In the late 1970s or maybe early eighties there was an article in Publishers Weekly about a new company called Dictronics which had acquired the rights to produce floppy-disk versions of a number of their reference books in the USA. I was head of reference at Oxford University Press at the time, called them, blagged a return ticket to New York and visited them to see if we could join whatever electronic party was about to happen. We did a deal with a substantial advance to OUP($600k if my memory serves me right) and Dictronics began work. Their editorial director ('the guy who can spell and things like that') was a young guy from Chicago, Andy Rosenheim, who then emigrated to England to work on the stuff and stayed here. He got a full-time job at OUP and then at various London trade houses including four years at Penguin, wrote a few top-notch novels, got married, had children,became a great friend and now has taken over as editor of my favourite magazine, The Author, which does not have a website but is run by The Society of Authors. This is a long preamble to justify my reprinting a piece which will appear there by Simon Greenall, one of the Macmillan team of authors. And please take out a subscription to the Author to help fund the new editor's desire to make the magazine even greater.
It’s about 8.30am, and I leave for the office, about fifteen minutes’ walk away. I go past the uniformed security guards and into the large open plan office where I greet my friends. Someone brings me a coffee and the latest gossip, then I sit down, sometimes with one editor, sometimes with another, and we start work checking proofs. I could be with any ELT publisher in the UK … but this is the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press (FLTRP) in Beijing, and it’s the start of a very typical day.
About seven years ago, Christopher Paterson and Yiu Hei Kan of Macmillan Education began to explore a possible partnership with FLTRP, one of the largest educational publishers in China. China was soon to be admitted to the World Trade Organisation and would sign the International Copyright Agreement. These events coincided with an important curriculum reform in primary and secondary education.
The first fruits of this partnership were a textbook series for primary schools. The Chinese Ministry of Education curriculum reform now requires English to be taught from the age of eight. No one in China had produced books for this age group before, and while Macmillan has published primary school books elsewhere in the world, no one was certain if this experience was relevant for China. A team of UK-based writers, with Printha Ellis as Chief Editor, worked with an editorial team in FLTRP to publish a series of textbooks. Sadly, Printha died before she could see the extraordinary success of New Standard English for Primary schools, which soon became the best seller in China.
In December 2000 I went to Beijing to discuss plans for the continuation of the New Standard English series in junior middle and senior high schools. I sat through my first nerve-wracking meeting, one of three people from Macmillan facing twenty Chinese editors, publishers and professors. It was the start of many meetings.
Since then, we’ve spent much time discussing the kind of English that China would need for the 21st century. We’ve researched the traditions of teaching and publishing in China, and we’ve explored how Macmillan’s international expertise can be used in the Chinese context. The Chinese Ministry of Education imposes many requirements on the grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and the social and cultural content. Our final course design has had to work within these constraints, as well as to have a story line, and to be interesting and motivating for the schoolchildren. Above all, we’ve had to submit the seventeen main coursebooks to the Ministry of Education for approval. About forty books, including teachers’ books and supplementary material, have had to be ready for the start of the school year.
There have been up to fifteen authors and editors in the Macmillan team, and about twenty editors and professors in Beijing. As co-editor in chief, my role in Beijing is to help interpret feedback from both the market and the FLTRP team, and to develop the course design. Back in the UK, I then brief the Macmillan team, monitor the writing progress and help edit or rewrite, if necessary.
It’s not always easy. One problem has been the Ministry wordlist, a list of about 3500 words which are considered to be the most frequently used and which need to be taught. While it is relatively easy to think of unconnected sentences to illustrate the meanings of these words, we need to ensure they are presented in a more extended context, within the general topic of the lesson, and in a way which practises different language skills. At times it has meant trying to write an exciting dialogue for teenagers which includes such disparate words as Ottawa, dumpling, goldfish and shabby.
The Beijing team has to ensure the dialogues and passages that we write are appropriate for schoolchildren. Only positive moral values and role models can be portrayed, respect for parents and older people is maintained at all costs, and negative feelings about, for example, upcoming exams is unacceptable. More specifically, there are certain words which, if we include them in a reading passage, will be questioned. These include not only the most obvious ones, such as human rights, Taiwan, or God, but also names, places and events. Apparently innocent (to a westerner) words, such as change, exile, boss, need to be treated with care, and even the word communism would trigger attention to the context in which it’s used.
One particular difficulty in our working relationship has been our different understanding of the concept of time. There is a theory that all societies gradually move from a concept of appropriate time (I’m hungry, so I’ll have lunch) to one of clock time (It’s 1pm so I’ll have lunch). This is usually related to some transition in their economic, trading or business life. Cultures which are at different stages in this transition may experience conflict between the two contrasting views of the same concept. Perhaps this explains why, for our project, schedules were often unrealistic, quality was initially compromised, and there has been a lot of urgent rewriting. Although the UK and the Beijing teams share the consequences of any setbacks, and give each other endless support, we have never entirely overcome this cultural difference.
But on the whole, the experience has been overwhelmingly positive. On the personal side, I’ve seen regions of China I would never have visited otherwise. Part of my work involves visiting provinces which have adopted our books. My visits usually include a presentation, a question-and-answer session, the inevitable fifteen course banquet with the provincial ministry officials, and some of the most welcoming hospitality you could imagine. These trips have taken me all over the country, from Ningxia, a Muslim, semi-autonomous province in the desert in the north, via Guilin, with its rocks rising vertically from the river in scenes photographed for travel books everywhere, to the tropical island of Hainan, with its water buffalos and rice fields.
A substantial part of the marketing budget is assigned to teacher training. FLTRP, for example, holds seminars all over the country, and runs training courses at its purpose-built conference centre just outside Beijing. The facilities here include a 1500-seater auditorium, two or three smaller lecture halls, break-out rooms, a hotel and other accommodation for all the delegates or trainees. There’s also an entertainment complex with a bowling alley, karaoke room, gym and a 25-metre swimming pool fed by the hot springs which were discovered while the centre was being built. It’s extravagant and visible proof of FLTRP’s commitment to developing best practices in education.
Above all, the relationship between FLTRP and Macmillan seems to be a model of intercultural co-operation, with both teams learning from and supporting each other. And together, we’ve been fortunate. The New Standard English course is now one of the best selling courses in China, and sells tens of millions of copies every year. However, the price of each textbook is low, sometimes 40 pence for a book for which the UK list price might be £9 or £10. Recently, in order to make the main course textbooks for Primary and Junior Middle Schools even cheaper, the government has decided to allow publishers to print and distribute their competitors’ books under licence within their own provinces. The licence is subject to a bidding process: the lower the bid, the cheaper the title, and so a more attractive proposition to the provincial ministry. It’s like OUP being obliged to sell a licence to CUP to print and distribute OUP books in Cambridgeshire, for a low royalty. Fortunately, the licence bidding process should increase overall sales and its net effect on revenue should be neutral. But it’s a decision which shows some of the unpredictability of doing business in China.
Over five years of almost monthly visits by me, our mutual trust and affection has grown. FLTRP is a first-rate publisher and a model employer, and has welcomed me as one of the family. Among my friends and colleagues, we recognise, enjoy and even celebrate the cultural differences between us. I’ve had the privilege of an insight on life in China which is denied to most visitors from the West. But above all, I’ve learnt that I should not always view a different culture or society through my own Western eyes.
It’s now six pm, and the last evening of my stay. Someone has booked one of the many rooms in Partyworld, where we have something to eat, and then sing karaoke for three hours or more. Any song by the Beatles or from the Sound of Music are favourites. It’s surprising how much fun we can have with our own poor singing and without any alcohol to give us courage. When I say goodbye, I already begin to miss my friends, although it won’t be more than a few weeks before I come to Beijing again. We sit together, we work together and at the end of the day, we play together. We will remain friends for life.
Simon Greenall is an ELT writer, and a committee member of the Educational Writers Group. He lives in Oxford … and in Beijing.
And while on the subject of China please follow this link and click on Picador Asia Brochure to see the amazing progress that new imprint has made in a very short period of time.