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During the last decade, the Chinese popular literary journal Gushihui (Story session) has consolidated its reputation as the best-selling, most profitable, most adaptable, and most politically correct cultural journal published in the People's Republic of China. A long array of government prizes and honours has been awarded to this tiny (32mo, which is less than A5) and seemingly trivial journal, which most educated people sniff at, and which no literary critic considers 'literary'. Gushihui's secret appears to lie in its low price and its appeal to great numbers of ordinary, relatively uneducated readers, whose cultural consumption has not been entirely taken over by TV and film.1 But with more than fifty almost identical competitors,2 there must be something else to its success.
Gushihui was established in the early 1960s but stopped publication during the Cultural Revolution. It was restarted in 1974 under the title Geming gushihui (Revolutionary story session), and revived under the original title in 1979. Originally a bimonthly or a monthly, it was turned into a semimonthly in 2004. All along it has remained a simple low-tech publication with a small amount of advertisements. As late as 2002 it was still entirely in black-andwhite print except for the cover, but since then some more colour has been added.3 The number of pages has stabilised at 96 since a number of years; the same applies for the retail price, 2:50 RMB (yuan) per issue.
Short stories and humour, in 3 million copies or more
The typical contents of Gushihui consist of 20-25 short or very short stories and a few jokes. The shortest stories are only less than a page long, the longest about 16 pages. Most stories are from two to four pages long. They are sorted into columns that recur in most issues during a number of years, thus making it easy for the...