Article Xujun Eberlein on "Second in Command* and China's officialdom novels.

The Rules of the Game: China's booming 
bureaucracy lit 
is part exposé -- 
and part how-to guide...

The first of Huang's three planned volumes was published in May 2011 and sold 100,000 copies in its initial month on the market. By October, a month after the second book was published, the two volumes together had sold 630,000 copies in print. Their actual readership is likely many times higher -- the books, like many bestsellers in China, are widely available online, legally and otherwise...