What do people read if they are tired of being couch potatoes, watching TV dramas or listening to music?

In the past year, it seems books with appealing titles sell better than others.

"What many bookmakers proposed selling during the past couple of years were concepts rather than contents," said the Guangzhou-based New Weekly in its retrospective of last year.

Surely there is some truth in that remark.

One of the concepts offered by bookmakers and heatedly accepted by the market last year was "qingchun wenxue," which can roughly be understood as "literature of beautiful youth."

Written by authors still in or just out of their teens about contemporary adolescent life, these sorts of books have been enthusiastically wooed by publishers as well as harshly panned by critics in 2004.

Guo Jingming was undoubtedly the biggest star among this youngest but hottest writing group, defined as "Writers Born after the 1980s."

As the defendant in a plagiarism suit, Guo has so far not seen any sign of reduction of his influence or interest to young readers. Both of his two 2003 novels City of Fantasy (Huan Cheng), and How Many Flowers Fall in Dreams? (Mengli Hualuo Zhiduoshao), sold stably throughout last year and have each sold more than one million copies.

His 2004 attempt at writing: The first two books of a 12-volume series called Island, edited and designed by his studio, have sold more than 400,000 volumes by now.

A black horse in the competitive business of juvenile writing last year came from abroad. In 2004, Guiyeoni, a 19-year-old girl from the Republic of Korea, beat all her young Chinese rivals except for Guo in grabbing market share with her work of fiction The Guy was Cool. The sales of up to 1 million copies of the book quickly resulted in the landing of a succession of Korean books in Chinese bookstores.

Adolescent writers and Korean books were the two things prevailing in 2004.

Books written by celebrities talking about themselves also sold well last year.

In 2004, big names continued to be added to the already long list of public figures who published autobiographies. They came from different fields, from sports stars (Yao Ming and Liu Xiang) to former United States president (Bill Clinton), from the literary and scholarly world (Zhou Guoping, writer and philosophy professor) to the entertainment circle (Zhu Jun, TV programme host in CCTV).

Among all these biographies, Yu Qiuyu's Borrow My Life (Jie Wo Yisheng), has attracted the greatest attention and generated the most heated controversy.

One of the most well-known cultural figures in China, who tramps on both popular and highbrow terrain in his prose, Yu published his autobiography at the same time that he announced he was quitting writing forever due to the attacks he had received in past years.

Again, the book was strongly criticized about its correctness concerning historical occurrences in which Yu was involved, especially those that happened in the "cultural revolution" (1966-76).

In a world seething with promoters' yelling and boasting, low-profile authors appealed to readers' affection more easily. Rivers Like Blood (Heliu Ruxue), the most recent fiction of the popular writer Hai Yan, made the bestseller list without much ado or promotion, like most of his previous works.

"What I pursue is not immortality, but an instant existence. The thing I excel in is not quality but speed," Hai Yan's honest confession was widely quoted by the press.

Spending only three-and-a-half months writing the 340,000-Chinese-character fiction, Hai Yan provided an interesting contrast in writing speed to Jiang Rong, who prepared for 25 years and then wrote for six years to finish his Wolf Totem (Lang Tuteng).

As the first novel of an obscure and anonymous author, Wolf Totem emerged as the biggest surprise, many insiders agreed, in 2004's publishing industry.

Among all the books published last year, it runs first in frequency of being mentioned in Internet web pages.

Just as Ouyang Tao, an editor working with People's Literature Publishing House, said: "Though Wolf Totem was written in the spirit of serious writing in the most strict sense of the term, it was accepted in different ways."

Some read it as a guidebook for business tactics, for one, which in part counted for its selling more than 500,000 copies.

The year 2004 was particularly auspicious for obscure writers.

Besides Jiang, Fan Wen, an author based in Southwest China's Yunnan Province previously little known to the Chinese public made a strong impression on critics with his Land of Water and Milk (Shuiru Dadi).

Fan just beat out Jiang to be the Chinese Novelist of the Year.

Then Wang Gang with his English (Yinggelishi) won the Best Expert and Readers Awards, granted by Sina.com, the People's Literature Publishing House and the Contemporary (Dangdai) magazine in early January.

Jiang Rong won the Outstanding Expert and Readers Awards, Fang Wen won the Outstanding Expert Award.

A total of 42 novels were nominated by literature critics from 55 Chinese mainland media. Ten entered the final for both expert and reader's appraisal. During the 10 days, over 3,000 readers cast votes on the Internet.

Both writers have built their works on long-time investigation into the life, culture, and history of specific ethnic groups of China.

In Wolf Totem it is the Mongolians in North China's Inner Mongolian steppe, while in Fan's fiction, it is the Tibetan and Naxi people living in the Lancang Valley of Yunnan Province.

(China Daily January 17, 2005)