The Entrepreneurial Chief-Editor and the Success of Garden of Flowers

Aili Mu (Iowa State University) [BIO]

Email: ailimu@iastate.edu

 

ABSTRACT:

This paper investigates the role of the chief editor Yang Xiaomin in the exceptional success of Garden of Flowers. Garden of Flowers is the publisher of Selected Short-shorts, a journal that captures half of contemporary China’s market for literary journals. Studying Yang as a combined product of Chinese cultural tradition, socialist ideology, and market economy, this paper hopes to underscores contemporary China’s specific conditions of knowledge/cultural production and the unique ways that such agents as Yang confront and construct the literary, commercial, and ethical landscape. This paper starts by presenting how Yang’s belief systems, professional standards, business models, and associations, as well as his editorial practices, help establish the publisher’s social, institutional, and entrepreneurial profile. With specific examples on survival strategies and measures to sustain growth, this paper argues for Yang’s indispensable role as a buffer that ensures the delicate balance between the state bureaucratic interests and the journal’s literary and entrepreneurial ventures, without which neither could make headways in China today. Through the example of Yang – especially how he manage to negotiate market mechanisms and state control in order to translate short-shorts’ aesthetic potential into commercial success and positive social values – this paper hopes to show the necessity and the possibility of integrating aesthetic values with market orientations, to the advantages of both literature and humanities education.