Studying the 'Wen effect'

What do Oprah Winfrey and Wen Jiabao have in common? They can both catapult obscure works into bestsellers. The American television host opened a book club, a segment on her extremely popular talk show, in 1996 and has since recommended dozens of books, increasing their sales by as much as a million copies each. Hence, the "Oprah effect".

The Chinese premier mentioned in a visit to Singapore late last year that Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is his bedside reading. Since then, the Roman emperor's thoughts and insights have had half a dozen Chinese translations published, all of which are selling briskly. There is a bilingual Chinese-English edition, a special edition for adolescents and even a Meditations-style volume by one of the translators. All of them carry the tagline "a book Premier Wen Jiabao reads every day".

China has book critics, but their impact pales beside that of politicians. The Chinese version of The World Is Flat is on the recommendation list of several high-profile leaders. When Wang Yang, then Party secretary of Chongqing municipality, encouraged city officials to read it, 1,000 copies were sold in one day, emptying the city's entire inventory. Later, when Wang assumed the equivalent position in Guangdong province, he invited author Thomas Friedman for a visit.