The move towards a market economy has wrought dramatic changes on the nation's book market. Readers can now lay their hands on a much greater variety of titles in a broadening range of new outlets, both private and State-owned.

Despite the fact that book publishing and distribution has become a lucrative business, publishers must tap into the right marketing trends to attract book sellers and the readers.

The annual Beijing Book Fair, a venue for publishers and book sellers to meet and seal contracts, is always viewed as the bellwether of China's book market.

During the four-day fair, which ended this past weekend, the 1,440 exhibiting booths of 554 publishing houses were surrounded by booksellers hoping to make the right choices.

Among the novels and biographies of famous people, four books stood out, showing great promise of hitting the best seller list this year.

Renowned writer

The first is Green Fox (Qing Hu) by established writer Wang Meng, published by the People's Literature Publishing House.

The public is getting quicker at forgetting the now unfashionable past glories of the Chinese literary world.

But among our long-standing literary celebrities, Wang Meng is one of the few who has managed to stay constantly in the spotlight despite his advancing age.

In the autumn of his life, the 70-year-old vice-chairman of the China Writers' Association is enjoying a very pleasant sort of second spring in his career.

It is nothing like the first and real "spring" of his literary career, when he and a handful of others dominated the literary scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but his name is still to be reckoned with.

Following four acclaimed novels collected as a Season Series, published in and after 1992, he presented his publisher what was to be his best-selling memoir, My Life Philosophy (Wode Rensheng Zhexue), in 2003.

His new novel The Green Fox is hot off the presses and a little different from his previous novels.

In the four novels of the Season Series, and in his works published in the 1980s, the historical background dominates, and the characters' actions and ideas grow out of the specific historical situations.

The historical setting is equally intrusive in The Green Fox, but in a different way.

"It was a time when people were listening to the songs of Teresa Teng (1953-95), and TV channels had just begun broadcasting movies from abroad," says Wang in the book.

It was during the early days of the country's opening to the outside world, when Teng's soft and soothing melodies and sweet and romantic lyrics offered a change from the rhythmic march tunes whose lyrics were filled with political jargon.

It was an age, said Wang at the release ceremony for the book, "when things were in transition, and people were starting to meet their instinctive human needs face to face."

Such as the need for sex, a motif Wang seldom touched in his previous writing, but which gets considerable attention in this novel.

The 1980s was a great decade, when the sense of individuality first awakened. But it was also an awkward one. That's why Wang picked it as the setting for his story.

"In an age of urgent, hence insensitive change, people's subtle private needs are more likely to be ignored, and their situations rendered more pathetic and more likely to arouse the sympathies of contemporary readers."

In the novel, Wang portrays a heroine who is constantly thirsting for true love and does not hesitate in letting her passion show. As a result, she is anathematized by the people around her in her youth. Despite her overnight success in literary creation, she still gets nowhere in her love life.

As the story moves forward, the heroine, Qiangu, metamorphoses into Qinghu, or a green fox, a kind of lovelorn creature in ancient Chinese myths who often crosses the border between human and animal seeking human love.

Both the green fox and the heroine embody the desire for forbidden love and an inescapable sense of dislocation.

They are calculated to arouse mixed feelings of admiration, sympathy, and maybe even a slight touch of repulsion in the reader.

The second book that is likely to attract many readers is Report on the Death Penalty (Sixing Baogao), by Pan Jun. It is also published by the People's Publishing House.

According to the author, the book is "a blend of 80 per cent literary writing and 20 per cent judicial case studies."

In the novel, the writer discusses the issue of capital punishment.

Pan says it was the short film Thou Shall Not Kill, part five of Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Decalogue that first stirred his interest in the subject.

He made up his mind to write about it when he heard of the death of Sun Zhigang. Sun, a 23-year-old graphic designer from Central China's Hubei Province, who was wrongly detained by the police in Guangzhou and beaten to death by some of his detainees in March last year. The case resulted in the abolition of the decades-old regulation about detaining and sending home urban vagrants and beggars without residence permits.

A generation younger than Wang Meng, Pan Jun was one of the key members among the so-called "avant-garde writers" who appeared in the mid-1980s and for a time enchanted Chinese readers with their experimental, subjective works.

With their focus on experiment, these writers often ignored basic storylines and closely-knit plots. As a result, the trend flagged and eventually folded in the early 1990s when the experiments ran out of steam, leaving a number of major young writers of this camp with nothing more to say.

Pan was not one of them. After a dormancy of about five years, he entered a very productive period in 1996. In the year 2000 alone, eight different publishing houses published a total of 18 of Pan's works.

According to critics, Pan's works vividly describe the contemporary lives of ordinary people in times of change, calamity and misfortune, revealing the writer's concern over the wide range of social issues.

Biographies

Biographies remain arguably the most popular category of books in the market.

Two biographies that are likely to sell well are She Came from the Sea (Ta Cong Haishanglai) and My Three Lives (Sansheng Sanshi).

She Came from the Sea is a biography of Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing) (1921-95). The book is to hit book stores later this month, timed to coincide with the broadcast of its TV adaptation.

Chang, perhaps the most ingenious, eccentric and charming female Chinese writer of the mid- 20th century, led an elusive private life that must have frustrated potential biographers.

"Chang avoided talking about herself even in her private writings. The words left by her, published or unpublished, throw little light on her life. And she was not a sociable woman; there is not very much we can get from those who chanced to know her," said Wang Hui-ling, the Taiwan biographer who spent three years "pasting together the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of Chang's life."

Wang took on the challenge.

"I learned the taste of sleepless nights from the job," said Wang, who was also the scriptwriter for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and a TV series about Xu Zhimo, the famous Chinese modernist poet.

From Chang's writing, and from the little and sketchy knowledge the public has of her private life, Chang is conceived as a woman who marvelously combined high spiritual pursuits with shrewd earthly wisdom.

Wang's testimonial further reinforces that impression.

Compared with She Came from the Sea, My Three Lives presents a persona far less singular and phenomenal, but perhaps more affecting.

It is the autobiography of another renowned Chinese female writer based in the United States, Nieh Hua-ling, whose books include Mulberry and Peach: Two Chinese Women, among others.

The book, published by the Baihua Literature and Arts Publishing House in Tianjin, will arrive in bookstores this month.

Chang and Nieh have some fairly obvious similarities: Both were born in the 1920s to illustrious families that were disintegrating, both left the Chinese mainland around 1949, and both spent their later years in the United States.

But the two lived different lives in almost every other way.

When Chang had already made herself a legend in 1940s' Shanghai, Nieh, homeless and impoverished, was driven by the war to move among the towns and cities along the Yangtze River, sometimes alone, sometimes with her widowed mother and three younger siblings.

"I spent almost all my youth along the Yangtze River running from war," says Nieh in the book.

Nieh moved to Taiwan with her family in 1949. She soon rose to fame with her subtle, thoughtful writing.

However, she also had to endure political persecution, as her editor had a run-in with the ruling Kuomintang.

"Those days were the darkest time in my life," says Nieh.

Then one day in 1963, she met the man who later turned out to be the most important person in her life. Paul Angel, an American poet, after a prolonged and persistent courtship finally became her husband in 1971 and brought her to the United States.

In contrast to Eileen Chang, whose personal emotional life seemed always at low ebb except for a short romance when she was 23, Nieh's 21 years of marriage life with Angel before he died in 1992 were the very incarnation of marital euphori.

And contrary to Chang's silent American years, Nieh leads an energetic and fruitful social life in the United States.

The International Writing Program, initiated by The University of Iowa with the suggestion and active support of Angel and Nieh, has become an important meeting ground for international writers, including those from China.

Nieh describes herself as having lived three lives as a tree, with roots in the Chinese mainland, trunk in Taiwan, and leaves and branches in the United States.

(China Daily January 15, 2004)