Who is going to get paid, and how, were also not made explicit.
But this is China, after all, a culture that, for all its emphasis on appearance and "face," is notoriously messy about the details. "Doing business here is like being in the Wild West," said one American publisher yet to strike a major deal. (I've heard that line, almost verbatim, so many times in the past six months that it vies as a cliché with "tastes like chicken." ) Due to language or custom or the fact that the economy is growing (for some, anyway) so quickly, disorder often reigns, even on the lowest level: at the fair, for example, officials announced the hall would close one day at 5 p.m., not 6, as originally announced, but when visitors complained, they added back the hour.
I gather HC has noticed all this—which is why executives are so careful about describing the new venture. On the other hand, maybe they're subscribing to the very Western notion that being smart is one thing, but being first is best.
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