In the book market, most of the books that enter the best-seller list are literature, philosophy, biography and history, and it is relatively rare to be related to economics. When we mention economic bestsellers, it seems that what emerges in the reading memory is some investment and financial management guides, which are "not worth mentioning" in the public reading market.
Stills from the second part (2005) of the TV series "Ma Dashuai".
In recent years, with the best-selling of books such as "Big Country Big City", "Xue Zhaofeng's Economic Lecture Notes", and "Staying in The Inside", people have begun to pay attention to the methods that make economic books sell well, as well as general writing. In fact, in the past four decades, there have been a number of economic bestsellers. The earliest is the economist Xue Muqiao's "Research on the Economic Problems of Socialism in China".
On the scale of the discipline, economics is spread across all faculties, and after accumulation, this discipline has been highly standardized and standardized. If we talk about the sub-territories that have been opened up, it is called "economic imperialism" and can provide economic explanations for all human behaviors, phenomena, institutions and cultures.
In contrast, however, economics books that can make an impact in the field of mass reading are scarce. On the one hand, economic research is mainly expressed through treatises and reports. On the other hand, economists who have more influence even among their readers tend to be because of their views—such as those on a hot issue—rather than because of their arguments. In other words, economists can express their economic views quickly, but it is less easy to disseminate their "economic analysis" (to borrow Joseph Schumpeter's concept) and not to give the reader an idea of how these views were actually arrived at. Readers are also unlikely or interested in searching for professional papers. Many misunderstandings of "knowing only one and not knowing the other" have also arisen.
The bestseller is an example of the relatively successful dissemination of "economic analysis". Of course, some are carefully analyzed, some are crude, and the number of prints only means the acceptance of a book within a certain range at a certain stage. The reason why a book sells well is sometimes vague and accidental. Placing together economics bestsellers from the past four decades, on the timeline, has the characteristics of a shift from "close to the problem" to "close to the reader". In the early days, the literature reference was relatively simple, but there was a strong sense of problems. At the beginning of this century, economics books with the goal of selling well emerged, taking into account the selection of topics, cover designs, and recommendations, in an attempt to increase the attractiveness and let readers take a more look. Then in the last decade, general writing has risen.
One of the "proximity problems" and "proximity to the reader" satisfies the necessary conditions for selling well, and the rest is left to the others.
This article is from the B02-B03 edition of the Beijing News Book Review Weekly's August 5 feature "Between Chance and Necessity: The Best-Selling Road to China's Local Economics".
Breaking ground
The best-selling book of China's local economics is the economist Xue Huiqiao's "Research on The Economic Problems of Socialism in China".
In December 1979 (Xue Muqiao himself recalled that in early 1980), "Research on China's Socialist Economic Problems" was issued by the People's Publishing House and printed 50,000 copies. On the eve of the "publishing boom" of the 1980s, this figure, though not the only one, is one of the few academic monographs to be distributed in more than 30,000 volumes, and if confined to economics, "only this one." Over the next three years, it was revised and reprinted, and the number of copies printed reached three million copies. According to the statistics of Lu Dingyi's "Preface to the Revised Edition of Xue Huiqiao's Research on China's Socialist Economic Problems" published in the second issue of "Reading" magazine in 1984, in all parts of the country that year, the book was in short supply, and the People's Publishing House provided content and paper types to many places, which were reprinted by various places, and the print volume of this part was about 6.5 million copies. The sum of the two prints adds up to a total of nearly 10 million copies. Translations are available in foreign languages from English, French, Japanese, German, Serbian and Spanish countries. In economics, there is no precedent before it, and there is no such thing as an equal number of prints after it.
In December 1980, the copyright page was printed for the second time in Research on The Economic Problems of Socialism in China.
"Research on the Economic Problems of Socialism in China" broke ground in the historical context of reform and opening up, especially economic reform, which is a necessary condition for it to become a publishing miracle. The ten chapters of the book, nearly 200,000 words, the basic content is to explore the history of socialist economic construction from 1949 to 1978, "and to study a series of major economic problems that have not yet been solved or have not been completely solved", and to put forward new views on observing the law of economic value, aiming to change the highly centralized planned economic system that had long been influenced by the Soviet Union, so it echoed the practice of economic reform.
However, we also need to see that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the awareness of how to develop a commodity economy in the traditional socialist system was shared by the economists who advocated reform. At the beginning, "Research on the Economic Problems of Socialism in China" was not the only new book to explain this. For example, Zhuo Jiong's October 1981 book On the Socialist Commodity Economy (Guangdong People's Publishing House) also began with a concentrated discussion of the commodity economy. The difference is that this is a collection of essays that presents the author's process of thinking about the commodity economy, while "Research on the Economic Problems of Socialism in China" is a monograph that reviews history, raises questions and methods from the perspective of reform. The focus of the early stage of economic reform was on rural areas, and the household contract responsibility system was practiced, and the economic reform in the city was only distributed with a few sporadic pilots, and it was not until 1984 that the focus was shifted. In the first edition of 1979, Xue Muqiao had already discussed that "we cannot reluctantly implement the same public ownership", and in the 1983 revised edition, that is, the year in which the focus of economic reform shifted to the city, he turned to the complexity of the state-run economy and the collective economy, and continued to take a step forward on the question of how to separate ownership and management rights, with the view that both economic forms should become independent and self-financing commodity producers and operators.
Released in 1982, the comedy film "Star Star" shows the economic life of that time through the contradictions between father and son and two generations that occurred in the marketization transformation of a state-owned shoe factory.
The closest thing to Xue's "Research on China's Socialist Economic Problems" is actually Sun Yefang's "Socialist Economic Theory". The two are cousins and both are economists. They and Economists such as Yu Guangyuan were tasked with writing political economy textbooks in the 1960s, and challenged the economic system and line of the time by proposing views such as "talking about corporate profits." During the Cultural Revolution, Xue Waschao was imprisoned in a "cowshed" and Sun Yefang was arrested and imprisoned. During this period, Xue Huiqiao wrote the first draft of "Research on Socialist Economic Problems in China", and Sun Yefang rescued the "Socialist Economic Theory" that had already written a part of it, and by April 1975, when he was released from prison, he used the method of silent recollection to pass the contents of the book in his mind dozens of times. At the end of the Cultural Revolution, Sun Yefang, like Xue Muqiao, restarted his writing plan, but unfortunately, he died of illness in February 1983, leaving behind an unfinished manuscript of "Socialist Economic Theory". In 1985, the manuscript was published by the People's Publishing House under the title of "Treatise on Socialist Economy".
Xue Muqiao and Sun Yefang.
Sun Yefang's "Circulation Chapter" in the book believes that enterprises are no longer workshops with only technical independence, but economically relatively independent business entities, expanding autonomy, "because the thousands of enterprises that exchange with each other are independent accounting enterprises, so their product exchange must be equivalent exchanges." This is consistent with Xue's views on the reform of the state-run economy and collective economy, and the internal logic is consistent. However, he has been running into a wall in the process of actual argumentation. He used the category of "value" to promote the reconstruction of the economic system, but "value" comes from another socio-economic form, commodity production, exchange and consumption based on the monetary system, that is, the commodity economy. At that time, if we wanted to study the "value" under socialist conditions, we could "make mistakes" if we did not pay attention to it. He wandered within the border countless times, and once he stepped into the forbidden area, he turned around and returned to no avail, which was the root cause of his final failure to finish the manuscript.
Xue Huiqiao also encountered the same dilemma of "value" argumentation. In 1986, the 10th issue of the journal "Economic Research" published the "Revised Japanese Translation" written by Xue Huiqiao, who mentioned the setbacks of the "Research on The Economic Problems of Socialism in China" in discussing the law of value: "One of the shortcomings of this book is that it is too much emphasis on consciously using the law of value, ignoring the need to make full use of the spontaneous regulatory role of the law of value. Much emphasis is placed on the need for planned prices to conform to value and supply relations, while it is not stated that many commodity prices should be allowed to be adjusted spontaneously by the market. ”
Both Xue Anderson and Sun Yefang advocated expanding the autonomy of state-owned enterprises to operate, so that production and exchange between state-owned enterprises conformed to the law of value, while trying to show that this did not conflict with the existing economic framework of classical Marxism. And that's almost impossible work. Subsequently, what people did not expect was that from around 1985, very marginal economic forms such as the self-employed and private enterprises created a market-oriented environment and became a key force in the economic growth miracle. Helplessly, the "Socialist Economic Treatise" published at this time has become distant from the reality of economic reform, and it is impossible to reproduce the publishing scene of "Research on Socialist Economic Problems in China". If the Study of The Economic Problems of Socialism in China had been published after 1985, it might not have been possible to produce the result of "printing tens of millions.". Of course, this does not mean that the publication significance of "Research on China's Socialist Economic Problems" is completely shaped by the time node, Xue Muqiao has been infinitely close to economic issues in that era, expanding the space for discussing the commodity economy, his difficult exploration with Sun Yefang, Yu Guangyuan, Zhuo Jiong and a group of economists, as well as their frankness and prudence in doing academic problems, have become an incomparable spiritual heritage.
Towards a new century
In March 1988, a simplified version of another economics bestseller, The Words of the Seller of Oranges, was released. This is a collection of essays by economist Zhang Wuchang, or it could be called a short collection of essays. "The Words of the Seller of Oranges" is one of them, and the collection and publication also takes the title of the book. Zhang Wuchang borrowed the Ming Dynasty poet Liu Bowen's "Words of the Seller of Oranges", but replaced "orange" with "orange", because he ran to the streets of Hong Kong to sell oranges and obtain economic materials. His short essays let mainland readers see that the methods and narratives of empirical research in economics can be so different, and are full of a certain interest in "rebelling" against modern mainstream economics.
In 1988, when Zhang Wuchang's "The Word of the Orange Seller" was selling well, the movie "Stubborn Lord" was released, telling the story of three young people in Beijing who opened a three-T company that "ranked for others, solved difficulties for others, and suffered for people", which was the epitome of a generation of young people "going to the sea".
A traditional edition of The Tale of the Seller of Oranges was published in Hong Kong in November 1984 and reprinted twenty-five times, with a print run of about 80,000 copies. In 1988, the Sichuan People's Publishing House introduced a simplified version from the mainland, printing more than 30,000 copies and selling them out. In August 2000, Book City magazine published an article entitled "A Review of the Orange Seller", which was originally the preface to the revised edition of the Hong Kong Flower Thousand Trees Publishing House, in which Zhang Wuchang mentioned that "The Words of the Orange Seller" was his best-selling book. As for the reason, he himself believes that it has freed itself from the shackles of academic style and "taught" instead of "subject".
In addition to the official version, there are many manuscripts, prints, and copies of the Orange Seller. Before the simplified version in mainland China and after the simplified version was not republished, it was a reading custom for friends or classmates to borrow "The Words of the Seller of Oranges" from each other. In his book Real-World Economics (first edition in 2004, quoted here since the 2021 reprint), the economist Zhou Qiren recalled that he learned of Zhang Wuchang in 1985 from a friend in Beijing who "privately printed" the "Words of the Orange Seller" and learned for the first time about his theory of property rights and contracts.
In the five years since the publication of Orange Seller's Speech, there have been no tens of thousands of economic bestsellers. It is worth mentioning "On the Competitive Market System" (China Finance and Economic Publishing House), a dialogue collection between Wu Jinglian and Liu Jirui, which advocated that "we have no choice but reform" when the theory of the failure of market economic reform was widespread, explaining the necessity and urgency of market reform, although the number of prints was not as good as that of other eras of best-selling books - 6,000 copies in the first edition in December 1991, and more than 5,000 copies reprinted in April 1992 - but it caused great repercussions at that time. In October 1992, the socialist market economic system was formally established. In December of the same year, "On the Competitive Market System" was awarded the first prize of the "China Book Award" by the jury of the State Press and Publication Administration and other relevant departments, and the jury considered it to have made "a historic contribution to the preparation of public opinion for the target model" (see Li Jingwen et al., "China Economic Science Yearbook", China Statistics Publishing House, November 1993). The extent of its actual influence in the reading and policy circles at that time can be seen from this.
In September 1994, the "Gu Zhun Anthology" was published, and the economics bestseller with tens of thousands of prints was re-produced. Guizhou People's Publishing House first issued 3,000 copies, followed by an increase in quantity, and by the time of the 4th reprint in September 1995, a total of 34,000 copies had been set off, which immediately set off the "Gu Zhun Fever". Economist Dai Yuanchen also mentioned in the 1995 issue 1 of the Economic Research Magazine that it was difficult for friends to buy Gu Zhun's Collected Writings in bookstores.
The Collected Works of Gu Zhun includes articles such as "The Ancient Greek City-State System" and "On the Law of Commodity Production and Value under the Socialist System", as well as correspondence between Gu Zhun and his brother Chen Minzhi. The Collected Works of Gu Zhun made many people know Gu Zhun for the first time, as well as his story, knowledge and perseverance, and is called a model of the spirit of Chinese intellectuals. Gu Zhun and Sun Yefang were both economists who were the first to put forward that "we must study the problem of commodity production under socialism", and he was called "the first person in China's socialist market economy theory" (some people believe that it is Zhuo Jiong), and what makes people feel infinitely emotional is that he died before waiting for economic reform. "Gu Zhun fever" is a cultural phenomenon, but from the perspective of Gu Zhun as an economist, this is also an echo of the spirit of economic reform in the 1990s. After that, the time came to this century, and the best-selling market of economics entered the next chapter.
The "Writer" era
Stills from Big Shots (2001).
In the first year of this century, the World Book Publishing Company introduced and published the American Robert Kiyosaki's "Rich Dad, Poor Dad", which was rapidly sold out under the influence of the financial industry reform and the rise of phenomena such as "stock speculation and financial management" and wealth anxiety, and has since been distributed by more than a dozen publishing houses. However, at this time, the copyright page of the book is no longer uniformly marked with the number of prints as in the last century, some have, some have not, and the specific number of prints cannot be counted. "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" has become a super bestseller indicating that at the beginning of the new century, the best-selling book market has become diversified and more commercial, using technical strategies in naming, from cover recommendation, topic selection to content are speculating on the needs of readers, entering the "reader democracy" era, and finally mud and sand, and this is the inevitable law of the book market.
Back to the local economics bestseller. In January 2007, the first volume of "Thirty Years of Turbulence" by financial writer Wu Xiaobo was published (CITIC Publishing House and Zhejiang People's Publishing House), and the next volume and bound edition were published the following year. "Thirty Years of Turbulence" recalls the development history of China's private enterprises through literary language, portraying the psychology, emotions and choices of the characters, which allows readers to see a different way of writing the history of economic development. The subjectivity of his writing has also been somewhat controversial. In the "Rich List of Chinese Writers" jointly released by the Yangtze River Business Daily and Chengdu Business Daily in 2009, Wu Xiaobo ranked Fifth with a royalty income of 7.5 million yuan, higher than Han Han, Yu Dan and other best-selling authors of the year.
Another million-selling economics bestseller emerged in 2007, and its title is probably the most widely circulated of any local economics bestseller — Currency Wars. The first printing was in June 2007, and by November, CITIC Publishing House had reprinted it for the 13th time, on average, in less than half a month. The author, Song Hongbing, became a well-known writer of financial history.
Currency Wars pieces together financial and monetary material from different sources, arguing that the various world changes since the founding of the Bank of England in 1694, including the assassination of Lincoln, have been the result of the manipulation of, or at least the shadow of, the forces of finance capital. This shortened, single chain of causation, which tells the history of finance as a history of conspiracy, must arouse the desire of readers of all stripes to try to quickly understand the changes in the world. The global financial crisis of 2008 also accelerated its best-selling. Since 2009, Song Hongbing has published five series of "Currency Wars" in foreign languages such as France, Russia, South Korea, Japan and Vietnam.
In August 2009, economist Chen Zhiwu's "The Logic of Finance" was published by the international cultural publishing company Times Guanghua. Although "The Logic of Finance" is a collection of essays, after the author's own compilation, its basic content is to discuss why human beings inevitably need financial markets, which is a refutation of the "financial conspiracy theory" of "Currency War". Publishing Business Weekly reported in October 2009 that "Logic of Popularity", "Logic of Finance" sold nearly 100,000 copies in a month, and has since risen to 500,000 copies.
Looking back at the first decade of this century, investment and financial management became a kind of "must-have course" for the urban middle class, and the financial crisis swept the world. As a result, there is both an intrinsic desire for finance to achieve "wealth freedom" and a fear of distrust, which constitutes an inevitable condition for the attention of a book such as The Logic of Finance, which is more specialized but not completely general. The currency war, on the other hand, set the stage for the book, which was spat upon from the beginning for implying "conspiracy theories." The publisher also followed the trend, highlighting the confrontation between the two books in promotion, resulting in an unexpected bestseller of an essay collection.
The "generalist" era
Stills from I Am Not a Medicine God (2018).
In September 2010, "Why Our Days Are So Difficult" (Oriental Publishing House) was published by "Lang Xianping Said", which talked about hot topics such as food, housing prices, and medical care. Lang Xianping was a hot economist in the television era, and the "Lang Xianping Said" series of books basically sold as bestsellers. Since there is no way to count its specific prints, we have to find data from network platforms such as Dangdang, JD.com, and Douban. Why Our Days Are So Hard is probably the most talked about in the series. As of the publication of this article, under the self-operated articles of Dangdang and JD.com, the sellers have more than 10,000 comments, and more than 7,000 people have participated in the scoring under the Douban entries.
The book's cover design was typical of "expert bestsellers" at the time, with a large cover image of the author's speech or reflection, accompanied by keywords and recommendations. After that, this exaggerated pattern is rare.
Time shifts to 2013. In January of that year, two of the best-selling books appeared in the field of economics.
The first book is "Game and Society" published by the economist Zhang Weiying by Peking University Press, which discusses the basic methods and conclusions of game theory in the form of general knowledge writing. The first edition was published in January 2013, and the same edition was printed for the 7th time in June 2015. The second book is Wen Tiejun, a scholar of rural issues in China, who published "Eight Crises" in the Oriental Publishing House, which was first published in January 2013 and printed for the ninth time in December 2016, with a total of 36,000 copies. From 2017 to 2019, Wen Tiejun recorded the video course "The Economic Crisis and China's Experience in Response" (adding "Crisis" twice), and since then his lectures and Q&A videos have become popular on video platforms such as Bilibili. "Eight Crises" also continued to sell well, and by December 2020 it was the 28th printing.
Next, in July 2016, Lu Ming's "Big Country Big City" (Shanghai People's Publishing House) was published, and it was reprinted eight times in two months, and the number of prints in the fifth year reached about 200,000. As China's urbanization unfolds nearly two decades ago, Big Cities explores transportation, air, housing, and education with empirical data, case narratives, and universal laws, and ideas that influence people's understanding and change of these issues. Lu Ming believes that China needs larger and more large cities to let land allocation and labor mobility be regulated by market demand and form a unified market. When readers think about the "national unified big market" proposed in 2022, they may think of the "Big Country Big City" of that year.
This was followed by Xue Zhaofeng's Lecture Notes on Economics (CITIC Publishing House). Xue Zhaofeng became famous for recording paid courses and variety shows, and Xue Zhaofeng's Economics Lecture Notes were published in June and July 2018, and by May 2019, about one million copies had been sold in a year. Since then, he has also set a staggering record of selling more than 60,000 copies in a live broadcast.
At this point, the second decade of this century is over. The economic best-selling books at this stage, except for "Eight Crises", are general knowledge writing, and the last best-selling general knowledge writing is the "Orange Seller's Speech" in the 1980s, which is different from "The Word of the Orange Seller", the general writing in recent years is less romantic and eclectic discourse style, the author is obviously affected by the discipline specialization, from chapters, arguments to annotations have shown a trend of monographization. The first best-selling book in economics in the 1920s, "Inside the Matter" (Shanghai People's Publishing House), also has such characteristics in its general writing. Based on a review of academic research, the book tells readers how local governments have participated in and promoted economic development over the past few decades. Published in August 2021, the book was reprinted 13 times in five months and will be printed more than 600,000 times by the first half of 2022. This print size is considerable in the economics bestsellers, but in the past few decades, including "Currency Wars", no one has been able to compare with the print number of "Research on the Economic Problems of Socialism in China".
"Research on Socialist Economic Issues in China" is at a critical time when the consensus on economic reform is formed. When a market-based environment eventually emerges, the book market will be like any other market, where readers, as buyers, pick books based on their knowledge structure, occupation, interests, and personality. Books are muddy and sandy, and readers are good.
There can no longer be an Indian number myth.
Written by Beijing News reporter Luo Dong
Edited by Li Yongbo Li Yang
Proofread by Xue Jingning