You are a publisher in Taiwan, yet your perspective appears to extend beyond the confines of Taiwan's publishing culture to the larger context of Chinese publishing culture overall. How did you come to a perspective that embraces the entire scope of Chinese publishing, including the overseas Chinese market?

Though I am from Taiwan, I was exposed to traditional Chinese culture at a young age. The Taiwanese educational curriculum has always included traditional Chinese culture. Whereas the mainland broke with the traditional culture during the Cultural Revolution 34 years ago, it has been faithfully passed on by the Taiwanese. You might say I am one of the heirs to that tradition.

Martial law was lifted in Taiwan in 1988. During the years that followed we saw the rise of movements for Taiwanese independence and for localization, that is, the emphasis of Taiwanese culture and a Taiwan-centered ideology. Of course these movements are politically significant, but in the cultural sphere they risk producing a negative effect by narrowing our perspective from the totality of Chinese culture to Taiwanese culture alone. This has already had a tremendous impact on publishing in Taiwan. Ten years ago there were plenty of books published about traditional Chinese culture. But the localization movement has caused both our culture and our publishers to focus exclusively on Taiwan. Now most books are just about Taiwan, and the publishing market itself has become limited to this one island. This is one of the most problematic drawbacks of the Taiwanese publishing industry today.

Meanwhile, the economic growth of mainland China has raised its status in the world and has expanded the use of simplified Chinese characters, particularly in Southeast Asia. In other words, Chinese-language publishing outside of Taiwan is making great strides but the Taiwanese publishing industry is increasingly isolated as it allows itself to be left behind. Over the last decade, the Chinese publishing world outside of Taiwan has been transformed.

At the same time, as the Taiwanese declare that they must place a greater emphasis on Taiwan, more and more mainland intellectuals are visiting Taiwan, and communication among intellectuals on both sides of the Taiwan Strait has begun to flourish. Artists and scholars from Taiwan are also visiting the mainland and engaging in all kinds of cultural exchanges. These exchanges have helped acquaint publishers on both sides with one another's thinking about publishing, culture and business. Among ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, too, there has been a growing recognition of the importance of Chinese-language publishing, as well as growing demands placed on mainland Chinese publishers. The narrowed focus of Taiwanese publishers on Taiwan stands in contradiction to this trend. It's not a good approach to take at a time when the demand for books written in simplified Chinese characters is only growing.

There are two forms of written Chinese prevalent today, simplified and traditional. Doesn't this pose a problem for the transmission of traditional Chinese culture, as well as the interaction of Taiwan with mainland China and overseas Chinese communities?

Of course, it's an important problem. Taiwan and Hong Kong are the only places where the traditional writing system is used. In Malaysia, Singapore and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, writers of Chinese and Chinese-language schools use the simplified system.

In North America the situation is a bit different because until recently most of the ethnic Chinese there emigrated from Taiwan or Hong Kong, so they used the traditional character set. But in recent years more and more people have emigrated to North America from the mainland, and they use the simplified system. So in North America too, the number of people who read books and newspapers in simplified rather than traditional Chinese is gradually increasing. The ethnic mix of the overseas population is itself changing, so what Taiwanese publishers need to do is pay attention to the simplified Chinese market as well.

Last year, I spoke on various occasions to my fellow Taiwanese publishers. I told them that if the Taiwan publishing industry wishes to grow, we must reevaluate our policies. Instead of using traditional characters exclusively as in the past, we must give equal priority to both traditional and simplified characters. Otherwise we will become utterly isolated from the Chinese communities of Southeast Asia and North America.

But you can't expect any reciprocation on the mainland, can you? Mainlanders are not about to start using traditional characters, one would think.

No, I don't think we can expect to expand the use of traditional text on the mainland.

Isn't it difficult for people who use simplified text to read the ancient classics or books published over fifty years ago?

Certainly it would be difficult. But all of the Chinese classics have been transcribed into simplified text.

Currently I am trying to popularize "one Chinese language, two characters" (一中兩字) as a slogan in the Taiwanese publishing industry -- in other words, to encourage the use of both traditional and simplified characters. Taiwan publishers are technically capable of printing books in simplified Chinese, and some have started to publish with both character sets. Books in traditional Chinese are for the Taiwan and Hong Kong markets, and those in simplified Chinese are for the overseas Chinese markets in North America and Southeast Asia -- Singapore, Malaysia and so on.

But when you convert between simplified and traditional Chinese, it's not just a matter of switching character sets, is it? There are also considerable differences in vocabulary and expression between Taiwan and the mainland. How do you deal with those differences if you publish in both character sets?

It's true that a particular concept will be expressed different ways in mainland China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan. The word "digital," for example, is 数码 (shuma) in mainland China and Hong Kong, and 数位 (shuwei) in Taiwan. But the differences are not so great as to make the variations incomprehensible to us. In that respect, the interchange of text does not pose such a big problem.

You seem to envision the possibility of creating a new publishing culture that is independent of politics. But is it possible to create such a culture in the midst of the political situation that exists between Taiwan and the mainland?

Ultimately, I think it is possible. But based on our past experiences, we know that political pressure may very likely be brought to bear in the course of that process. Nonetheless, democracy has taken root in Taiwan to some extent, and within this democratic environment it should be possible to expand our cultural scope through discussions and exchanges even if political pressure is applied. That would certainly be difficult without such an environment in place. But there is now a democratic community in Taiwan, so I believe we can pursue our cultural movement whether there is political pressure or not.

One more thing to remember is that Taiwan may be a small island, but it has a history of diverse cultures coexisting on it. First there was the culture of the indigenous people, the so-called mountain tribes. Second, there were the Chinese who moved to Taiwan from the mainland in the past. And third, there were the Chinese who arrived with the Kuomintang when the Communists took over the mainland in 1949. Taiwan is thus a multicultural society in which these three groups, each with a different culture and way of thinking, have somehow coexisted. Thanks to this background I believe there is every reason to think that we can develop a multicultural publishing environment as well.

You pointed out that among overseas Chinese there are different communities, some from Taiwan, others from the mainland, each using a different writing system. It seems there would be many complex issues to deal with in attempting to create a unified culture that includes all these groups.

When I say "multicultural" I do not mean something that is uniform or monolithic, but rather something based on coexistence. It certainly allows for the existence of differences.

I see. We have also been talking about the expansion of Chinese culture in East Asia. How do you view the position of Korea and Japan in relation to this vast Chinese culture?

Well, the language differences certainly form barriers between us. But historically, there has been a long tradition in Taiwan of translating Japanese works. These days, manga in particular are being translated and published in high volume. The largest number of translations published in Taiwan is from English. Next would be mainland books converted from simplified to traditional text. Translations from Japanese rank third. And very recently, translations from Korean have moved into fourth place.

Even though they rank third, there is a serious problem with the content of the translations from Japanese. Most of them are bestseller novels or mysteries; there are very few translations of works of philosophy, social science or the humanities that shed light on how Japanese people think. That is a real shame. I don't think it is at all difficult to heighten the visibility of Taiwanese culture among the Chinese communities of Southeast Asia or on the mainland, but Japan and Korea pose a real challenge. In the larger picture, how are we to increase our familiarity with one another's cultures in East Asia? Can we do it through contemporary media such as magazines, books and the Internet? That is a task for those of us at this conference, I believe.

It's quite rare for publishers and editors from various parts of East Asia to actually gather and talk in one place as they're doing at this conference. Do you yourself have any plans or ideas for collaborative publishing projects or magazine tie-ups with publishers in different regions of East Asia?

Let me talk about a project that I think would be very easy to launch right now. There are several journals published by the participants in this conference: Reading (Dushu) by SDX Joint Publishing in China, Reflexion (Si Xiang) by my company, Linking Publishing, in Taiwan, Creation and Criticism (Changjak-kwa-Bipyong) by Changbi Publishers in Korea, and Thought (Shiso) by Iwanami Shoten in Japan. Why don't we translate and print one another's articles in these magazines? I think that would be a wonderful idea.

The EAPC Website is wonderful too, but what I think is most valuable -- more than book recommendations, for example -- is the opportunity it provides through dialogues between publishers to learn about the state of publishing in our respective markets as well as what our fellow publishers in other regions are thinking. In a word, it is an online version of our meetings at conferences like this one.

That is certainly what we are trying to provide through this site. Our objective is to create an online network of people and books. In closing, I'd like to ask about Reflexion, the quarterly journal your company, Linking Publishing, just recently launched [in March 2006]. Is your target audience for this magazine Taiwanese readers only, or do you publish it with the overseas Chinese communities in mind as well?

Right now our market is basically in Taiwan and Hong Kong, but in the future we intend to expand to the Chinese-language markets in Southeast Asia and North America. As far as the mainland is concerned, we don't have high hopes of the magazine's acceptance because it criticizes the current situation there. However, our authors are from everywhere, including mainland China.