Wed, May 01, 2002 page19

• Chinese book sales reflect a nation's hunger for fiscal success

  The ambitious youth of China do a lot of reading -- but little of it pertains to communist doctrine or Maoist dogma. Much of it has to do with getting rich

  • AP
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  When Ericsson executive Xu Hui wanted to brush up her performance at work, she headed straight for the expert -- Dale Carnegie.

  Chinese hunting for secrets to success are snapping up books by Carnegie and other arch-capitalist American business gurus. Communist revolutionaries like Mao Zedong (毛澤東), Zhou Enlai (周恩來) and Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) still get bookstore shelf space, but the choicest spots are filled with memoirs and biographies of American CEOs and Hong Kong tycoons.

  Even tiny subway kiosks carry translations of such popular recipes for success as Robert Kiyosaki's financial primer Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and Spencer Johnson's Who Moved My Cheese?

  Chinese authors are turning out their own versions. One of the more obvious is a tongue-in-cheek knockoff, Can I Move Your Cheese? by journalist Chen Tong. Like Johnson's original, it advises a proactive approach to overcoming challenges and fears.

  One of the biggest sellers, at more than 1 million copies, is Harvard Girl, written by the parents of teenager Liu Yiting. It details how their daughter, a kid from the northern coal mining city of Taiyuan, got into Harvard.

  "In the bookstores, it's `Harvard this,' `Harvard that,' `Carnegie this,' `Carnegie that'!" said Li Xiguang, a professor at Beijing's Tsinghua University. "People are so hungry to be successful, they seem to think they can get an education in one book."

  But the popularity of books about success hasn't meant a windfall for foreign authors -- pirated editions account for a large share of the volumes available.

  David Chao, who represents Dale Carnegie Training in Beijing, estimates that only 5 percent of the dozens of Dale Carnegie titles sold in China are authorized versions. Chao set up Carnegie's official training office in Beijing last September, believing that the chance to profit outweighed the perils of helping pirate rivals.

  "The market is tremendous," Chao said. "There is a burning desire among Chinese to be successful."

  Most of his 150 Chinese graduates are young, upwardly mobile executives or professionals at high-tech or foreign companies.

  "I got results. I understood myself better," said Xu Hui, the executive at Swedish mobile phone maker Ericsson, who attended a two-day session on improving presentations. "You could say it was a personal breakthrough."

  Dale Carnegie, a salesman and aspiring actor, began his first classes in human relations and public speaking in New York in 1912. He wrote several enduring bestsellers, including How to Win Friends and Influence People and How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.

  Carnegie's books were first translated into Chinese in the 1930s. They survived war, revolution and political upheaval to stage a comeback in the 1980s.

  One reason why Carnegie and other authors are in demand is China's tradition of moral role models, which stretches back past Mao to Confucius.

  "The modern hype around the CEO is very much in that tradition," said Geremie Barme, a scholar of Chinese pop culture who teaches at Australian National University. "The aim is all the same -- personal success."

  During the Mao era, which ended with his death in 1976, the term "capitalist roader" was one of China's vilest epithets. The Little Red Book, a compilation of Mao's quotations with tens of millions of copies in print, was treated as sacred.

  But after two decades of market-style reforms and the weakening of government social controls, it's now little more than a novelty sold in antique markets.

  Today, Chinese bookstores are stocked with memoirs by legendary capitalists such as Microsoft Corp co-founder Bill Gates, retired General Electric Co chief executive Jack Welch and Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing.

  Their publishers are state-owned, suggesting the communist government at least tacitly endorses the Chinese public's hunger for practical guidelines for living.

  "Today is completely different from before," said Feng Xiaolin, 37, who moved to Beijing from her hometown of Hangzhou, in eastern China, planning to become a Dale Carnegie trainer. "We have to find our own way in life."
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