Lifestyle and fashion magazines have been the fastest growing segment of the mainland magazine industry in recent years, with the local Trends stable leading the way. This photo shows the youthful and vibrant editorial team of Trends Health. (Jimmy Lin)

With the restrictive environment on the mainland being suddenly relaxed, the publishing industry is now in a period of vigorous growth. Magazines and periodicals in particular have had a prosperous few years of late. Currently the mainland is home to over 9,000 different titles, over 100 of which are licensed editions of foreign magazines. Stand at a magazine stand or newsagent in any city across the country, and you can see hundreds of magazines sprawling across the shelves like a flood. Famous international titles like Elle, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, and Walker take pride of place, some of them sticking faithfully to their origins, others going under a local title. With good titles and bad titles alike jumbled together, the displays end up becoming much of a muchness.

With foreign name-brand magazines leading the charge, Taiwanese publishers are making their way in alongside them. Even the sudden change of fortunes of Kao Hsin-chiang's Jingcui Weekly, in print just two years ago, then suddenly off the presses, has not slowed down the march of the magazine industry in the least. Nong Nong Group's MomBaby took up the lead in the area of parenting magazines, while Commonwealth Publishing's Shanghai-published Dongfang Qiyejia (aka Global Views) is trying to secure a place in the rapidly growing financial magazine arena. So what is the big picture of the mainland periodicals industry? How does it look to Taiwanese magazine publishers? Let's take a look at how a few of them have done it.

One would imagine, given Beijing's strict grasp on media and the dissemination of information, that the order in which they would open up the various content sources would be books, magazines, newspapers, then television, given the growing informational value of each. But the reality is different. Under commercial pressure, the order has actually ended up reversed, to hold with the circulation and customer base for each-the higher the circulation, the better it is for business.

Books from Taiwan have no trouble breaking into the mainland market, as they don't need to carry the mark of their Taiwanese publishers-already Taiwanese authors like Liu Yung, Jimmy, and Wang Wen-hua have been able to enjoy fashionability and best-seller status on the mainland. The magazine market, though, is different; publishers must pay attention to the state of the market and the sales of the big name titles, and foreign companies have to walk a legal tightrope while still trying to safeguard the reputation of their magazines. Therefore, magazine publishers on the mainland have been much more aggressive than their book publishing counterparts, and since 2000 they have been flooding the market with titles, trying to stack the deck in their favor.