A review of the The Dark Road from The Guardian gives a brief introduction to Ma and his previous work:

Although best known as an exiled dissident defined by his head-on opposition to virtually every aspect of mainstream Chinese politics, Ma Jian is a writer of rare originality whose work effortlessly combines a sense of the avant garde with uncomfortable humour, underpinned at all times by rage at the social changes that have affected China over the past 30 years. The brilliance of his 2008 masterpiece, Beijing Coma, was already anticipated in Red Dust, his atmospheric travel memoir, which recounted the young intellectual’s spiritual and political escape from the capital to the west of China in the 1980s. Subsequent fiction such as The Noodle Maker and Stick Out Your Tongue developed a style that blended internal landscapes with flashes of magic realism and surreal comedy.

The Dark Road is an angrier, more openly confrontational novel than its predecessors. Set in the river towns and vast waste sites that line the banks of the Yangtze in Guangdong province, it tackles the grim issue of forced abortions and sterilisations with a prolonged and unflinching gaze.[...]

The Telegraph’s review explains how Ma was able to gather research on the sensitive topics dealt with in The Dark Road:

[...]When researching The Dark Road, Ma posed as an official reporter to witness the forced sterilisations and abortions carried out by the government, and as a vagrant, living among the fugitives of China’s one-child policy.

And yet one does not need to read a biography to determine the authenticity of Ma’s writing, which sings out through in this translation (by his wife, the talented Flora Drew). The Dark Road is a long, explicit account of the depredations endured by both a people and a mother forced to flee from her home merely because of a second pregnancy.[...]

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Post tags: book reviews, censorship, exiles, forced abortions, forced sterilization, freedom of expression, literature, ma jian, one-child policy, writers
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Nearly a quarter century has passed since you were forced into hiding by the Ayatollah’s fatwa. In the ensuing years, how would you assess the worldwide climate for censorship? Have things generally gotten better, or worse?

I’d say that, in general, they’ve gotten worse. But one of the things our report highlights is that people have more tools to resist censorship using new media. For instance, in China,  while there’s increased repression in the form of arbitrary arrests, artists held incommunicado and put under house arrest, and increasing hostility towards literature and free expression, there is at the same time a growing willingness of Chinese citizens to find ways to express themselves. In spite of all the repression, there’s been a  growth of independent, non-state publishers to print things that wouldn’t be approved by state houses, and people have shown the willingness to post things online even if they’re not to the liking of the state.

Is this a battle that China’s citizens will win?

I don’t want to be Pollyannish — it’s entirely possible that they’ll lose. China has been pretty effective over the years in silencing dissident voices — just consider the case of Liu Xiaobao and his wife, who resorted to shouting “not free” in court to remind people of her situation. The Chinese are good at repression and can be pretty ruthless about it.

But I feel that, in the end, China does want to have a more significant role in international affairs, it does want to be seen as a big player in the world, it wants to have authority, it wants to have respect, it wants to be treated as one of the great voices in the world today. They’re beginning to be aware that their behavior is damaging their reputation, though, and I think if you put sufficient pressure on authoritarian regimes they often see that it is in their own self-interest to ease up on repression.

This is not the first time Rushdie has weighed in on China: he has publicly advocated on behalf of political prisoner Liu Xiaobo, has co-authored a letter to Hu Jintao and foreign minister Yang Jiechi protesting travel restrictions on dissident artist Ai Weiwei, has opined that “art will win over tyrants” in reference to China, and has also labeled Mo Yan a “patsy” after the Chinese novelist took the Nobel prize in literature. Also see Rushdie’s recollection of the day in 1989 when he became aware of the Ayatollah’s call to end his life, via The New Yorker.

The Atlantic has also published an excerpt from author Murong Xuecun’s contribution to the PEN report, on “China’s ‘Crappy Freedom’”:

In the past decade or so, the condition of freedom of speech in China has improved remarkably. But if any credit is due the government, it’s due to its powerlessness.

[…] On April 22, 2011, a Chongqing netizen named Fang Hong passed a joke online: When Bo Xilai asked Wang Lijun to eat his shit, Wang Lijun asked the procurator to eat it, who then asked Li Zhuang to eat it. Li Zhuang said: whoever shit it should eat it.

Two days later, Fang Hong was arrested by the Chongqing police and was sentenced to one year of re-education through labor.

Bo Xilai has left Chongqing […]. But the “pile of shit” case has universal significance and symbolism. It’s like the moral of a typical Chinese fable: You have the freedom to take a shit, and you have the freedom to eat it. But you don’t have the freedom to casually comment on it.

Global Times reported last month that Fang, who was cleared of wrongdoing and released in April last year, recently lost a court bid for higher compensation than the nearly 57,000 yuan (about $9,000) he was initially offered. Other high-profile re-education through labor inmates have recently been denied compensation altogether, including Ren Jianyu, also in Chongqing, and “petitioning mother” Tang Hui.

Samuel Wade contributed to this post.

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Post tags: anti-censorship, Bo Xilai, censorship, Chongqing, freedom of expression, Murong Xuecun, novelists, re-education through labor, writers
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Li Ning (李凝) the Body Art Guerrilla Group, Made-in-J Town (凌雲焰肢體游擊隊), are among one of the most interesting groups. Recently, they released three action art performances from 2008 through Youtube. The year of the Beijing Olympics - 2008 – dissent voices in the country faced the harshest repression. The 11-year imprisonment of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, because of his Charter 08 initiative, is the most well-known example. These videos from 2008 give a glimpse into the resistance culture among young people in China.

[…] 2008 is the year of Beijing Olympic. In order to show the strength of the country, demolition had taken place in all major cities. Even though Jinan was not the hosting city, the scale of demolition and re-development had been huge. Li Ning and Body Art Guerrilla Group, Made-in-J Town, produced a short video showing the Olympic Torch relay in Jinan and the demolition. In the video, Li Ning performs the flesh and blood in the demolition scene, which creates a sharp contrast with the propaganda of the torch relay.

See Li Ning’s works (Warning: NSFW):

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Post tags: activists, Ai Weiwei, art, artists, contemporary artists, forced demolitions, freedom of expression, Shandong
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“The Statue of Liberty with Chinese Characteristics” by Crazy Crab of Hexie Farm for CDT:

Read more about Hexie Farm’s CDT series, including a Q&A with the anonymous cartoonist, and see all cartoons so far in the series.

[CDT owns the copyright for all cartoons in the Hexie Farm CDT series. Please do not reproduce without receiving prior permission from CDT.]

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Post tags: freedom of expression, hexie farm, Internet censorship
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The problem with labeling Mo Yan’s jumble of registers as “satire” is that much of it is hard to read as satire and at least some of it seems quite inadvertent. Mo Yan’s Sandalwood Death, for example, is set during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, well before the advent of socialist jargon, and yet characters in the story spout socialist jargon. A young woman refers to her lingdaozhe, or “leader”—a word no one used in 1900. Is this satire? Of what? I think it is more likely that Mo Yan was writing too quickly (which seems to me often the case), and allowed his own conceptual habits to seep out unnoticed. Anna Sun is right to suggest that Howard Goldblatt’s translations are “superior to the original in their aesthetic unity and sureness.”

But how much do unnoticed linguistic habits reflect conceptual approaches to the world—or even, as Sun suggests, shape them? Sun quotes George Orwell that “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” This is from Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” published in 1946, just a few years after the famous “Whorf hypothesis” advanced the notion that different languages lead to different world-views. Among Western cognitive scientists, Whorf has always been controversial. Hence it is interesting that Chinese communists (although there is no evidence that they borrowed anything from Whorf) have always had faith in the same principle. Since the 1950s, the Party’s Propaganda Department has disseminated lists of words for the media “to stress” and “to downplay” as political needs come and go,1 and the unchanging assumption has been that this word-engineering helps to “guide thought.” There is much evidence that it works, too. I was recently talking with a Chinese-language teacher whom I had not seen since 1989 in Beijing. Trying to recall our first meeting, she asked me, “Was that before or after the dongluan [turmoil]?” Teasing her, I asked, “What do you mean by dongluan? Student dongluan or government dongluan?” She replied reflexively: “Student dongluan, of course.” Then she peered at me for a moment, realized what I had meant, and said: “Oh, yes! Government dongluan. The massacre!” Then she went into a long apology to me: she herself had been a student protestor in 1989, had been in Tiananmen Square in the days before the massacre (but not during it); she was on the students’ side; she agreed with me. And yet the phrase “student turmoil” now rolled off her tongue as easily as “Wednesday.” How much conceptual baggage went along with it? How much does this kind of induced linguistic habit reinforce state power? And how much does this sort of thing affect Chinese writers? Laughlin and Sun raise a crucial issue.

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Post tags: freedom of expression, mo yan, perry link
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The letter, signed by 71 people and posted on the blog of Peking University law professor Zhang Qianfan, calls for the party to end its oversight of government personnel decisions, leave court decisions to judges and lawyers, and allow people to speak and assemble freely.

[…] “I don’t think society should simply wait passively for whatever comes up but we should express our ideas and try to build a social consensus,” Zhang, who helped draft the letter, said in a phone interview. “Now is a good time to do something new and if we miss such a chance then our social problems will become more serious.”

[…] “None of this is new and it’s not something that’s really against the Party’s will,” Zhang said. “They already expressed their will in the constitution or in the charter of the party itself.”

Zhang’s calculation that a gentle approach may be more productive—and less dangerous—is not universally accepted, with critics arguing that the resulting text is too watered down. From Didi Tang and Gillian Wong at the Associated Press:

The document echoes some of the requests made in Charter 08, a 2008 manifesto that made an unusually direct call for an end to single-party rule and other democratic reforms. The manifesto landed its lead architect, dissident writer Liu Xiaobo, in prison for inciting subversion — an 11-year term he is still serving.

The petition, released on Christmas Day, adopts a milder tone, asking the party leadership to rule within existing laws.

[…] Hong Kong-based Chinese free-speech activist Wen Yunchao said the requests made in the petition were sound but the style in which it was written was “too subservient.”

“It’s like they are slaves, kneeling there and writing it,” Wen said. He said the proposed changes should have been stated more directly.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Charter 08, constitution, freedom of expression, judicial system, Liu Xiaobo, Peking University, political reform, reform, Wen Yunchao, Xi Jinping
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The grants are named for the American playwright Lillian Hellman and her longtime companion, the novelist Dashiell Hammett. Both were both questioned by US congressional committees about their political beliefs and affiliations during the aggressive anti-communist investigations inspired by Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. Hellman suffered professionally and had trouble finding work. Hammett spent time in prison.

In 1989, the trustees appointed in Hellman’s will asked Human Rights Watch to devise a program to help writers who were targeted for expressing views that their governments oppose, for criticizing government officials or actions, or for writing about subjects that their governments did not want reported.

[…] A concentration of grantees in certain countries points to especially severe repression of free expression by those governments. Twelve of this year’s grantees come from the People’s Republic of China; four of them are Tibetan and remain anonymous for security reasons. Five grantees are from Vietnam, four from Ethiopia, and three from Iran.

In addition to the four anonymous and imprisoned Tibetans, the honorees include one ethnic Mongolian, Huuchinhuu Govruud, and two Uyghur writers, Memetjan Abdulla and Gulmire Imin. Wang Lihong, Qi Chonghuai, Huang Qi, He Depu and Sun Wenguang also received grants. Profiles of all the named writers are available at HRW.org.

See also the November edition of Words without Borders magazine, which focused on banned Chinese writers and is still available for free.

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Post tags: Ethiopia, free expression, freedom of expression, huang qi, human rights watch, Iran, mongolians, Qi Chonghuai, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Vietnam, Wang Lihong, writers
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Speech is not a crime by Crazy Crab of Hexie Farm for CDT:

Read more about Hexie Farm’s CDT series, including a Q&A with the anonymous cartoonist, and see all cartoons so far in the series.

[CDT owns the copyright for all cartoons in the Hexie Farm CDT series. Please do not reproduce without receiving prior permission from CDT.]

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: freedom of expression, hexie farm, Liu Xiaobo, political prisoners
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This cartoon refers to previous comments by Mo Yan in which he said, “This is an era when one can speak freely.” While his remarks were aimed at his critics’ right to express themselves, some observers interpreted them as his own acceptance of China’s restricted media environment.  The empty chair in the image alludes to Liu Xiaobo, who was unable to attend his Nobel awards ceremony in 2010.

Crazy Crab of Hexie Farm for CDT:

Read more about Hexie Farm’s CDT series, including a Q&A with the anonymous cartoonist, and see all cartoons so far in the series.

[CDT owns the copyright for all cartoons in the Hexie Farm CDT series. Please do not reproduce without receiving prior permission from CDT.]

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Post tags: freedom of expression, hexie farm, Liu Xiaobo, mo yan
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Wu Si describes the “third level” as “administrative orders and bans.” As part of our series Directives from the Ministry of Truth, CDT regularly translates such orders that have been leaked online. Wu describes the mechanics of these orders (from CMP’s translation):

When you’re running a newspaper, magazine or website in China you regularly receive certain phone calls to “just say HI” (打招呼). These are administrative orders and bans. They specify what you can say, and what you cannot say. Generally speaking, the things within the scope of those important topics we talked about earlier that need to be reported and registered are difficult to handle in practice, and in fact there is no way to keep a handle on them. So if you bring them up, you bring them up. If you touch them, you touch them. If what you say is in line with the Party line there is generally no problem. If what you say is not in line, only then will someone call to say HI, sending down an order or ban. If everyone is perfectly honest, they know in their hearts where the boundaries are. If you’re a good and well-behaved editor-in-chief, editor or reporter the two side co-exist in harmony. In this situation, the degree of freedom of expression we enjoy is not the 10 square meters dictated by regulations that we saw on Level Two, not that dismal — we might have 20 square meters.

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Post tags: freedom of expression, media censorship, Ministry of Truth, weibo, Wu Si
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This Generation: Dispatches from China’s Most Popular Literary Star (and Race Car Driver)

What makes Han different from critics of earlier eras is his use of ironic humor instead of historical allegory. Writers in the early twentieth century like Lu Xun explored this voice, but Han makes it his. Born in 1982, he dabbles in the modern forms of evasion: ennui, irony, boredom, and sarcasm. He’s witty and wry and when he’s on, he’s really on. A good example was a blog he wrote last year called “The Disconnected Nation” (also reprinted in The China Story, an illuminating collection of essays edited by the Australian sinologist Geremie Barmé about contemporary China, available in a free downloadable pdf).

[...]

Too often, however, Han seems to lack other arrows in his quiver. Some of the essays are tedious—he goes on and on in one essay about how people should have been allowed to donate old clothes to victims of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake; the government had wanted only new clothes. It was a worthwhile criticism to make at the time, but hardly the most urgent part of the authorities’ mismanagement of the disaster; now, four years later, it seems obscure. His phlegmatism also dominates a 2010 post on an earlier round of protests about the disputed Senkaku or Diaoyu islands—which were also the cause of the recent anti-Japanese riots. He said protesters should concern themselves first with whether they have a decent job or family “rather than worrying about something so remote.” It’s a fair point, one supposes, but sounds like the advice from an overly sensible, mortgaged-to-the-hilt middle-aged father rather than an edgy young blogger. Go home and play with your kids is actually more than that—it’s wrong. In a country where too few people concern themselves with big affairs, the answer should rather be to stay engaged while learning to think more critically and skeptically. Perhaps it’s no wonder that some critics claim in excruciating detail that his father—a frustrated author himself who once used the pen name Han Han—contributed to his son’s essays, or even wrote some of them outright.

Han’s exhausted, burned-out attitude is even less convincing when he discusses political reform. At the end of last year, he published three essays that caused a small uproar in China. Han advocated a go-slow attitude toward democracy, essentially saying Chinese people were not ready for it yet because they weren’t well-enough educated and behaved. The arguments were fair enough, but applicable to almost any country on the planet, especially, in this election season, the United States. The three essays have been interpreted (for example by the editor Chang Ping, whom I interviewed in January) as showing how many Chinese have given up hope for change and so resort to explaining why it shouldn’t happen. They certainly show how careful Han is not to overstep the golden rule of dissent in China: measured criticism is okay, but not advocacy of systemic change.

Read more by and about Han Han via CDT.

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Post tags: bloggers, freedom of expression, Han Han, writers
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Citing “strong resentment from the local Chinese community,” the Chinese government has asked the city of Corvallis to force a Taiwanese-American businessman to remove a mural advocating independence for Taiwan and Tibet from his downtown building.

But city leaders say the mural violates no laws and its political message is protected under the U.S. Constitution.

Taiwanese artist Chao Tsung-song painted the 10-foot-by-100-foot mural last month on the side of the old Corvallis MicroTechnology building at Southwest Fourth Street and Jefferson Avenue. The work was commissioned by property owner David Lin, who is renovating the space for a restaurant and has rechristened the building Tibet House.

In vivid colors, the painting depicts riot police beating Tibetan demonstrators, Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire to protest Chinese rule and images of Taiwan as a bulwark of freedom.

In June, Chinese embassy officials in the UK boycotted a film festival because two controversial films remained on the programme, and threatened to withdraw Chinese athletes from a pre-Olympics training camp because of a scheduled appearance by the Dalai Lama at a private business conference nearby.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Dalai Lama, freedom of expression, Taiwan independence, Taiwanese in America, Tibet independence, U.S. relations, United States
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Welcome to Sina Weibo, a giant speakers corner frequented by about 300 million Chinese, making it the largest national public square in history.

It’s fast, it’s rude and, even though it just turned three years old, it’s a 24-hour-a-day nightmare for government officials across China, who for decades have kept tight control on information. Many have never before been questioned, let alone ridiculed, in public.

[...] “There was already a growing credibility crisis [in China]. People just don’t believe what the government is telling them. Weibo has drastically exacerbated that,” says Bill Bishop, the Beijing-based author of Sinocism China, a daily email roundup of news and Internet trends.

[...] So is Weibo a threat to Communist Party rule, or does it fact entrench it? The latter might be true in the short term. Replacing Facebook and Twitter with a medium they can control means that China’s rulers are unlikely to face the rapidly spreading unrest that has marked the Arab Spring.

Read more about weibo via CDT, including lists of words blocked from Weibo search results.

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Post tags: freedom of expression, Internet censorship, sinaweibo, weibo
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Wang Xiaoning’s wife Yu Ling said in a phone interview that the Beijing No. 2 Prison told her of his release Friday morning and that she should meet him at the prison gate.

[…] Rights groups said that passages from writings cited at his trial in 2003 included: “Without a multiparty system, free elections and separation of powers, any political reform is fraudulent.” Others called China an “authoritarian dictatorship,” and complained of continuing widespread corruption, poverty and workers exploitation.

A lawsuit Wang and others filed in the United States showed that Yahoo’s wholly owned subsidiary based in Hong Kong gave police information linking Wang to his anonymous e-mails and other political writings he posted online.

Yahoo could not immediately be reached for comment.

Yu told AFP that Wang’s political rights will be suspended for another two years, and that he has been mistreated in prison but remains in reasonable health.

Yahoo was also involved in the prosecution of journalist Shi Tao, who is still serving a ten-year sentence passed in 2005 for leaking state secrets. Wang and others later sued the US company, which settled in 2007 for an undisclosed amount. Yahoo founder and then-CEO Jerry Yang later urged the Bush administration to demand Wang and Shi’s release.

These cases illustrate the legal entanglements that come with a physical business presence in China. Google avoided storing sensitive user information on Chinese servers in order to avoid any similar predicament, but was still forced to filter search results and eventually left the Chinese mainland. Twitter alarmed users in January with an announcement that the service would selectively block posts in accordance with local laws, a move widely suspected of being a concession to allow entry to the Chinese market. CEO Dick Costolo quickly clarified, however, that “I don’t think the current environment in China is one in which we can operate“.

See also a 2007 Wired article on Wang’s case (via Isolda Morillo), and more on Wang and Yahoo via CDT.

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Post tags: freedom of expression, Google, Internet companies, Jerry Yang, Shi Tao, Twitter, Wang Xiaoning, Yahoo
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How would you describe his ideas?

He’s similar to [Soviet dissident Andrei] Sakharov. He’s not just a critic of communism but also someone who promotes virtues and values. This is an important point because there are a lot of people who criticize the communists. Liu Xiaobo also has a constructive ideology too. That line—”I have no enemies”—is really important. It’s similar to Mandela. You look at how many problems blacks in South Africa had. It could have resulted in a lot of hatred, but Mandela tried to reconcile people, and I see Liu like that too.

China doesn’t have apartheid.

No, China doesn’t have the racial component perhaps quite as much but it has fault lines, for example between country and city. The way that rural laborers are treated in the cities is similar to how blacks were treated in South Africa. If you don’t have an ideology like Liu’s to push for peaceful change, then change could result in violence.

For example, I see a big difference between him and Ai Weiwei. Western society is really interested in Ai. A lot of Western media write about Ai and gives him a place of importance. There’s a new movie about him too. I don’t think he is so important. He is an established artist and he has many theatrical actions that the media like to report about. I do strongly support some of the things he’s done, like the [accounting for the dead in the 2008 Sichuan] earthquake but a lot of his thoughts have problems.

Read more about Liu Xiaobo and Yu Jie via CDT. See also Ian Johnson’s previous interviews with Chang Ping, Ran Yunfei, Liao Yiwu, and Bao Tong.

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Post tags: dissidents, freedom of expression, Liu Xiaobo, yu jie
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