Like the last knights fighting a losing war, two Shanghai-based monthly magazines Shu Cheng (Book Town) and Wan Xiang (Panorama Monthly) have only recently published their first editions this year after financial difficulties forced a six-month suspension.
When they temporarily stopped publication, the press wrote eulogies on China's last "intellectual magazines," tailored to the reading tastes of the cultural elite.
But their troubles are not recent. Since 2000, Book Town stopped pubishing thrice, reportedly because of money problems. Panorama Monthly kept running on a tight budget until it had a cash-flow crisis at the end of last year.
Now, as the two try to sell their new editions and Book Town redesigns its content and layout, the market seems fairly nonchalant.
"I don't think their sales can exceed their previous numbers (about 30,000 a month each)," said Xiong Hui, a bookshop manager.
For the time being, together with a couple of other titles published in Beijing, China's "intellectual magazines" seem to have little chance of overcoming financial challenges and dwindling reader interest.
Is it because the market has switched to "lowbrow" reading material, or because the people who used to read these magazines have all but disappeared despite growing numbers of university graduates?
The "intellectual magazines" had good readership among better-educated urban dwellers in the 1980s and early 1990s.
But since then, other types of media have flourished.
Zhu Wei, editor-in-chief of Sanlian Lifeweek a current affairs magazine based in Beijing since 1995 said the magazine market has been taken over by a new breed of publications upscale current affairs magazines.
Views of the situation vary. Fans of the old magazines say it means the disappearance of serious reading. "Grown-ups don't read today," Chen Xiaoming, literature professor at Peking University, told Sina.com. "When they do, they only want light-hearted books and magazines. They would not choose thought-provoking ones."
Others suggest readers have changed. Perhaps, they say, a generation of young professionals has emerged, demanding a different kind of "intellectual magazine."
"Our cities have a new generation of well-educated people," said Zhu,
"They are different from the old-style intellectuals and have different lifestyles."
Intellectuals of the previous generation, he explained, were active in the 1980s and early '90s and came mainly from the universities and social science research bodies.
"They were small in number and meager in economic resources," Zhu said, "but they managed to have cultural power because the wealthy people in China in those days were business people with little cultural background or education, much less anything that could be called culture."
Since the '90s, however, the young people who used to listen to and even adore the "cultural elite" have grown up. Professionals among them have become the mainstay of the nation's "middle class."
This generation is a much larger group of people, with great energy and potential. Different from the old intellectuals, those young professionals are showing enormous upward social mobility while remaining culturally creative, Zhu said, "so editors must try to meet the demands of this larger group of new readers."
Readers of the new generation care more about what is happening now than what took place in the past, and they want to get better involved in the reforms and developments in society, he said.
They don't care for articles about life on the Bund in Shanghai in the 1930s, or about some famous courtesan's residence in Beijing's old courtyard neighborhood, however rich with cultural and historical allusions they may be.
And they don't want just information. "They want new ideas, new lives and new pursuits that they can make for themselves," Zhu said. By contrast, Book Town and Panorama Monthly seem to be putting out a cultural facade without reflecting mainstream middle-class life. Eventually they marginalize themselves, and "that's why they are doomed to have an unhappy end," Zhu said.
To He Xiongfei, president of the Boai Tianshi Publishing Consultancy Co Ltd, who rose to success by publishing books on social criticism for young intellectuals in the '90s, the two old magazines are merely feeding the nostalgia of what he called an old "cultural elite."
Becoming marginalized
The ups and downs of Book Town illustrate how an "intellectual magazine" can become marginalized.
It was founded in 1993 by Ni Moyan, a renowned scholar of modern Chinese literature, with investment from the Shanghai Municipal Press and Publication Bureau. At first, it enjoyed quite a reputation among intellectual circles, with its stories often arousing widespread feedback and being reprinted by other media.
During the mid-1990s, the magazine claimed a circulation of 30,000. But it carried few advertisements, if any, and had to ask constantly for financial support from the municipal publication bureau.
In 1998, State-owned Shanghai Sanlian Bookstore Co Ltd took ownership as part of an industry-wide reform in which the government severed its ties with most magazines.
But two years later, Sanlian Bookstore Co Ltd closed Book Town, which was losing more than 200,000 yuan (US$25,000) annually, according to a report in China Reading Weekly. It didn't reappear until December 2001, after 21st Century Newspaper Corporation bailed it out with money and editors.
By the end of 2004, the newspaper corporation had lost more than 3 million yuan (US$375,000) on the magazine. Book Town was abandoned again, but merely one month later it received new investment from four large enterprises in Beijing.
After struggling for another year, the magazine announced it would stop publishing again last December. Shanghai Jiu Jiu Reading Co Ltd provided funding in May to allow it to start up again.
The new investor wants the magazine to take on a fashionable look. On the editorial committee, popular writers have replaced college professors, and Yu Qiuyu, a well-known author, became the honorary editor-in-chief.
The new issue presented in June comprises mainly introductions to novels and other new books that are expected to become bestsellers, and also articles about the joys of life such as the mellow aroma of East China yellow rice wine.
"We want our stories to attract not only intellectuals but also college students and blue-collars," Huang Yuhai, president of the board of Jiu Jiu Reading who recently became Book Town's managing editor, told China Reading Weekly.
"Instead of entertaining a small section of society as it used to be, the magazine is trying to cater to mainstream readers."
The attempt of Book Town to cater to all sections of society has been regarded as a bold, even outrageous, effort to overcome its financial difficulties. And some loyal readers are unhappy.
"Our Book Town is dead. It is just another magazine bearing the old name," an Internet forum poster named Daniel said at www.douban.com, a website of book lovers. His walk to a bookstore in heavy rain to buy a new issue of the magazine was not worth it, he said.
Market view
As Book Town struggles, China's publishing industry in general has been thriving in the past decade.
Since 2001, about 220,000 new books and magazines have been pouring into the market each year, according to Jin Lihong, president of Changjiang Arts and Literature Publishing Co Ltd in Beijing, one of China's most successful publishers.
And despite a fiercely competitive market, a dozen new magazines that have targeted young professionals have been successful. With a few high-profile regular advertisers, their circulation more than triples that of the old "intellectual magazines."
"Like Book Town and Panorama Monthly, we also have intellectuals at the core of our readership, although we don't call ourselves an intellectual magazine," said Zhu, of Sanlian Lifeweek.
Caijing, one of China's most respected business magazines, is known for its occasional crusading articles. Others are China News Weekly, New Weekly, Phoenix Weekly and a few others.
Compared with the previous intellectual magazines, the new ones focus more on in-depth reporting and commenting on current events. Sanlian Lifeweek, for example, devotes half of its pages to a current event in each issue and contributes the rest of its pages to music, art, fashion and columns.
"My magazine is modeled after Time magazine in the United States, but it is more cultural," said Zhu, who added he has been adjusting the content to cater to the changing tastes of young professionals.
Until 2000, intellectuals of the new generation were concerned about politics, and editors at the magazine always chose important political or social events to be the cover story topics. Since then, readers' interest seems to have shifted to lifestyles. Now it seems to be going back.
"There is some new change now," Zhu said. "Readers dictate a growing demand for profound thinking on current events." So, he is adding commentary in stories and putting more emphasis on columns.
The bottom line is that even a well-established magazine needs to change to give its readers what it wants a lesson the old "intellectual magazines" didn't learn.
(China Daily July 12, 2006)
