China’s unfavorable copyright imbalance

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GAPP just released a report on the state of China’s publishing industries in 2006. The report concluded that, while China’s copyright-related trade has made strides, the “unfavorable copyright trade imbalance” hasn’t fundamentally reversed.

In support of this conclusion, the report cited figures showing that 12,386 copyrighted publication titles “from elsewhere” were sold in China in 2006, while China exported only 2,057 copyrighted publication titles. The report includes comments from industry experts saying that the competitive power of China’s “book products” is still relatively weak. Chinese books that “walk out” into the international arena will have to “carry a heavy load over a long distance.”

To anyone with passing familiarity with the quality of media published in China, the fact that China imports vastly more publications than it exports should be no surprise. Years of censorship, restrictions on market access, rampant copying and ingrained corruption have taken their toll on product quality. As a result, reporting and non-fiction writing in China tends to be simplistic (or simply propaganda) and include inaccuracies; comprehensiveness and analysis is rare. Fiction writing often lacks the drama and plot developments that characterize storytelling that captures a global audience.

The “unfavorable copyright trade imbalance” — or, put another way, the absence of international demand for Chinese publications — reflects the global market’s assessment of the quality of Chinese publications. China would be well-advised to accept this lack of demand as a function of market forces, rather than crying unfairness or discrimination. Pushing Chinese publications into an unwilling market will only leave international audiences with a sour impression of Chinese media. If China thinks the copyright trade imbalance is unfavorable now, think how much worse it will be after global readers have slogged through “The Selected Works of Jiang Zemin” and sworn, “Never again.”

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