A customer browses through foreign language books at the Page One bookstore in Beijing. Photo: Lin Meilian/GT
When Li Xiang got home with a pile of books he had bought from a bookstore at a Shanghai business school, he started to happily flip through one of them until he noticed something odd; pages 16 and 17 were stuck together.
It was not a printer's error. The book was far from a subversive, anti-China tome. It was billed as a fun, illustrated book offering tips on culture and etiquette for tourists and business people to China.
Using a razor and the skill of a surgeon, Li managed to pry apart the glued-together pages to find that the offending passage described China's legal system. On page 18, he also found lines of text that were redacted with sloppy strokes in black ink. Carefully scrutinizing the passage, Li could see the section was an explanation of China's one-party rule.
"I found the same book at the state-owned Shanghai Foreign Languages Bookstore in which the pages were not glued together. I can't figure out why," said Li who works in Shanghai's English media sector.
It's not the first time Li has encountered censorship of imported books and periodicals. The fully bilingual graduate of a Beijing university said he found pages missing from the International Herald Tribune, which he had ordered through the China National Publications Import and Export Group (CNPIEC).
"I remember it was March 2008 when the riots in Tibet occurred and the pages I most wanted to read were missing," he said.
With an estimated 300 million Chinese learning English and a foreign population that continues to grow, the market for foreign-language literature holds huge entrepreneurial potential.
Last year's national census shows 593,832 foreigners and more than 526,000 people from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan where registered residents of China.
The census also showed the foreign community was made up of more than 120,000 South Koreans, 71,493 Americans and 66,159 Japanese. Foreigners from Myanmar, Vietnam and Canada rounded out the top six.
Although the foreign community's population is now the size of a small city, the number of bookstores offering a comprehensive selection of foreign language books remains few and far between.
State-owned monopolies including the CNPIEC are responsible for importing all foreign language books.
"China still has no timetable to open to the free exchange of ideas on all books, but eventually China will have bookstores that are less controlled," said Liu Gui, who heads the China operation of Singapore's biggest bookseller and publisher Page One, which opened its flagship store in downtown Beijing in April.
A growing market
With so many Chinese becoming more fluent in English the market for original, first edition books appears to be growing, despite the import restrictions.
Page One's initial stock of 10,000 books includes fiction and non-fiction books about life, travel and art. English-language books account for 65-75 percent of its stock. It also imports Chinese books from Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Liu said Page One differs from State-owned, foreign-language bookstores, by offering readers a wider choice of mainstream English publications.
"Most English books in State-owned foreign-language bookstore focus on English-learning, while Page One brings in mainstream English publications as well as books on design and art," he said, adding that English literature Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert is its current best-seller.
"Our customers have two things in common: They're not sensitive about prices and they're not buying books from State-own foreign language bookstores," he said jokingly.
Page One also provides its customers with custom book-ordering, which must be approved by CNPIEC. The bookstore does not challenge established rules by importing or selling politically sensitive books.
"We are operating a business in China, so we obey Chinese law," Liu said.