Consuming Literature: Best Sellers and the Commercialization of Literary Production in Contemporary China (review)

China's economic reforms, beginning after the Cultural Revolution dust had settled and continuing to this day, have generated countless reams of description and commentary in the West. The mainstream media alternates schizophrenically between celebrating the liberation of Chinese producers and consumers by the market and warning darkly of the threat of a prosperous and nationalist China. A steady stream of books by social scientists attempts to look beyond the hype and describe the deep and dramatic changes in economic and social organization that have swept China in the last few decades. Relatively few books have dealt with the effects of market reforms in the culture industry, however, and studies of contemporary Chinese culture have tended to put the phenomenon of cultural commercialization or "marketization" (shichanghua) in the context of broader themes such as cultural politics and ideology, globalization, and postmodernity in China. The dramatic growth of Chinese cultural studies in recent years, moreover, has reversed the central role literature used to play in the scholarship on modern Chinese culture, with literature often being included as just one among several topics—including cinema, popular music, and television—in studies of current cultural trends.

Consequently, Shuyu Kong's Consuming Literature: Best Sellers and the Commercialization of Literary Production in Contemporary China fills a significant gap in the current scholarship by providing a broad overview of the literature industry in reform-era China as well as a study that squarely faces commercialization as the defining characteristic of Chinese culture in the market age. This contribution is all the more welcome for being written in a straightforward and engaging style that steers completely clear of unnecessary jargon or gratuitous theoretical obfuscation. There is no book in English that could serve as a more informative or reliable introduction to the literary scene of China today.

Before describing the accomplishments of Consuming Literature, however, a few words on what it is not. Most importantly, it does not undertake lengthy literary analysis and interpretation of the greatest Chinese novels and short stories of recent decades; instead, it only considers literary style and narrative in the context of the publishing histories of various books. That is, the focus is on a historical account of the industry, or the cluster of industries (official book publishers, private book dealers, literary journals, and even Internet companies), that constitute China's contemporary literary scene; close readings of individual works of literature are mostly absent, and to the extent that they occur at all they are only within a discussion of, for example, a publisher's marketing strategy for a book Kong also does not attempt to theorize her topic in any significant way, nor does she use the Chinese instance to try to illustrate in any explicit way the broader phenomenon of the commercialization of culture under capitalism. Instead, she almost exclusively uses a case-study method, relying on the concrete instances of specific publishing houses, book dealers, authors, novels, journals, and so on to illustrate in rich detail the dynamics that have rapidly and radically transformed the institution of literature in China.

In a chapter on the changing role of writers, for example, through a series of case studies Kong examines the transition of writers from "cultural workers" in the socialist economy to "cultural entrepreneurs" who often had no choice but to "dive into the sea" of the market economy. An early exemplar of this trend was Xue Mili, a "Hong Kong female writer" of pulp fiction in the late 1980s whose name was eventually revealed in fact to be the pen name of a group of male writers who produced the books in an assembly-line manner and had them distributed through a private book dealer. Kong also discusses the notorious "hooligan" novelist Wang Shuo, who is described as one of the first writers to abandon completely the security...