What's Selling at the San Lian Bookstore: October 1998

The best seller list at the Beijing Sanlian Bookstore (Meishuguan Donglu
#22 just north of Wangfujing and east of the Fine Arts Museum) has three
books about the USA on the bestseller list for the week of September 13
- 20. The books, at spots #3, #4, and #5 are "Deep Concerns About
History" [Lishi shenchude youlu], "It Doesn't All Depend Upon the
President" [Zongtong shi kaobuzhude], both by Lin Da, a Chinese who
emigrated to the USA. and "America Close-up" [Weiguan Meiguo]. I read
the first third of "Deep Concerns" last Spring. The book is in the form
of letters home to a cousin in China explaining the American political
and social system. The book has very acute observations of the U.S.
political and legal system.

I haven't attacked the other two yet. "America Close-Up" is by Hu Shuli,
an editor of Workers Daily [Gongren Ribao] who spent six months in the
U.S. in 1987 and a year at Stanford in 1994 -1995. Having read a good
bit of "Deep Concerns" and a few other American books it seems that the
quality of information the Chinese get about the USA continues to
increase a rapid pace.

In translation at the Sanlian Bookstore I saw Ezra Vogel "Living with
China", Henry Kissinger's "Diplomacy", a book of essays edited by a Sri
Lankan writer arguing that human rights and scientific progress are
inseperable, and a great many new books on U.S. - China relations
featured prominently at the first floor entrance to the bookstore.

The genre of the moment seems to be memoirs of the ant-rightist campaign
of 1957 and the suffering of "rightists" in the ensuring two decades.
There must be four memoirs by former rightists or studies of the period
displayed near the entranceway. Perhaps Premier Zhu Rongji has made
former (?) rightists popular.

In the basement, the religion section seems a bit bigger with a bookcase
each devoted to Christianity, Buddhism and Daoism and several bookcases
devoted to Tibetan studies. The rate of growth of the Tibetan studies
part of the bookstore is matched only by the computer books (which of
course take up more bookshelves, but still their are about three
bookshelves of Tibetan stuff.