Famine turns to feast for Chinese readers

The foreign literature available at that time comprised basically classics.

Chen writes: "Modern Western literature, however, was still regarded as a cultural black hole that we needed to treat cautiously, due to ignorance. … At such a time (the late 1970s and '80s), young intellectuals needed to borrow universal experience from other countries to understand their situations and how they should feel about these situations. After reading those classics, young people like me simply wanted to read not only beautiful ancient works."

In Foreign Literature and Art, Chen found contemporary works, including Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata's short stories such as The Izu Dancer, four works by Italian poet Eugenio Montale, Jean-Paul Sartre's play Dirty Hands and a translation of part of Joseph Heller's novel Catch 22.

"Reading the bimonthly allowed me to blend into the modern world. I found that my mind should have belonged to a new world: a mental situation in a modern social environment," Chen wrote.

Since those days, the barren landscape for books has been transformed. Last year alone, China bought the copyrights of more than 17,400 titles from overseas.

The year 1988 was a significant one for China's publishing industry, when some of the country's biggest houses, such as the Yilin Press and the China Citic Press, were founded.

The growth of major publishers such as the Shanghai Translation Publishing House, the Yilin Press, the People's Literature Publishing House and the China Citic Press highlights the different demands of Chinese readers over time, especially for foreign books.