Storybooks with lots of pictures and few words are becoming the education tool of choice for China's new generation of parents

Picture books, once dismissed as poor value for money, have been handed all kinds of educational duties — and pushed into a fiercer market fight.

Nini's son, now 10, recently developed a reading difficulty. She thought reading picture books might solve it.

She first read Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, by the American children's picture-book author William Stark, with her son a few years ago. In the story, Sylvester, a donkey who collects rocks, stumbles on a magic wishing pebble, then turns himself into a stone while trying to escape a lion. His parents pass him by again and again, but they never give up; in the end they find him and change him back, and the magic pebble is locked away in a cabinet.

There is a lot in Sylvester and the Magic Pebble she can't forget. When Sylvester runs into trouble, he doesn't think about attacking the other side — he changes himself first. And Sylvester's father finds the wishing pebble because he remembers what his son likes. That second point is the one she and her son responded to most.

"Reading images, understanding pictures — that is a fairly hard ability to acquire. The biggest reason art education in China differs so much from art education in the US and Europe is that we understand beauty differently, and picture books can train children from an early age to find beauty and to imagine and create," Nini told QDaily. She runs training at a public-sector institution, and perhaps because the job hands her the background knowledge, she talks with something of a training company's tone.

Nini's choice is not unusual. Children's picture books like Sylvester and the Magic Pebble are becoming the hottest part of children's book spending.

Figures from the book-market research firm OpenBook show that in 2015 children's books passed literature and study aids to become the second-largest segment by retail value, behind only social science. The biggest contributor to that growth was cartoons, comics and picture books, up 27.5% year on year.

At the Beijing Book Fair, which has just closed, young parents turned out with more enthusiasm than anyone expected. Unlike the consumer-facing Shanghai Book Fair, the Beijing fair is by nature still a trade event, where publishers, rights holders and retailers from around the world come to do business. This year, for the first time, it opened an international children's education zone, and held the International Picture Book Exhibition there for the second year running. The venue, the new China International Exhibition Center, sits far out in Shunyi, close to the Sixth Ring Road, and plenty of young parents still made the trip with their children in the last days of the summer holiday.

Christine, the mother of a 5-year-old boy, also used a seemingly expert vocabulary to describe what picture books do when QDaily interviewed her. She sees them as an indispensable part of preschool education: "Reading pictures is a very important ability. It builds observation and focus, it makes children retell things out loud, and it trains them to express themselves."

You can hear almost the same wording from Xing Peijian, an editor at Red Hat Children's Books: "The whole children's book market is hot, but the picture-book market looks hottest of all, partly because its direct consumers are preschoolers. As children get older, their reading choices inevitably multiply — from picture books to bridge books to children's literature — and other activities, schoolwork above all, start to pull at them. But ages 0 to 6 is a stage with no distractions. They don't know many characters yet, and they need books that leave room for imagination and creativity while still teaching something. So picture books become their first reading choice, and their only one."

Picture books are becoming the education tool of choice for China's new generation of parents.

For a long stretch of time, the normal state of the market was that nobody saw any value in picture books at all.

When people in the trade talk about picture books, they more often say tuhuashu, literally "picture-drawing book," than huiben. The two are parallel terms with different origins and similar meanings. The picture book had developed for more than 100 years in Europe and America before it reached Japan around 1960. The word huiben comes from Japan, where it is read ehon: a group of Japanese publishers, writers and illustrators, Tadashi Matsui foremost among them, fell in love with the picture book coming out of Europe and America and began promoting it in Japanese kindergartens. Unlike comics or lianhuanhua strips, picture books put more weight on telling a story through images, bind picture and text more tightly together, and are usually printed larger than a standard book — bigger than the common 32mo trim size.

By the late 1970s, under Japanese influence, Taiwan produced its first crop of publishers specializing in children's picture books: Shangyi, Grimm Press, Penguin, Yuan-Liou and others.

Illustrated books on the mainland went through changes of their own, from the palm-sized xiaorenshu storybooks of the early 19th century to the lianhuanhua picture strips of the 1920s. But what these sold adult readers was story, not the aesthetics and education that picture books in Europe, America and Japan stress.

The parents of today's post-80s generation may well have held this view: a book of pictures isn't really a book; you buy a book to consume information and knowledge, and only a book with lots of words and lots of stories is worth the money. They also put more weight on knowledge and skills, and books made entirely of pictures don't, at first glance, "teach" a child anything.

That way of thinking made for a narrow picture-book market in China. Mainland publishers had been importing picture books on and off since 1978. The first concentrated stretch came in the late 1990s. In 1999, Chunfeng Literature and Art Publishing House tried importing the Janosch picture-book series from Germany. It printed once, no more than 8,000 copies per title, and the books didn't sell out until 2004 — with most of the sales packed into that one year.

A Jia, an advocate for children's reading, described how people saw things then: "Big pictures, with a little less text than picture — Chinese readers at the time were very uncomfortable with that... The stories felt a bit baffling, as if they held no useful knowledge or lesson... Almost 10 yuan a book. With so few words, that book was simply too expensive!"

By 2004, not much had changed. Lu Fang, marketing director of Beijing Pupulan Culture Development Co., remembers that when Japan's Poplar Publishing opened its Beijing office that year — the office that became the Pupulan Picture Book House — consumers still had no idea what a picture book was.

"I first ran into picture books around 2004. We'd go do storytelling sessions at the Capital Library, the storyteller reading to one or two children gathered around. The first parents who came into the bookstore would ask: what are picture books for? Are the children supposed to draw on them?"

When the post-80s became parents themselves, the picture changed.

Most of that generation probably grew up wanting picture books and getting only a few. If we wander off the subject for a moment and talk about the other, adult-facing branch of the form, many people will remember Jimmy Liao. "On the autumn morning of my fifteenth birthday, a light rain fell outside the window. I fed my cat. At six-oh-five, I walked into the subway." That hit picture book, The Sound of Colors, was — to borrow a word now worn out — a red-hot IP.

Jimmy Liao was how many people first came to picture books. He published his own picture-book work in Taiwan in 1998: 《Secret in the Forest》 and 《The Smiling Fish》. In 1999 came Turn Left, Turn Right, and in 2001 《The Sound of Colors》, later adapted into a musical and a film. The density of his output and the room for imagination in his work carried Jimmy Liao himself beyond the bounds of the picture book, and gave the post-80s something to talk about.

After that, publishers began pushing picture books widely, because everyone wanted to repeat Jimmy Liao's miracle. OpenBook data show that in 2002 picture books accounted for 4.3% of China's book retail market by cover-price value, well above other categories at 1.3%. The trend held through 2003, hitting an all-time high of 5.03%.

Even so, the market showed no real improvement until 2007. Ikuko Ishikawa, founder of the Pupulan Picture Book House, summed up that decade of work this way: first, nobody knew what a picture book was or what it was about, so we had to introduce it, teach people, promote it. And how do you introduce and teach without books? So we had to make books. And once you have something to show people, if there's nowhere to show it, you build your own platform — you open picture-book stores.

Liu Yang of Magic Elephant Books, an imprint of Guangxi Normal University Press, thinks 2007 was the breakout year. He told QDaily: "That year Heryin Books published Miss Rumphius. The market didn't have nearly as many kinds of picture books as it does now, and this one broke through straight away." The Chinese edition is called 《花婆婆》, "the flower granny"; the original title is simply the heroine's name. The book tells its story in flashback: Miss Rumphius, by then a frail old woman, tells a young narrator about things that happened many years before.

As with Miss Rumphius, at a time when Chinese creators still couldn't keep up, importing foreign classics became many publishers' answer. In this period Chunfeng Literature and Art Publishing House imported the German writer Janosch's series I Say You're a Bear (《我说你是一头熊》); 21st Century Publishing House imported the German writer Michael Ende's The Bare-Bottomed Rhino (《光屁股大犀牛》) and Ophelia's Shadow Theatre; CITIC Press brought out the picture-book series of the French illustrator Sempé; Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House imported the German artist F. K. Waechter's fine picture books The Red Wolf (《红色的狼》) and Fish in Love (《恋爱的鱼》); and Jieli Publishing House imported the Japanese bestseller The Cat Who Lived a Million Times.

In other words, by the time the post-80s became parents, the choice on the market was far better than anything they had known. All they had to do was pick the picture books they thought suitable — and in a sense, parents are a picture book's first reader.

21st Century Publishing House did most of the pushing. It grew out of Jiangxi Children's Publishing House, became a sister publisher to Germany's Thienemann Verlag in 1989, and in 2000 was among the first in the country to import foreign children's picture books.

Beyond the books themselves, 21st Century promoted picture books along fairly conventional lines. In 2006 it published Picture Books: Reading and the Classics (《图画书：阅读与经典》) by the well-known advocate Peng Yi, and organized 144 speaking dates for the book around the country. In October 2007 it launched the "21st Century" Children's Reading Promotion Forum in Nanchang, which became an annual event. And it worked with Shanghai City Comics and Wuhan's Zhiyin Manke to set up the "21st Century Sanzhisan Picture Book Award" for original picture-book creators.

After restrictions on children's books were lifted in 2003, the Japanese-funded Pupulan, Taiwan's Heryin Books and Hsin Yi, and the mainland's Thinkingdom Media Group, through its Giving Tree imprint, all entered the market. Thinkingdom, publisher of The Giving Tree, founded the Giving Tree Picture Book House in August 2003 and went on to be the first in China to import and publish hardcover picture books at scale. By 2008 it was Dangdang.com's largest book supplier.

The real spread of picture books probably came from many forces at once. More titles, for one. The experience of reading picture books and of being guided through them, for another — as with every kind of education campaign, you teach the parents first and it reaches the children later. Then there was exposure online and through multimedia: parents active on parenting forums turned into picture-book opinion leaders while hunting for children's books for their own kids. And once WeChat spread, picture-book recommendations dressed up as official accounts multiplied further.

A Jia (Lin Xiaoxi) and Luobo Tanzhang (Lin Xiaoyang) were two of them. After becoming fathers, the pair began studying children's books and together founded the children's website Red Clay Village and the Red Clay Book Club, promoting picture books and children's reading events. A Jia became a well-known children's reading advocate. He helped translate foreign picture books such as Courage and Where the Wild Things Are, and wrote guides such as 101 Books to Captivate Children (《让孩子着迷的 101 本书》).

In a 2003 interview with the China Book Business Report, Hao Guangcai, editor-in-chief of Taiwan's Grimm Press, said the key problem holding back picture-book publishing on the mainland was "explanation." When children's picture books first took off in Japan, he said, there was a publisher called Fukuinkan Shoten, and nearly every one of its books came with a "mother's handbook" — what Europe and America call a parents' guide. The success of children's picture books in Taiwan owed a great deal to an effective direct-sales system: close to 70% of picture books were sold by sales reps, and in South Korea the figure may have reached 95%. That "explaining" can take about as much work as making the book.

Without such guidance, ordinary parents may find it hard to work picture books out on their own. The biggest difference between a picture book and an ordinary book is that a picture book carries a purpose, which makes it, in a sense, an investment rather than a diversion. Even the most relaxed parents want their children to come away with something, so they choose with at least some care.

For publishers, though, a new round of competition may only be starting. New players keep pouring into this market.

CITIC Kids, CITIC Press's children's brand, launched in 2015. Its head told QDaily: "Of the 200 children's books we plan to publish this year, 60 or 70 are picture books, and they're almost all foreign — 90%."

This June, Guangxi Normal University Press set up its own children's sub-brand, Magic Elephant. Its head, Liu Yang, said: "Imports will be 99% of Magic Elephant's list, and we'll build up original titles step by step."

Talking about original work is one thing; doing it is far messier. Lu Fang told QDaily: "A couple of years ago our sales staff used to joke that original work was 'a mark of quality, poison at the box office' — meaning consumers wouldn't buy it and sales were hard."

For publishing brands that have just entered the picture-book market, much of their energy and money has to go into building distribution and partnerships, and buying rights is the faster, more efficient route. As Deng Hao of the Nanjing children's-story studio dreamook told us in an interview last year: "When a publisher imports rights, all it has to get right is the translation and the design, and sales are basically guaranteed. Digging up original work at home takes a long time and a lot of money, and few people dare to try."

According to media reports, nearly all of the world's 10 best-selling children's books have now been brought into China. Of the titles in the American book 100 Books Kids Need to Read Today (《当今儿童需要读的 100 本书》), 78 had been published in China by 2011. On Dangdang.com in 2015, the ratio of original to imported children's picture books was 3:7.

Zhang Donghui, deputy general manager of Beijing Pupulan Culture Development Co., told an earlier interviewer that rights were already tight by 2014. "At the Bologna Children's Book Fair we had a meeting booked with a rights editor at a foreign publisher, and when we turned up she just laughed. We asked why. She said there were no books left to talk about."

Feeling the pressure, presumably, Pupulan had to start testing how the market would respond to original picture books. At the end of 2014 it published Monster Mountain (《妖怪山》), written by the picture-book scholar Peng Yi. Peng had earlier published World Picture Books: Reading and the Classics (《世界图画书：阅读与经典》), a book young parents often mention alongside The Power of Picture Books (《绘本之力》) by the Japanese picture-book champion Tadashi Matsui.

The test sold 70,000 copies of that single title in six months. Lu Fang thinks that may mean readers' appetite for original work has shifted. But she also said: "We're slow with original titles. We have more than 400 titles in all right now, and only 22 are original — though the number has been rising these past two or three years."

Nini is now a children's reading advocate herself, and often receives picture books from different publishers to review. She told QDaily: "I really like original creators like Liu Chang and Xiong Liang — their work has a very Chinese flavor. But on the whole, original picture books for the youngest readers still strike me as uneven. Picture books for little children lean toward information and usefulness, and they miss what's going on inside a child. Japanese creators are better at this. At the very young end, someone like Tatsuya Miyanishi understands that the way small children take in and feel the world still needs delicate emotion."

She also raised the question of range, in both original and imported books: "The picture books winning big prizes abroad right now are concentrated in the humanities, and there's nothing coming in from the natural sciences or the life sciences. Japan and South Korea have published a lot of early picture books on math, biology and chemistry. They do better on variety."

All of which suggests there is still a great deal left to do in China's picture-book market. Talking about the different relation between image and text in an illustrated book and in a picture book, Tadashi Matsui once put it this way: "Picture plus text equals an illustrated book. Picture times text equals a picture book."

"There are places where words can't do the job, where only a picture can say it properly. It isn't about depicting what is visible; it is about making something visible to the viewer. That is the essence of making picture books."

Set against marketing, distribution and capital, the biggest problem facing China's new Tadashi Matsuis may be whether they can grow a culture of original picture books the way Matsui and his peers once did in Japan.

Cover image sources:

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