The Bookseller.com

8th January 2009

Ian Taylor is founder of Ian Taylor Associates a sales agency and consultancy service for the Chinese book market. He was formerly international director at the Publishers Association.

Beijing in Tianjin

02.09.08

Arriving in Beijing after the Olympics, might be a bit like arriving a day late for the party of the year, but though the abandoned Bird’s Nest looked a bit forlorn, the city looked incredibly clean, quiet  and most of all green. The latter effect created by a massive army of peasant labour, on peppercorn rates, which had planted mature trees all over the place before the great day.

Beijingers seem a bit surprised to have enjoyed the Olympics, even though most were unable to get tickets. A splurge of gold medals was enough to produce a wave of nationalism. Just as the government intended no doubt.

This year’s Beijing International Book Fair is in Tianjin, 120kms southeast of Beijing. The city, though unheard by most foreigners, is the third most important commercial centre in China and, as the former ‘Treaty Port’ of Tientsin, was once one of the five foreign concession cities in pre-revolutionary China. Government regulations, something the Chinese booktrade is all too familiar with, required a change of venue for the fair because of the proximity to the Olympics. Foreign publishers might have hoped it would be shifted to Shanghai, but there was never any hope of this, not just on account of civic rivalry, but because Beijing based publishers, which account for 65% of the sector, would not have been willing to accommodate their staff in Shanghai.

Beijing publishers were not enthusiastic about a non Beijing fair, but a superfast train service to Tianjin, taking just over half an hour, made commuting an option. Peking University Press, a major publisher, but not one of the biggest, sent 100 editors by train to the fair on the opening day, to return in the evening. It remains to be seen whether they will be back for Day Two.

It is not just the change of venue that has made this 15th Beijing International Book Fair an unusual event. After years of positive growth the China book trade – local as much as international - has been unnerved by the collapse of Bertelsmann’s China operation in June and the causes and consequences of this event were still the main topics in the temporary venue’s uncomfortably narrow aisles. The official response has been that Bertelsmann ‘didn’t understand the China market’ and the company’s insistence on expatriate top management may have supported this view, but it was suggested to me that the failure may have a curious benefit for the international publishing sector. Such a public failure of a major international player was not supposed to happen. The government might just have to take notice.