Last year, during the anxious time before the annual session of Chinese Parliament, censors banned two bestsellers on sensitive topics. Chinese Peasants: A Study by Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao won the 2004 Letter Ulysses Award for its study of rural hardship; The Past is Not Like Smoke by Zhang Yihuoone dealt with the purges of intellectuals during the Communist Party’s anti-rightist campaigns of the 1950s.
Both books, however, can be bought on the street and continue to circulate in China via the Internet.