While western countries groan about their massive trade deficit with China, Beijing is fretting over its burgeoning 'cultural deficit' with the western world.
It appears in all walks of cultural life, but is perhaps most sharply seen in the realm of publishing. Every year, tens of thousands of foreign books are translated into Chinese and are gobbled up by Chinese consumers. But conversely, only a handful of Chinese titles are translated for foreign consumption.
It's a trend that officials are eager to address. The publishing industry is booming on the mainland, with more than 7 billion books sold each year, producing 44 billion yuan in revenue. And, as the economy continues to surge, there is huge scope for growth. According to Xin Guangwei in his book, Publishing in China, the average Chinese spends about US$4 a year on books, compared to the average American's US$90.
More than 100,000 new titles are published on the mainland each year, a tenfold increase in the past decade. But aside from textbooks, the vast majority is foreign imports.
While the government decries this, it is, of course, part of the problem. Independent thinking and writing have not exactly been cultivated in modern China, with censorship and persecution often part of a writer's life. Additionally, would-be authors have traditionally been constrained by an educational and cultural background that tends to stifle creativity and encourage conformity.
As a developing economy, novelists here also struggle to make their mark in a society that still focuses very much on money and careers. The type of books that dominate the market are in the areas of education, business and self-help, with fiction only accounting for less than 3 per cent of the titles on offer.
Zhao Jin, a 23-year-old bank clerk from Hunan , spends much of her free time among the throngs of browsers in Beijing's book cities, as the megastores are known. She churns through management 'how-to' manuals by the dozen, and buys numerous books on learning to speak English and Japanese, but says that she has only read a handful of novels in her adult life.