Beijing ? When Ericsson executive Xu Hui wanted to brush up her performance at work, she headed straight for the expert Dale Carnegie.

Chinese hunting for secrets to success are snapping up books by Carnegie and other arch-capitalist American business gurus. Communist revolutionaries like Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping still get bookstore shelf space, but the choicest spots are filled with memoirs and biographies of American CEOs and Hong Kong tycoons.

Chinese read success books in a Beijing bookstore. These days, Chinese hunting for secrets to success are snapping up the works of arch-capitalist American business gurus.

Even tiny subway kiosks carry translations of such popular recipes for success as Robert Kiyosaki’s financial primer “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” and Spencer Johnson’s “Who Moved My Cheese?”

Chinese authors are turning out their own versions. One of the more obvious is a tongue-in-cheek knockoff, “Can I Move Your Cheese?” by journalist Chen Tong. Like Johnson’s original, it advises a proactive approach to overcoming challenges and fears.

One of the biggest sellers, at more than 1 million copies, is “Harvard Girl,” written by the parents of teen-ager Liu Yiting. It details how their daughter, a child from the northern coal mining city of Taiyuan, got into Harvard.

“In the bookstores, it’s ‘Harvard this,’ ‘Harvard that,’ ‘Carnegie this,’ ‘Carnegie that’!” said Li Xiguang, a professor at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. “People are so hungry to be successful, they seem to think they can get an education in one book.”

But the popularity of books about success hasn’t meant a windfall for foreign authors pirated editions account for a large share of the volumes available.

David Chao, who represents Dale Carnegie Training in Beijing, estimates that only 5 percent of the dozens of Dale Carnegie titles sold in China are authorized versions. Chao set up Carnegie’s official training office last September in Beijing, believing that the chance to profit outweighed the perils of helping pirate rivals.

“The market is tremendous,” Chao said. “There is a burning desire among Chinese to be successful.”

Most of his 150 Chinese graduates are young, upwardly mobile executives or professionals at high-tech or foreign companies.

Chinese bookstores are stocked with memoirs by legendary capitalists such as Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates and retired General Electric Co. chief executive Jack Welch.

Their publishers are state-owned, suggesting the communist government at least tacitly endorses the Chinese public’s hunger for practical guidelines for living.