The New China Cover Girl

　　Fresh look, modern attitude invigorates magazine market

　　By Mark Godfrey

　　News vending couple Feng Cheng and wife Gong decorate their stand with pretty faces. The posters go up after a delivery cart drops a stack of newly minted magazines at their door.

　　A wave of glossy color washed over China's metropolitan news stalls since China eked the door to foreign publishers two years ago. Inky news dailies are no longer the mainstays - best sellers at this newsstand near Beijing's World Trade Centre subway station are fat glossy magazines aimed at China's prospering masses.

　　Among the wholesome, white-toothed smiles on the covers, however, a new type of girl has been emerging. She doesn't smile. She's sexy. And she knows it. International lad's magazine FHM is a new arrival to these shelves, but the package-wrapped glossy sells well, according to Feng.

　　A faded poster for a summer FHM got a lot racier with a cover featuring Hong Kong actress Christy Yung in a see-through negligee. Glued underneath was the covergirl for the previous issue, Britney Spears, dressed in clingy rubber. FHM was dipping its toe in the water back then, looking for girls to appeal to Chinese readers. A recent issue with TV and film actress Fan Bingbing on the cover has sold better than either the Christy Yung or Britney editions, according to Feng Cheng. Fan usually wears white and sports an angelic smile in the posters she sells to fans. But the FHM Fan Bingbing is a made-up, seductive creature, stretching skywards in a short black designer dress.

　　Covergirls like Fan hang out at plush places like the Red Moon bar in Beijing's Grand Hyatt hotel, a magnet for Hong Kong celebrities and business people. At a table there's Yuan Li, a graduate of the hitherto conservative Beijing Film Institute, who showed a lot of cleavage in her foray onto the cover of the Chinese edition of the UK celebrity bible Hello! The pretty actress with tightly cropped hair came to Beijing from the provincial city of Hangzhou in eastern China. "I have received a lot of offers to do cover shots. That's just one of the offers I took up," she says. "It was right for me, right for who I want to be seen as." China is going through a "celebrity revolution" right now, says Yuan Li. Faces sell magazines, not news.