Lionel Shriver has directed another broadside at the publishing world, this time taking aim in The Spectator at a Penguin Random House directive that by 2025 its hiring and publishing output “reflect UK society”. Whether entirely serious or as an agente provocatrice, Shriver charged that this was political correctness inimical to the production of “good books”.

This may make for good copy, but Penguin Random House is a very large company in an industry that produces a staggering number of distinct products. Given that writing ability is presumably evenly distributed across the socio-economic and ethnic spectrum – why would it not be? – one would expect, statistically, the company’s output to reflect the wider society. If it diverges to any significant extent, then that itself is evidence of a problem – perhaps a social one, but almost certainly a business one: it will be leaving parts of its market underserved.

If different sectors of society are under-represented in published books, then this is evidence of some sort of a systemic problem, for which outreach is a possible solution.

It is easy to deride diversity as a warm and fuzzy social objective without objective substance, but without diversity the English literary world would not have Homer, Dostoevsky or García Marquez. The whole point of reading is, almost by definition, to learn or experience something new and different: how new, how different, are matters of taste, but diversity is integral to the exercise.

But diversity in publishing is more complex than a mere reflection of readers and authors divided up by category: diversity of viewpoint, for example, does not map cleanly on to diversity of origin, Kazuo Ishiguro and Michael Ondaatje being two cases in point. Nor does readership necessarily match either ethnic or social background of the author or the subject matter of the book.

More fundamentally, perhaps, literature has been a global exercise for centuries; and so, increasingly, is publishing. The idea of distinct British, American or Australian book markets is increasingly quaint. But the world of writing is, of course, much wider even than that. A Chinese author from China in translation adds just as much diversity – arguably more – than an emigré writing in English or a second-generation British-Chinese or Chinese-American writer. From my viewpoint in Hong Kong, writing from an ethnically Asian writer in the US or Britain is not necessarily terribly Asian at all: a Chinese-American novel, for example, often has more in common with mainstream American fiction than it does with Chinese fiction written in China in Chinese.

And for “Asia”, write “Africa”, “Latin America” or any other place. It is true that good writers can set their stories anywhere, but when Boris Akunin, say, writes a Russian thriller, the result is rather different than Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park or Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October. All are fine writers, but they are hardly interchangeable. And these examples are roughly apples and apples; the distinction is even starker in literary fiction.

Seen globally, therefore, the diversity issue looks rather different that it may from within any given society. Ethnic Indian and Chinese writers have no real problem being published in India or China, for example. There is, it is fair to say, no great shortage of ethnic Indian writing in English; it’s just that it circulates mostly in India.

English-language publishers have sourced few books from outside the main anglophone countries, relative, at least, to publishers in French, Spanish, and other languages. English-language publishers had had, in general, a far larger pool of writers to choose from. “Foreign” writers in French, for example, tend to come from pretty diverse places to begin with. But European bookstores have a far higher percentage of books in translation than the typical bookstore in one of the large English-speaking countries. Bestselling Korean, Japanese and Chinese writers tend to show up in French and German before English readers get a crack at them. One imagines, and hopes, that this will change.

Translations and overseas sourcing tend to pick off the the best books. The next-as-yet-untranslated novel in Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Russian or Swahili is likely to be better than the average English-language book. So, diversity – and an increased emphasis on translation – will tend to increase overall quality rather than, as Shriver argues, dilute it.

The ironic corollary is that a push for diversity will not necessarily open as many opportunities for “domestic” writers as they might hope, because publishers may well source more writers from overseas and in translation. There are, one can be pretty sure, more top-notch ethnically Indian or Chinese writers in India and China than in the US or Britain.

Publishing and literature are, like other things, becoming globalised. In literature, at any rate, this can thankfully lead to more good writing rather than increasing homogeneity.

• Peter Gordon is editor of the Asian Review of Books in Hong Kong