Pirates and Publishers

A Social History of Copyright in Modern China

Fei-Hsien Wang

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780691195414
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

A detailed historical look at how copyright was negotiated and protected by authors, publishers, and the state in late imperial and modern China In Pirates and Publishers, Fei-Hsien Wang reveals the unknown social and cultural history of copyright in China from the 1890s through the 1950s, a time of profound sociopolitical changes. Wang draws on a vast range of previously underutilized archival sources to show how copyright was received, appropriated, and practiced in China, within and beyond the legal institutions of the state. Contrary to common belief, copyright was not a problematic doctrine simply imposed on China by foreign powers with little regard for Chinese cultural and social traditions. Shifting the focus from the state legislation of copyright to the daily, on-the-ground negotiations among Chinese authors, publishers, and state agents, Wang presents a more dynamic, nuanced picture of the encounter between Chinese and foreign ideas and customs.Developing multiple ways for articulating their understanding of copyright, Chinese authors, booksellers, and publishers played a crucial role in its growth and eventual institutionalization in China. These individuals enforced what they viewed as copyright to justify their profit, protect their books, and crack down on piracy in a changing knowledge economy. As China transitioned from a late imperial system to a modern state, booksellers and publishers created and maintained their own economic rules and regulations when faced with the absence of an effective legal framework.Exploring how copyright was transplanted, adopted, and practiced, Pirates and Publishers demonstrates the pivotal roles of those who produce and circulate knowledge.

1

The Curious Journey of “Copyright” in East Asia

IN THE SPRING OF 1899, a provincial teacher in Fujian named Lin Shu received a strange request from Wang Kangnian (1860–1911), proprietor of a progressive journal in Shanghai, regarding Bali chahua nü yishi (The story of the lady of the camellias in Paris), his Chinese translation of Alexandre Dumas’s La Dame aux camélias, which Lin and his friend Wang Shouchang (1864–1926) had completed not long before, initially as a winter pastime project.¹ It became an instant best seller after their friend Wei Han (1850–1929) published the first edition in Fuzhou with woodblock printing.² Sensing the potential commercial value of this work, Wang expressed a keen interest in paying a lump sum for Lin’s permission to republish it in Shanghai. This is probably one of China’s earliest copyright deals in a modern sense.

Lin Shu would later become China’s highest-paid translator of Western fiction in the early twentieth century.³ In 1899, however, he declined the deal proposed to him. Lin told Wang via a mutual friend that he had no interest in receiving payment because they had translated the work for their amusement, not for profit. The one really entitled to “sell” the rights to publish Bali chahua nü yishi, he also believed, was not him, but Wei Han, who had invested money in having the woodblocks carved and copies printed.⁴ When Wang reached out to Wei, Wei did agree to “sell” the book, but, sharing Lin’s disinterest in financial gain, he asked only for the cost of the woodblocks. To complete the deal, Wei insisted on sending the whole set of printing blocks to Shanghai, despite his awareness that Wang planned to republish the book using Western movable-type printing.⁵

Occurring at a turning point in the development of China’s cultural economy, this incident offers us a unique window onto how copyright, as a newly introduced “Western” concept, shaped (and was shaped by) the changing conceptions of book ownership in China. At the turn of the twentieth century, foreign knowledge and literary works were suddenly in high demand in the marketplace, owing to a decisive intellectual turn among educated Chinese and the Qing government’s Westernization initiatives. As an unprecedented number of foreign works were being translated into Chinese, hundreds, if not thousands, of new terms were created to translate and introduce foreign ideas, practices, institutions, and things that were deemed “new,” “civilized,” “progressive,” and therefore worth the Chinese effort to learn and adapt. Among them was the concept of “copyright,” or banquan in Chinese.

The somewhat amusing negotiations over Bali chahua nü yishi, to a certain extent, can be seen as a not-so-effective conversation between those who spoke the language of copyright and those who did not. What Wang intended to acquire was an authorization from Lin, the translator, likely with the belief that whoever creates the literary work owns it and should exclusively control the use and distribution of the work, an understanding that is close to the contemporary meaning of intellectual property rights. What he eventually received, however, was a set of tangible printing blocks that were useless to him. This incident provides a snapshot of the time lag in the transmission of Western ideas to China between the country’s center and its periphery. Wang, who had been running several progressive, pro-Westernization political journals in the treaty port of Shanghai, was better equipped with Western ideas and “enlightened” earlier than those in Fujian.

Lin’s and Wei’s response, however, suggests that, when the idea of copyright was introduced in China, it was not “spreading” onto a tabula rasa. They might not comprehend the notion of copyright, but they had a clear idea of book ownership as a kind of proprietary claim of transmittable private property. They considered that the exclusive right and ability to produce copies of Bali chahua nü yishi belonged to whoever paid for and retained the woodblocks used to print it. For them, it was the printing blocks, not the writing or translation, that made the book come into being. Therefore, the proper ownership transaction would not be complete unless the block set was transferred from Fujian to Shanghai, even if Wang had chosen a different printing method. Only by sending the blocks to him, they argued, could the capacity to produce (and sell) more copies of the book be transferred to Wang, the new owner of Bali chahua nü yishi.

Therefore, this was not merely a conversation between those who spoke the language of copyright and those who did not, but a negotiation between two different understandings of what embodies “the right to copy.” In this chapter, tracing how the English word “copyright” became the Chinese term banquan, which literally means “the right to printing blocks,” I will examine the negotiations and struggles of the early East Asian promoters and practitioners of copyright between these two understandings of ownership of the book. While this chapter looks at the use of words the early promoters associated with the notion of copyright, the practices they and their contemporaries undertook in the name of “the right to printing blocks” would be an even more crucial subject of inquiry. The early promoters of copyright in East Asia portrayed copyright as a progressive universal doctrine completely alien to the local culture, one that, for the sake of national survival, needed to be transplanted artificially. This chapter argues, however, that their contemporaries’ actual practices of “copyright” tell a different story—the “new” means used to declare banquan ownership were derived from some early modern practices whereby profits were secured from printed books.

Making Copyright the “Public Law under Heaven”

To trace the journey of the very concept of “copyright” to China, one has to start in Japan. The Chinese term for copyright, banquan, was, after all, not coined in China. The person responsible for combining han/ban (printing block(s)) and ken/quan (right) to translate “copyright” was Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901), one of the most influential public intellectuals of the Meiji era. In most standard narratives of modern Japanese history, he appears as a major champion of bunmeikaika (enlightenment and civilization), and the Benjamin Franklin of Japan. In the 1860s and 1870s, he introduced a wide range of Western ideas and practices in Japan, from civil rights to eating beef, to transform his country into a strong and independent modern nation. Looking back from the 1890s, Fukuzawa proudly credited his translations of foreign ideas with the birth of a “new Japan.” In his autobiography, he highlighted the significance of his coining of hanken 版権: “At the time there was no term [in Japanese] to convey the meaning of copyright,” he stated. “No one truly understood that the exclusive right of publishing work belongs to its author; this is a form of private property.”⁶ By inventing hanken to capture the essence of copyright, he proclaimed, he did not merely translate a term from English to Japanese, but enlightened his fellow countrymen on an advanced type of property rights that had not existed in Japan before.

What Fukuzawa did not mention in this self-aggrandizing account is that his introduction of copyright to early Meiji Japan did not proceed without a hitch. He actually translated “copyright” into Japanese twice, first as zōhan no menkyo (license for possessing the printing blocks) around 1868, and then as hanken in 1873, to convince his contemporaries to respect this new doctrine. He also failed to mention that his enthusiastic promotion of copyright was driven not entirely by certain noble Enlightenment ideals, but by his struggle to protect his livelihood against unauthorized reprinting at the time. The period between Fukuzawa’s two translations of “copyright” coincided with the peak of his publishing business, as well as the most active period of his legal actions against unauthorized reprints. His translations and practices of copyright must thus be understood in conjunction with his economic life, especially his “business of Enlightenment.”

Fukuzawa started his “business of Enlightenment” on the eve of the Meiji Restoration. Born into a low-ranking samurai family, he was first a student of traditional Confucian learning and then a devotee of Dutch studies (rangaku), a body of Western knowledge, especially technology and medicine, developed in early modern Japan via its contact with the Dutch. Although his command of Dutch studies earned him a position as the official Dutch teacher of his home domain, he quickly moved on to study English, after discovering that the international language of the time was English rather than Dutch. To improve his English, he served voluntarily in the Tokugawa government...