Published: June 15, 2012 - Sunday Book Review - New York Times
Two months ago at the London Book Fair, where China was this year’s “guest of honor,” Ma Jian, the exiled author of the Tiananmen-era novel “Beijing Coma,” inked a red X across his face in an emotional protest against Chinese censorship. It may be a sign of the times that while drawing attention from the Western press, the move went almost unnoticed by other Chinese authors present, many of whom still live in China and find ways to circumvent the authorities.
Illustration right by Dan Cassaro
Exactly how Chinese writers navigate this complex political landscape can be seen in a single tweet inspired by a speech by Ma at Oslo’s House of Literature during a special “Chinese week” conference last November. In his talk, Ma described how “tanks crushed Chinese people’s bodies and crushed their morality to death” on June 4, 1989. But Murong Xuecun, China’s latest literary bad boy, made the line censor-friendly by changing “tanks” to “tractors.” On the Chinese version of Twitter, a politically neutral word like “tractors” will probably be ignored by censors for several hours, while “tanks” would be deleted immediately.
This is the confusing world of the People’s Republic 2.0, with its sliding scale of dissidence, a gray zone where authors are constrained but can flout the official rules without their work necessarily being banned. They carefully calibrate what can be communicated in English but not in Chinese; in Hong Kong but not in Beijing; online but not in print; via allegory but not direct exposition. The tank-to-tractor substitution — as well as related techniques, like taking advantage of Chinese’s rich store of homophones to substitute a sound-alike anodyne term for a politically charged one — illustrates how the ever-present censorship machine turns Chinese writers into verbal acrobats. Put more bluntly, it forces them to lie to get their voices heard.
No comments:
Post a Comment