Publishing Group Phenomenon

When New China was founded, our country set up the highly concentrated and unified socialist publishing industry through administrative means, which formed the government's direct administractive management mode on it and solely depended on national appropriation. At that time, this system was really advantageous to the centralized management in policy propaganda, guaranteeing the national governmental order unimpeded. However, this also made an administrative monopoly on China's publishing system that has much influence until now.The administrative monopoly media mechanism and structure remained until 1980s, and the shortages of the original publication structure exposed day by day. With the transformation of our state economic system, the change of media concept as well as its requirement changes, the problem of the publishing houses in small size and large numbers, and of the same structure became quite serious, the market of publishing materials appeared in quite large number and much too loose status, and publishing resources could not be well integrated resulting in lagging in scale efficiency. On the other hand, with China's entrance into WTO, foreign media groups continuously joined in our publishing market, which further threatened our publishing enterprises. How to compete with the foreign publishing lords has become an quite practical problem that we should solve urgently. Following the huge domestic pressure and the serious foreign threatening, the publishing industry reform is so necessary that demands the publishing group be established immediately.In 1990s the steps of market economy being speeden up, the reform of economic system in large enterprise group, promulgation of ((company law)) as well as policy tendency have laid necessary conditions for the reform of publishing and the founding of pubishing groups. As a result , the establishment of the first publishing group Shanghai New Century publishing group has made a tide in founding publishing groups all over the country., and fourteen groups have been set up in seven years. I can say the emerging of publishing groups do brings vitality and vigour for the development of publishing and play an active part in nurturing new market bodies, norming and promoting the market. Especially the reform on publishing groups starting in 2004 signsthe system of administrative structure enteprise management is gradually coming to an end. And this important measure will surely promote the publishing to health and properity, however while the construction of publishing groups are going further on, and the reform speeding, we've found that the present developing status of publishing groups still has a gap with the goal that our state publishing bureau predetermined.The origin of problem still lies in itself. The system reform on publishing groups is still in its preliminary stage, and there still exist many problems in the process of publishing groups' being carried on, such as : the thought of publishing managing staff stagnate, management in strips and pieces, serious local protection, unreasonable industrial structure, lack of unified management on publishing process and so on, which have already hindered the publishing group from developing larger and stronger and influenced their development, thus, what we must do right away is to find way out for the problem, which is the compulsory duty for everyone in publishing industry. How to develop publishing groups and how is the group going on in the future are the difficulties we have to think over."The road is endless, and we will try our best." With such purpose, through collecting a great deal of data and on-the-spot investigations, I observed and probed the reasons of publishing groups and its present status, meanwhile I carry on preliminary strategic research on the developing trend of the publishing group.This article focuses on the background and initial reason of our state publishing group in the first chapter, and the second chapter puts forword a strategic plan for the establishment of publishing groups, stating simply the development and types of the group. The third chapter depicts the influence of the group upon our state publishing industry, combined with some examples. The forth one carefully analyses the sharp problems existing in the publishing group development, and also makes out strategies to the problems. And lastly the paper makes an analysis and predication on the publishing group and the development of publishing industry in an eye of strategy.