China and the West

Mitchell, Margaret. Gone with the wind in China.
Davis, Anita Price. The Margaret Mitchell encyclopedia. (Jefferson, North Carolina : McFarland & Co., 2013).
The country of China caused Margaret Mitchell some worry. She discovered 1948 an advertisement for a pirated copy of Gone with the Wind. The introduction to the illegal copy of the Chinese edition noted that she was "a perfect housekeeper". Furthermore, the introduction described Mitchell as "pure, benevolent, filial and obedient to her husband".
The exact numbers sold in China and Japan were difficult to determine because of the illegal sales and printings ; it seemed, that in both countries hundreds of copies had been sold.

Li, Jing. China's America : the Chinese View the United States, 1900-2000 [ID D36062].
The theoretical establishment of the right to read freely, does not mean that the Chinese could actually do so, if only for the simple reason that for the time being there was precious little for them to read, especially on a traditionally taboo subject such as America. In Dushu the first American work that drew notable attention was Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. In the Chinese context, the prominence accorded to Mitchell's particular novel was not so odd as it may appear to some people. Translated into Chinese soon after its original publication, Gone with the Wind had achieved great popularity in China prior to 1949. When the Chinese Communists came to power, they determined that Mitchell's epic novel was reactionary and poisonous, a "yellow boo" harmful to the public. After the onset of the Reform Age, Gone with the Wind reappeared in China. Apparently, the notoriety it achieved in the Mao Era had turned it into a forbidden fruit, which many Chinese, especially the young, eagerly picked and devoured, the book's decades-old shabby translation notwithstanding. This was such a notable cultural phenomenon that, in early 1981, Dushu decidedto organize a forum devoted to the subject. Participants in the discussion were sharply divied in their assessment of Mitchell's work. Regardless of whethter they liked it or hated it, they all viewed the subject in the tradition of Marxist literary realism. A critic fond of Michell's epic tale spoke of its "educational value". In his view, Mitchell truthfully presented life in the American South in the old days, including slavery, the plantation system, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction, making her work a great fictional recreation of "a revolutionary era in American history".
Those who diasapproved Mitchell faulted her for grossly distorting U.S. history. "As we all know", Huang Songkang wrote, "slavery is the most brutally explitive system in human history" ; yet, in Mitchell's novel, African American slaves seem to lead a leisurely, almost joyous, life. To make his point, Huang contrasted Gone with the Wind with Jubilee, a recent work of fiction by African American writer Margaret Walker, which tells the story of an irreconcilable relationship between a young black slave and her white father, a plantation master.
The intense interest in Gone with the Wind, both among general readers and among Chinese scholars, well illustrates the limitedness of Chinese knowledge on American culture at the time. The people were still in the process of working out some old issues dating back to the Mao Era, and Chinese intellectuals, hard as they tried to embrace the new age, still looked at the world through eyes that were accustomed to signposts such as Marxist economic determinism and the class analysis.