China Bestsellers in July: Etiquette and Education

With summer school titles driving contemporary classics sales, China’s July charts were busy with a robust interest in etiquette.

‘The Giant Egg,’ as some call Beijing’s National Center for the Performing Arts, on a July evening. Image – Getty iStockphoto: Mirko Kuzmanovic

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson

See also: China Bestsellers in January: A Three-Adaptation Problem

Netflix To Release ‘Three-Body Problem’ in January

In looking at the July bestsellers in the Chinese market, the familiar summertime pattern was clearly in place, as sales of the four key classic novels recognized in educational programming in China was led by a new version from Publishing House of the China Literary Federation of Cao Xuequin’s Dream of the Red Chamber making its move for the first time onto the fiction charts.

‘Dream of the Red Chamber’

This as well as Shi Nai’an and Luo Guanzhong’s Water Margin (People’s Literature Publishing House) and Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West (People’s Literature Publishing House) are often animated by the release of new editions, and this summer, the usual engine of primary and secondary school-reading lists have been revved up by the ministry of education’s addition of a “reading the whole book” requirement.

An outlier in this regard is the first appearance at No. 1 of Think Tank by the 17th-century sage Feng Menglong (Beijing Union Publishing), following its debut on the charts at No. 2 last week. It’s a departure from the contemporary-classics/new-version pattern, in that it’s a book introduced in June this year, quite new, and written by an opera scholar of the Ming Dynasty. It’s a collection of “wisdom stories”—more than 1,000 of them—published in simplified Chinese. And as “classics” go, this is a collection of centuries-old classics, not the decades-old leading titles making such strong summer-reading showings.

‘Water Margin’

The real story in July, it turns out, was in nonfiction, which saw a surprisingly big cohort of new arrivals—14 in the Top 30.

And just what sells to the readership in terms of fast-charting nonfiction? – books that we in the West call “how to” or “self-help.” Among the new arrivals:

• Five-Minute Comic Worldly Wisdom
• Sentence Planet
• Strategy
• Be a Calm Mom
• The Art of Dinner
• Cognition Awakening
• Emotional Intelligence In Sales That Touch People’s Hearts
• Chinese Medicine Prescription Collection
• Winning The Three-year High School Critical Period

‘Be a Calm Mom’

Our associates at Beijing OpenBook have a good phrase for the most successful of this kind of read on the Chinese market, saying that they all show a “skillful interpretation of a humane sense of the world.” Zhou Yunwei’s Be a Calm Mom (Tianjin Science & Technology Press) is pointed up as a particularly apt example, offering advice on educating one’s children as a parent as the state begins placing new emphasis on parent-child learning.

One driver is “short-video channels” for marketing—this, of course, refers to TikTok-like platforms—which often provide solid discounts. Another factor is that consumers are looking for books that “help them meet market changes,” as our associates put it, and being that Calm Mom is a good example of that, as parents work to handle family-life changes in the state’s expectations.

‘Winning the Three-Year High School Period’

A third factor is, as we’ve seen in the Chinese market many times, the impact of personal influencers. An example is young Zhang Wuefeng, author of the Winning the Three-Year High School Critical Period. He became popular on the Internet with his unique interpretations of colleges and universities, and his humorous descriptions were widely appreciated by students. In June, Xuefeng was able to parlay that online traffic to his views of journalism as he started the process of applying for work. A lot of social-media conversation ensued, and so did sales.

In children’s books in July, China’s fascination for etiquette books shows no signs of slowing. OpenBook’s researchers are tracking top sales for Manga Child Psychology, which returned in July to No. 1 (North China Women & Children’s Publishing House).

In second and third places, This is Traditional Chinese Etiquette: A Study Guide to Etiquette for Teenagers (Hebei Science & Technology Press) and Good Behavior: Those Little Things That My Grandparents Taught My Parents and My Parents Taught Me (Jiangsu Literature & Art Press) ranked second and third, that traction having a lot to do with the resurgence of interest in traditional national cultural values.

Lastly, we have an update on an earlier report, on this  year’s January bestsellers. At that point, we’d looked at the three adaptations of The Three-Body Problem and one of those, an English-language adaptation, was headed for Netflix’s worldwide distribution. This is coming from the Game of Thrones team’s David Benioff and DB Weiss, focused on Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past, with producer Alexander Woo onboard and participation from Plan B Entertainment.

At this point, Netflix is announcing a premiere in January without a date yet specified. And here’s a trailer. From the looks of it, Liu Cixin’s trilogy could start showing up on bestseller lists far beyond China’s.



Below, then, are OpenBook’s overall lists from July 2023 of bestsellers in fiction, nonfiction, and children’s books, followed by its lists of bestselling fiction and nonfiction in China by authors from outside the country. At the end of our article, as always, you’ll find notes on how the lists are constructed.

OpenBook’s Fiction Bestsellers, July 2023

OpenBook’s Nonfiction Bestsellers, July 2023

OpenBook’s Children’s Bestsellers, July 2023

Foreign Author Fiction Bestsellers, July 2023

Foreign Author Nonfiction Bestsellers, July 2023

Notes on the Charts

OpenBook is a privately owned industry-data research firm based in Beijing. It functions somewhat as Nielsen and NDP do from the West, and Nielsen Book Research International has worked with OpenBook in Asian operations. With authoritative data and information resources, OpenBook is able to deliver consulting service to partners who would like to explore the Chinese book market and identify suitable partners.

At last report, OpenBook monitored more than 18,000 online and offline bookstores.

The online channel includes digital retailers such as large self-operated online stores, platform stores, and small- and medium-sized stores. The offline channels include more than 4,800 bookstores. Coverage includes most of the state-owned and influential privately owned bookstores in 30 provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions. Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Tibet are not included in OpenBook’s system.

In 2022, OpenBook tracked around 76.21 billion RMB in sales (US$10.62 billion).

Retail outlets include:

• Traditional bookstores
• Supermarkets
• Campus bookstores
• “Professional” stores, said to be small stores with a specific industrial or trade focus
• Airport stores

In addition, OpenBook is drawing data from online bookstores of three main types:

• The “Tmall” stores of Alibaba (Tmall is described as a marketplace of companies that create storefronts online to sell products including books)
• The “JingDong” Stores of JD.com (similar to Tmall as a marketplace of both individual companies and bookstores operated by JD.com)
• Ten independent online bookselling retailers

China has 500 or more publishers in operation today. Most of them are government-owned. Private publishers are required to generate ISBNs for their titles from a publishing company that is government-owned—which, in other words, creates a system in which all ISBNs are registered through government channels. The government approves each book published in China.

More of our China bestseller reports from Publishing Perspectives are here, and more on the Chinese book publishing market is here.