Online rebellion forces China censors to back down on banned history, social issue books
BEIJING -- A wave of online outrage has forced Chinese censors into an unprecedented decision to allow eight banned books to remain on the shelves.
The books, which touch on long-taboo historical and social issues, remained on sale yesterday, even in official bookstores despite an official ban, with penalties —- including fines —- imposed on the publishing houses, which have been told not to print more copies...
Demand has been high. At the respected All Sages bookshop in Beijing, Cang Sang, by Xiao Jian, which tells the tale of a man from the 1911 fall of the last emperor to the Great Leap Forward in 1958, sold out this week.
Publication on the internet of a second letter by the renowned author, Zhang Yihe, will only add to the authorities’ woes.
Officials at the General Administration of Press and Publication —- effectively China’s office of censorship —- were stunned when news of their unannounced ban provoked a furious response from bloggers. The censorship office and the way it introduced the ban secretly came in for criticism.
Zhang, who spent ten years in jail during the Cultural Revolution,...urged the National People’s Congress to look into the prohibition of Performers’ Pasts, an apparently innocuous book on the lives of Peking opera singers, along with the seven other publications.
This is the third of Zhang’s three books to have been banned. She won fame in 2004 for a memoir about her father who embraced Mao Zedong’s revolution only to be purged in the 1957 AntiRightist Campaign, along with about 500,000 rightists or liberals. Her father and four others are the only rightists never to have been rehabilitated by the ruling Communist Party.
Read entire article at Times (of London)
The books, which touch on long-taboo historical and social issues, remained on sale yesterday, even in official bookstores despite an official ban, with penalties —- including fines —- imposed on the publishing houses, which have been told not to print more copies...
Demand has been high. At the respected All Sages bookshop in Beijing, Cang Sang, by Xiao Jian, which tells the tale of a man from the 1911 fall of the last emperor to the Great Leap Forward in 1958, sold out this week.
Publication on the internet of a second letter by the renowned author, Zhang Yihe, will only add to the authorities’ woes.
Officials at the General Administration of Press and Publication —- effectively China’s office of censorship —- were stunned when news of their unannounced ban provoked a furious response from bloggers. The censorship office and the way it introduced the ban secretly came in for criticism.
Zhang, who spent ten years in jail during the Cultural Revolution,...urged the National People’s Congress to look into the prohibition of Performers’ Pasts, an apparently innocuous book on the lives of Peking opera singers, along with the seven other publications.
This is the third of Zhang’s three books to have been banned. She won fame in 2004 for a memoir about her father who embraced Mao Zedong’s revolution only to be purged in the 1957 AntiRightist Campaign, along with about 500,000 rightists or liberals. Her father and four others are the only rightists never to have been rehabilitated by the ruling Communist Party.