Persistent Censorship In China Produces Art of Compromise

By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, July 9, 2007; A09

BEIJING -- Yan Lianke, one of China's most popular contemporary novelists, is busy composing a new book, using his trusty pen to scratch out line after line of Chinese characters for what promises to be another biting satire of life under the Communist Party.

But not too biting.

The novel will be a patently absurd story about a well-meaning but weak professor, Yan said, crafted as a fantasy and so clearly fictitious that he hopes it will escape the censor's veto. Just in case, Yan said with a twinkle, he is writing two versions at once, watering down the controversial sections for Chinese readers -- and party watchdogs -- while keeping the full flavor of his provocative imagination for editions to be published abroad, outside the censor's grasp.

"Of course, this will affect the quality of the book," he acknowledged in an interview, smiling softly as if sharing a dark family secret.

Yan's little compromise illustrates one of the most tragic aspects of the Communist Party censorship that is imposed on journalism and art in China. In many ways, the country's 1.3 billion people are being deprived of the full bloom of their culture, with thousands of artists like Yan forced to calculate how much they can get away with rather than cutting loose with their talent unfettered.

China has come a long way from the days of Mao Zedong, when singing the praises of socialism was virtually the only form of art allowed by the party. But the principle has remained the same. The party still has a giant bureaucracy with broad authority to control what Chinese hear, see and read. After nearly 30 years of reforms set in motion by Deng Xiaoping, censorship is arguably the least changed aspect of the party's rule.

As a result, writers and other artists are forced to navigate between what they want to say and what the party might allow -- and to consider how high the cost would be if the censors were to hand down a ban. "This is a really big headache," Yan said, speaking in the straightforward language of his native Henan province and his peasant origins.

Yan, who turns 49 next month, is no stranger to China's censors. His first novel, "Xia Riluo," was banned in 1994 because of official outrage over its depiction of two army heroes who go bad. To make matters worse, Yan was in the employ of the People's Liberation Army at the time, assigned to write propaganda. He was kicked out a decade later when he published "Enjoyment," the rollicking story of local Chinese officials who try to buy Lenin's corpse from Russia to attract tourists to their backwater town.

Yan's most notorious run-in with the censors came in 2005, when a literary magazine published his "Serve the People," a novella in which an army officer's wife has an affair with a young recruit and finds that destroying her absent husband's Mao icons and shredding his Little Red Book enhances her sexual desire.

Copies of the magazine sold briskly. But when officials in the party's Central Propaganda Department realized why, they issued an emergency order recalling 30,000 copies already out and banning distribution of any more.

Despite the ban and condemnation -- outraged officials called the story a slander against the People's Liberation Army -- the book quickly caught the attention of China's literature lovers. It was translated and published abroad and is still widely read by Chinese young people adept at accessing forbidden overseas Web sites.

Yan's most recent clash with officialdom displayed some of the most insidious aspects of China's censorship, which includes covering up public health problems such as AIDS and SARS in the name of maintaining a good image of the country. Yan said he got interested in the AIDS epidemic in 1996 through a friend. He got in touch with Gao Yaojie, a bold doctor who brought an outbreak in Henan to public attention and who filled in Yan on how blood sales had resulted in wholesale contamination of villages.

In 2004, after censorship of health threats had begun to loosen following the SARS epidemic, Yan posed as an AIDS researcher's assistant and returned to Henan to trace what had happened. A local party official let him do the research, he said, but made him pledge not to write about his findings, saying the truth would destroy the economy if it got out.

"At first, I had hoped to do a nonfiction book about the situation in Henan, and then maybe a novel," Yan recalled. "But considering the ban on 'Serve the People' in 2004, I thought it would be hard to get the censors to approve a nonfiction book. So I finally decided to write a novel first."

"The Dream of Ding Village" was finished in August 2005 and published in early 2006. In the fictional world of Ding Village, peasants are encouraged to give so much blood, and the government makes so much money off the sales, that a pipeline is built to ship the blood to market as if it were oil.

The condemnation was clear. But the satire had already been toned down on orders from the publishing house, Yan said, and the fantasy setting was designed to round off the edges. "I didn't worry about it very much," he said. "It was not journalism, right? That's why I wrote it as fiction."

But party censors decided otherwise. They intervened with the publisher after about 100,000 books had been printed, 80,000 of which had been distributed to bookstores. Ren Chun, a spokeswoman for Shanghai Wenyi Publishing Co., wrote a letter to Chinese media that said, "We got orders from the upper level saying the book cannot be published, cannot be sold and cannot be advertised." In the same letter, she said newspapers should abstain from writing about the ban because AIDS is "a very sensitive topic" in China.

Yan said he was never contacted by the censors and has no idea where the ban originated or why. He learned about the censors' intervention only when payments stopped coming from the publishing house, he said. That is standard practice, he noted, because the censors' activities are themselves censored.

For a publisher that wants to stay in business, or an editor who wants to keep his job, this consideration is important. Jia Zongpei, chief editor of Shanghai Wenyi Publishing Co., hung up on a reporter asking what "upper level" told him to stop publishing the book. "I can't tell you anything about it," he said. "Please understand me."

Xu Naiqing, director of book publication at the Shanghai Propaganda Department's press and publishing bureau, said his office did not impose the ban, even though the publishing firm is headquartered in Shanghai. Officials at the General Administration of Press and Publication, part of the party's Central Propaganda Department in Beijing, said they had no idea where the ban came from. They suggested faxing a question; one was faxed, but there was no response.

Yan, by then experienced in book bans, realized he would have to settle for whatever had been earned on copies sold before the ban. But for him, an important point was a contractual provision obliging his publishing firm to give the equivalent of $6,500 to the real-life village behind the story for treatment of its AIDS patients.

The company refused, arguing that it had suffered a large financial loss. Yan, who had pledged to donate an equal amount from his earnings, lodged several entreaties. When they were ignored, he said, he hired a lawyer and filed suit. At the end of a long arbitration, the suit was settled in April with payment of about $50,000 to Yan, based on copies sold before the censor stepped in, but no donation to the village.

Yan himself had assumed that responsibility even before the settlement. He turned over the equivalent of $13,000 to the village in January, just before Chinese New Year, he said, so people there would have enough money for a meal of dumplings, as demanded by tradition.

Despite his experience, Yan said, he thinks the writer's life is improving in China and he has no intention of emigrating. When he got into trouble for his first novel 13 years ago, he recalled, propaganda officials forced him to write self-criticisms for six months.

"But I didn't have to write any for 'The Dream of Ding Village,' and this is progress," he said with a half-smile that betrayed his appreciation of the irony. "I believe that one day in the future, writers will be able to publish anything they write about China."