In China's most lucrative ever overseas book deal, the UK's Penguin Group has paid a 100,000 US dollars advance, 10 percent of the total purchase value, for the English rights to the Chinese bestseller "The Wolf Totem."

The Penguin Group, under the British Pearson Education company, bought the copyright from Central China's Wuhan-based Changjiang Literary Art Press last Thursday.

According to the agreement, the English version of the book will be published in all English-speaking countries simultaneously in 2007.

The novel has topped China's bestseller list for 16 continuous months since last April, selling more than a million copies altogether. It tells the story of a provincial youth, grassland wolves and Inner Mongolian nomads in the 1960s and 1970s. Writer Jiang Rong uses an epic narrative style to depict Inner Mongolia's grassland environment and nomadic culture.

Few Chinese books have had such good fortune in overseas markets as this one.

According to the State Administration of Press and Publication, since the 1980s the ratio of Chinese copyright imports has maintained a wide imbalance with exports, and is usually in the ratio of 10:1. For instance, China exported 1,314 book copyrights last year, while importing 10,040 that year. The average fee for China's exported copyrights is about 5,000 dollars, only six or seven percent of the total value of the copyrights.

An Boshun, director of the Changjiang Literary Art Press Beijing Book Centre, expressed concern that few books published overseas on China embodied the Chinese soul or the present Chinese situation. Most of the bestselling books from China have focussed on traditional medicine, massage, food, geomancy, traditional culture and travel in China. Few contemporary literature works have been introduced to the world from China. In the past few years, only works by Yu Hua, Mo Yan and a handful of other Chinese writers have been exported.

(China Daily 09/09/2005 page5)