The Cultural Production Of Multinational Publishing In China

International Conglomerates swept European and American publishing houses by means of acquisition while things are different for multinational publishing houses’business in China. Since late 1970s, Pearson PLC has started its business in China with Pearson education products including English learning publications, professional publications for all ages, and educating and training services. The core of Pearson has transferred from "education publishing" to "education". China’s policy of reform and opening, the transformation of market economy, and the production of multinational publication construct a kind of modernity for both China and its people. English education has been endowed with the meaning of an order of globalization. The popularity of the New Concept English in the 1980s has offered a possibility of China’s ordinary people to communicate with the western world. The boom of the copy edition books of IT and Economy Theories in the 1990s has expressed the imagination of synchronization with the western. The personalised English Training is the downward flow of middle class elite identity under consumption logic.The power of the global and the local negotiate and meditate in the political, economic and cultural levels. Pearson and the other multinational publishers are seeking the opportunities to expand business under China’s cultural defense. The JEFC Project was dominated by PEP to ensure that the publication is adapt to China’s ideology, while Longman’s New Concept English disintegrated the social depressing in ways of self-deprecation and irony. However, this kind of irony could not give those young Chinese who grew up in the 1990s enough strength to resist and fight back the sense of personal failure in accordance with the discourse of China’s "the rise of the great power" in the early 21st century. The opposite results of Pearson’s standardized transformation of education training institutions in Beijing Shanghai have showed some kind of failure of the globalization strength in terms of the complexity of local circumstances.With China’s joining the world’s order, the competitive society under market economic reform and the trend of modernity has brought both the freedom of fluidity and the pressure of time. As a result, anxiety and a sense of pressing are sweeping individuals. Pearson substitutes "education investment" for "education" and takes education consumption as a solution to individual’s anxiety. Individuals are placed in the ubiquity of economics discourses and descriptions constructed by culture, and become "economic people" who are always learning and who will never stop. The publishers and who involved in publishing activities such as scholars and teachers are becoming more and more close-rated in economic interests. The role of employees in publishing houses is changed from the gatekeeper or the guard of culture to the spokesperson. The dominators in the multinational publishing house or an international conglomerate are not the cultural elites who care about the quality of publications but the business elites who have full use of management experience.