A determined Shanghai man who has spent the last eight years challenging the authority of the country's most popular reference book is suing one of its distributors.

Chen Dingxiang and Shanghai Book Mall have already attended a preliminary hearing yesterday at Shanghai Huangpu District People's Court. A full hearing date has yet to be arranged.

The 56-year-old is asking the mall to stop selling Xinhua Dictionary, alleging it is riddled with errors, refund him twice the amount he spent on the book, make an apology in national media and pay him compensation of 20,000 yuan (US$2,470).

According to his indictment, the 10th edition of Xinhua Dictionary he bought in July last year has more than 4,000 definitions or usages either wrong or inaccurate.

"The book, of poor quality, not only violates consumer rights and interests, but also causes damage to their knowledge," said Chen's lawyer Ye Han.

At least 400 million copies of the book have been sold since it was first launched.

Ye declined to reveal why Chen was suing the mall instead of the book's publisher, Commercial Press. "Chen chose a smart way," she said.

Chen began to doubt the accuracy of the book as early as 1998 when his daughter raised a question about one entry.

He said he disagreed with the use of a noun and an adjective in one definition.

Two months later Chen read two national newspaper reports that described the book as "perfect," without even one mistake. He doubted the claims and started the eight-year-long fault finding mission.

To concentrate on the task, Chen quit his job as a deputy general manager at a Guangdong enterprise.

He studied every character in the dictionary carefully and in the first five years he spent up to 18 hours a day on the project.

In 2001, Chen finished his first book discussing faults he found in three of the most popular dictionaries in the country, including Xinhua Dictionary, and sent it to Commercial Press. He got no response, and was later told the manuscript had been lost.

Chen claimed that some of his suggestions were later adopted in a new edition of one of the books.

He finished another book focusing solely on Xinhua Dictionary in 2004, which he sent on, and four months later the book was sent back.

Fu Minrong, the mall's attorney, argued that the book was a licensed publication and that what Chen claimed as inaccurate was baseless.

(China Daily February 28, 2006)