Perhaps a poor choice of headlines from the Financial Times on this book publishing story. “China to Loosen Control of Book Publishing,” at least to me, suggests that the State might start allowing in foreign investors.

Bad assumption on my part. Looks like a restructuring for business reasons, the usual pattern whereby a domestic monolith is transformed into a leaner, financially stable entity that can go out and compete internationally as well as dominate at home.

At least I think that’s the idea.

China’s largest publishing house intends to transform itself from a propaganda vehicle into a global player as it spearheads Beijing’s plans to restructure the industry while keeping it under state control.

Nie Zhenning, president of the China Publishing Group, told the Financial Times that he hoped Beijing would regroup the publishing industry into two state-owned conglomerates. After an initial public offering, Mr Nie’s company would then seek to acquire players at the provincial level.

Keeping all this under State control means no meaningful new opportunities for foreign companies. Maybe in the future, if the restructured entities want to do a great deal more business overseas, they will have to make some concessions on the China market. Wouldn’t hold my breath on that in the short term, though.

Stanley Lubman’s latest China law article on judicial reform is as usual a must-read for the China law set, not to mention business types who need to be aware of legal trends here. The article covers not only specific influences on judicial activity (e.g. when a Party official influences a particular case because of politics or financial interest), but also broader influences on the policy of judicial reform itself. How the Party wants to use the judiciary towards specific policy ends, such as mediating disputes over property and environmental degradation, is a very interesting discussion.

Of even more interest to me is the influence of public opinion on the judicial process, and here I would bring in the entire law enforcement infrastructure, which would include the police (PSB) and prosecutors (PP).

New pressures on the courts originate from the media, from protests, and from petitions, of which almost four million reached the courts in 2005. Activist lawyers, especially when their lawsuits generate unwelcome publicity, add to the pressures.

The Party-state wants the courts to act as safety valves, both to bring grievances to the attention of officials as well as to obtain remedies for the violation of rights. The courts respond to concern for social stability, but as government agencies they also contribute to strengthening the overall capability of the Party-state to expand its abilities to resolve grievances and deal with abuses, all within Party oversight.

So the Party has policy goals, the public has grievances, and the judges are supposed to fix the unpleasantness to ensure a Harmonious Society. This is a tall order. To make matters worse, a lot of the public pressure these days involves areas like criminal law, where you have specific incidents that become infamous via online popularization.

I have talked about several of the better-known cases on this blog in the past. Many of them involve suspected police abuse, protection of local officials who are accused of things like rape, and personal injury cases where compensation has been lacking for one reason or another.

What worries me about this phenomenon is that the Net allows for mob mentality. When “justice” is served, everyone is happy (not that I condone the process). But when the public gets the facts wrong (easy to do when all you have is rumor and speculation), the police and prosecutors can be treated quite badly through no fault of their own. And worst of all, judges feel a great deal of pressure to act towards a specific outcome notwithstanding the merits of that particular case.

Dangerous stuff. I hope to have more time in the future to write about this topic.

Pandoran Concerned About Protection of Indigenous Innovation

First off, this lawsuit threat is kind of a joke, so if you’re looking for a substantive post on China IPR issues, best to go elsewhere (just for today – please come back another time).

OK, now that all those serious-minded folk are gone, we can have some fun. Just for the record, though, here is the background on this issue:

An amateur Beijing writer alleges Avatar director James Cameron plagiarized his work and said he plans to file a lawsuit, seeking 1 billion yuan in compensation.

“Eighty percent of the plot and the key elements of the story are similar to my 1997 science fiction novel, Tale of the Blue Crows.

Zhou, said he spent more than seven years composing the 1.2-million-word novel, which recounts the epic journey of six astronauts to a distant planet, home to a race of blue skinned beings.

“I wrote in my novel that their space journey took them six years, but in Cameron’s movie, the journey takes them five years, nine months and 22 days,” said Zhou. “I was shocked when I first saw that. It is too close.”

If you’re already LOL, slow down. That was the real stuff. The manufactured laughs are still coming. Obviously that last bit about the length of time of the “space journey” (it can’t be a coincidence!) is a tip off that this guy’s perspective here is slightly skewed.

One last serious point. As a fiction writer and lover of the Sci-fi genre for well over 30 years, I am sympathetic. Every time you write something, it becomes yours in your mind, no matter how derivative it is. And with science fiction, a story about earthlings travelling to another planet to meet up with humanoids is hardly a new idea, even with the genetic manipulation/avatar tech in the movie, which is kind of cool. Not everyone can be an idea man like Dick or Sawyer.

Without further ado, The Daily Mash has a send up of this hapless would-be litigant. I’m just going to cut-and-paste excerpts, it’s hilarious with no comment needed.

Chinese novelist Zhou Shaomou has sensationally claimed that James Cameron’s Avatar has a plot.

Shaomou, whose name means ‘Michael Jackson lyric’ in Mandarin, is suing the director for £97m after stating that Avatar lifted several key story details from his novel Blue People Of The Allegory Mountains.

He said: “My reputation is in tatters now everybody knows I write stuff that could be turned into something like Avatar.

“I’m an absolute joke in the fantasy fiction community, which as you can imagine takes quite some doing.

“I spent seven years writing my 1.2 million word book, only for James Cameron to make a fortune out of it by trimming it to 18 hours, adding loads of brilliant explosions, marketing it really well, having an innate sense of populist tastes and… well… look, that’s not the point.

“Oh, and then there’s the 3D. Have you seen the 3D? Good lord.”

Shaomou claims he first noticed the similarities when the film passed the $1bn mark at the box office, adding: “I suddenly realised there was something very familiar about all that money.”

Entertainment law specialist, Nathan Muir, said: “Shamou doesn’t stand a chance. Any half-decent lawyer will be able to prove that the Avatar storyline is what happens when a maniac rolls around the New Age section of Waterstone’s covered in Blu Tac.”