To exiled Chinese poet and essayist Bei Ling (貝嶺), censorship and self-censorship are like a fatal disease. They destroy an author’s feelings, critical faculties and creative power, he said.
The remark came in the
wake of a decision by organizers of a symposium titled China and the World, which took place on Saturday and yesterday in Frankfurt, to meet Chinese participants’ demands and not invite him and Dai Qing (戴晴),
a journalist critical of the
China’s government.
The snub is “disgraceful” and tantamount to censorship, Bei said.
He traveled to Frankfurt anyway. Precisely censorship — the insidious and in part unconscious way it spreads — was to be his subject at the symposium, which aims to promote better understanding of China and its writers ahead of the Frankfurt Book Fair from Oct. 14 to Oct. 18.
Bei had plenty to say in Frankfurt about the lack of freedom of expression in China, and the official Chinese guests want to prevent him from doing so.
“There still isn’t a single non-government television station, radio station, newspaper or publishing house that is completely independent of the state,” read a statement he prepared for the symposium.
“During the past 20 years in China, a very subtle and extensive system of checks at various levels has been developed,” Bei wrote. “The responsible departments in the publishing houses scrutinize works once, twice, three times — sometimes as many as five or six times.”
After that, municipal and provincial press offices have to approve publication. If an author’s book fails just one examination, it cannot be printed. Publishing houses bringing out books that are “politically incorrect,” “banned” or “a threat to state security” are punished or even shut down.
“To get a book published, authors have to choose their words carefully and censor their topics themselves,” noted Bei, who was arrested in 2000 for “publishing illegally,” released with the help of the US and expelled from China.
“Self-censorship by Chinese authors, journalists and editors kills the innocence of their souls and harms their creativity,” Bei said, adding that he too had had a pair of scissors in his mind when he worked in China.
“Every author in China knows exactly what he’s permitted to write and what he’s not permitted to write,” he said, including those authors whose books will be displayed at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s largest. China is the guest of honor this year.
“Self-censorship is the prerequisite for writers’ survival and success, particularly novelists,’” Bei remarked. Authors, journalists and editors who go along with the system are “consciously or unconsciously being accomplices” to the state supervision, he said.
Bei knows from personal experience that an author, once blacklisted, can never publish again in China. Today he lives in Boston and publishes Tendency (傾向), a Chinese exile literary journal, in Taiwan.
Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China will practically have dueling stands at the book fair. Taiwan’s stand will be carefully separated from China’s despite Chinese leaders’ insistence that the country is a part of China.
The Taiwanese section of the fair will display books not published in China. There will be hundreds of them by people including Gao Xingjian (高行健), the only writer in Chinese to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (2000) and now a French citizen. And Wang Lixiong (王力雄), who with his wife, Woeser, a Tibetan writer critical of the Chinese government, lives in Beijing under the watchful eye of the state security apparatus.
In Taiwan’s politics the party chair is an extremely influential position. Typically this person is the presumed presidential candidate or serving president. In the last presidential election, two of the three candidates were also leaders of their party. Only one party chair race had been planned for this year, but with the Jan. 1 resignation by the currently indicted Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) two parties are now in play. If a challenger to acting Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) appears we will examine that race in more depth. Currently their election is set for Feb. 15. EXTREMELY
China’s military launched a record number of warplane incursions around Taiwan last year as it builds its ability to launch full-scale invasion, something a former chief of Taiwan’s armed forces said Beijing could be capable of within a decade. Analysts said China’s relentless harassment had taken a toll on Taiwan’s resources, but had failed to convince them to capitulate, largely because the threat of invasion was still an empty one, for now. Xi Jinping’s (習近平) determination to annex Taiwan under what the president terms “reunification” is no secret. He has publicly and stridently promised to bring it under Communist party (CCP) control,
Jan. 20 to Jan. 26 Taipei was in a jubilant, patriotic mood on the morning of Jan. 25, 1954. Flags hung outside shops and residences, people chanted anti-communist slogans and rousing music blared from loudspeakers. The occasion was the arrival of about 14,000 Chinese prisoners from the Korean War, who had elected to head to Taiwan instead of being repatriated to China. The majority landed in Keelung over three days and were paraded through the capital to great fanfare. Air Force planes dropped colorful flyers, one of which read, “You’re back, you’re finally back. You finally overcame the evil communist bandits and
Last week saw the appearance of another odious screed full of lies from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian (肖千), in the Financial Review, a major Australian paper. Xiao’s piece was presented without challenge or caveat. His “Seven truths on why Taiwan always will be China’s” presented a “greatest hits” of the litany of PRC falsehoods. This includes: Taiwan’s indigenous peoples were descended from the people of China 30,000 years ago; a “Chinese” imperial government administrated Taiwan in the 14th century; Koxinga, also known as Cheng Cheng-kung (鄭成功), “recovered” Taiwan for China; the Qing owned
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