With The Bookworm International Literary Festival running from March 4-18, and the Capital Beijing Literary Festival from February 26-March 12, Beijing prepares to play host to writers from across the globe. These two festivals neatly underscore the rapid growth of China’s publishing industry, both online and offline.

Books sales in China totaled ¥90 billion in 2010, with magazines and periodicals accounting for another ¥58 billion, according to James Roy of China Market Research. That’s up from ¥38 billion in 2000, and ¥63 billion in 2005. Book sales are expected to grow by six percent per year over the next five years.

With an ever-expanding choice in reading material, literature in China works like a two-way mirror, providing readers with a look at alternate realities, and observers a peek at the shifting culture of a nation through the books on its collective bedside table.

The Genre Gap

So what are people reading? “Not literary fiction, that's for sure!” says Eric Abrahamsen of Paper Republic, a translation site for Chinese literature. Like readers the world over, China’s bookworms generally eschew the heavy stuff, preferring to escape reality through fictional flights of fancy.

Much of the country’s best-selling fiction is geared towards young adults in their teens and early to mid 20s. Superstar writers such as Guo Jingming (郭敬明) specialize in the shifting moods and inner turmoil of the country’s younger generation. Guo’s Tiny Times 2.0 (小时代2.0), the second in a series about disaffected urban youth—which the author has publicly claimed as more scandalous than Tiny Times 1.0, which included scenes of rape—sold almost 40,000 copies on China’s largest online bookstore, Dangdang.com, in just under three hours after launching on December 29 last year.

The race-car driving Han Han (韩寒), who rivals the cross-dressing, controversial Guo in both notoriety and book sales, is set to have his popular 2009 book His Kingdom (他的国) adapted for the silver screen this year, along with Riot in Chang’an City (长安乱, 2004) and Glory Days (光荣日, 2007). His first complete novel, Triple Door (三重门, 2000), about the life of a junior high school student in Shanghai, remains the best-selling work of literature in China over the past two decades.

Romance authors like Ai Mi (艾米)—whose 2007 novel of cross-class love in 1960s and '70s China, Under the Hawthorn Tree (山楂树之恋), was adapted last year into a film by Zhang Yimou—resonate with young women, says Roy. Those who like a good whodunit head for the crime fiction section for the latest Wang Xiaofang (王晓方) release, in which the author’s decade working as a government employee in Shenyang provides fodder for his wildly popular tales of official corruption.

The fantastical plotlines and subtle social critiques inherent in science fiction make it a common choice for book lovers in China. Sci-fi writer Han Song (Gravestone of the Universe, 宇宙墓碑, 2009) says he wants to instill a sense of fear in his readers by playing on themes of instability and conformity in modern society. "There's no way to be your own person," he says. "Chinese people feel this keenly. But it exists all over the world."

As befitting a place of such intense energy and change, domestic readers are increasingly turning to non-fiction self-help books and business manuals for advice on how to get ahead.

Peek inside a local bookstore, and you’ll likely see customers browsing such best-selling 2010 titles as Are You Happy? (幸福了吗?)—CCTV personality Bai Yansong’s ruminations on the meaning of personal contentment—or The Art of Speaking (说话之道) by Cai Kangyong (蔡康永).

Mass Movement

Roughly split down generational lines, contemporary Chinese literary fiction mirrors the country’s massive shift towards modernization. Authors over 50, such as Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (生死疲劳, 2006) author Mo Yan (莫言), Serve the People! (为人民服务, 2005) and Dream of Ding Village (丁庄梦, 2006) author Yan Lianke (阎连科), and Brothers (兄弟, 2005) author Yu Hua (余华) often set their tales of family, friendship, hardship and sorrow in the countryside during China’s recent tumultuous history. Their stories touch on topics relevant to their youth, from poverty and lack of education to social strife.

But for authors born in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, the concrete jungle of China’s modern urban landscapes provides inspiration for fertile minds. Sheng Keyi (盛可以), has earned accolades for her book Northern Girls (北妹, 2004), a story of a young woman who must learn to navigate lecherous bosses and the cruel realities of the factory floor when she migrates to the southern boomtown of Shenzhen.

Meanwhile Xu Zechen (徐则臣), writer and editor at People’s Literature (人民文学)—China’s oldest literary journal—set his soon-to-be-released novel Running Through Zhongguancun (跑步穿过中关村, 2010) in Haidian District, in which he explores the life of a young migrant worker, Dunhuang (for a translated excerpt, see paper-republic.org).

Though set in different times and places, these works are linked by shared perspectives from insignificant members of society, says poet and Central Academy of Fine Arts contemporary Chinese literature professor Xi Chuan (西川). In part a response to the Cultural Revolution, when men and women of letters were instructed to pen uplifting tales of heroes and other influential figures, and in part a response to a market of millions of everyday Zhous, this trend disappoints Xi. He believes Chinese literature should aim for more complex and layered meanings.

Epic, overarching themes are a relatively recent Western import, he says. Chinese novels evolved out of raucous storytelling in teahouses, with shuoshu yiren (说书艺人) reciting tales from memory while standing in front of the crowds. “Although Chinese novelists have learned a lot from Western novelists, the old color is still there,” he says.

But these small voices create a pattern that reveals a larger whole, says essayist and author of Everything Grows (万物生长, 2005) Feng Tang (冯唐), whose next project involves sifting through Chinese history and pulling out the stories of ordinary people living in past dynasties.

“Novelists fall into the trap of believing they are God, only looking at the big picture,” he says. “The smaller they look, the deeper they can go.”

Net Worth

In a scene that Penguin China general manager Jo Lusby calls the “envy” of international publishers, the sheer number of aspiring authors floating their stories into China’s online space, and the vast public reading them, has created a virtual barrel of fish for publishing houses shooting for the country’s next bestseller.

At ¥80 million annually, the digital publishing market, including books and periodicals, is worth almost as much as that of printed books, and Roy predicts it will grow by 40 to 50 percent this year.

Currently there is no Chinese e-book service similar to Apple's or Amazon's. Chinese readers use about 20 different formats for reading any of the one million e-books available for purchase in China today on a variety of websites such as Qidian.com, including laptops, PSPs, phones and other e-reader devices.

Many online journals hook readers by offering the first half of a novel for free, and the rest on a pay-as-you-go basis, which readers access through cards tied to cell phone plans, gaming cards, or stocking up cash in online accounts at the bank. Joel Martinsen, managing editor of Danwei.org, a website that monitors Chinese media and culture, says he reads entire novels off shanda.com.cn, a community of literary websites, for as little as ¥6 apiece.

Readers have their pick of a wide variety of genres, says Martinsen, including romance, military fiction, fantasy, horror and “space opera-type” science fiction. Occasionally new genres sweep the matrix. Over the past several years time travel romance—in which a modern day nobody is transported back in time to live life as a member of the royal court, or other significant figure—became such a hit among young adult readers that bookstores near university campuses started stocking books published from authors scouted online on separate “time travel romance” shelves, he says.

Many authors that now publish exclusively in print were once online scribes. He Ma’s (何马) smash hit series, The Tibet Code (藏地密码), started online in 2008, and was such a sensation that the series was soon caught in a bidding war between traditional publishers. A deliberate riff on the title of Dan Brown’s Vatican-spearing novel, the series follows Tibetan mastiff expert Qiang Ba and his partner, canine expert Fang Xin, as they uncover secrets of Tibetan Buddhism that have remained hidden for thousands of years.

Li Jie, who writes of people living in China’s industrialized cities under the pen name Anni Baobei (安妮宝贝), got her start online in the late 1990s, as did horror writer Cai Jun (蔡骏) and Ge Shuyi (哥舒意), the latter of whom now publishes his works in paperback after winning an online writing contest on 99Read.com for his paranormal-themed work Devil Sonata (恶魔奏鸣曲) in 2004.

The Internet space can be less restrictive than that of print publishing. Last year, schoolteacher Yuan Ping (元平) wrote In Dongguan (80年代睡在东莞), a tale about a man who explores urban life in the city’s seamy underbelly. Local authorities were embarrassed enough to haul in Yuan for questioning, but he was quickly released. (For a translated section of In Dongguan, go to Paper-republic.org). The book never made it to print.

A roundup of the best of online lit doesn’t yet exist, and trying to conceive of one in the current saturated climate is an impossible mission. “People ask where is the Mo Yan of online literature,” says Martinsen. “But he’s not there. It’s not fair to compare.”

In line with Feng Tang’s belief that writers can represent a brief moment in time that reverberates into the future, China’s current lit scene is guaranteed only to transform as it develops. Trends come and go, says Martinsen. “The landscape is always changing.”