Ethnic ChinaLit

In Authorities Cancel Indie Film Festival, the University of Hong Kong’s China Media Project reports that the 2013 Yunnan Multi-culture Visual Festival (云之南纪录影像展) has been cancelled. No reason whatsoever is given in the announcement in Chinese (停办通告).

Why the sudden cancellation?

I don’t know any of the details. But a clue may be somewhere in the list of films that were scheduled to be shown. Here’s the list in Chinese:  入选影片.

Shanghai Baby (1999) is a novel that has caused much controversy in China and beyond in the early years of the millennium. The ongoing controversy over this book and its writer made me decide to write my thesis in Literary Studies about this topic in 2008. I remember telling a friend of mine, an Amsterdam-based second-generation Chinese young man, about my thesis topic. He appeared disgruntled. Why would I spend time on a book that was a disgrace to Chinese culture, and, particularly, a shame to Chinese men? The book was rightfully banned in China, he said, as it was nothing but a piece of garbage. My interest in this book only showed my lack of intelligence, he added. His reaction further aroused my interest in Shanghai Baby. A book that evokes such emotional reactions does not belong in the trash, but should get the attention it deserves . . .

(From the intro to Manya Koetse’s thesis, Shanghai Baby: Beyond China—A Chinese Novel Banished to the West)

In Censorship’s Many Faces, Yu Hua, author of the very popular novel To Live (活着，余华著), makes the simple but educational point that censorship in the PRC is neither systematic nor free of economic considerations.

For instance, unlike book publishers, film censors can afford to say “No” to any politically sensitive script—because their salary and job security do not depend on creating revenues.

Yu Hua closes his New York Times Op-ed with this humorous anecdote:

“I recently made a joking comparison between media censorship and the pervasive threat of contaminated food, a constant source of worry:

‘There’s no end to these food scares,’ a friend sighed. ‘Is there any hope of a solution?’

‘Oh, all we need is for food inspections to be as forceful as film censorship,’ I told him breezily. ‘With all that faultfinding and nit-picking, food-safety issues will be resolved in no time.’

More than 12,000 readers reposted this. One wrote: ‘I know what we should do. Let’s have those in charge of film, newspaper and book censorship take over food safety, and have those responsible for food safety censor films, papers and books. That way we’ll have food safety — and freedom of expression as well!’”

Several novels depicting mind-boggling, systemic corruption among China’s civil servants were best sellers in 2012. Citizens read them to confirm their worst suspicions about government officials, while newbies and wannabes—millions take the requisite exams each year—peruse them for insights into how to amass a fortune once in office.

Awareness of public servants living far beyond their means has been heightened by weibo and Internet posts of cadres who flaunt their wealth like Brother Watch.  Pictures showing him brandishing 1 of his 5 luxury brand watches on various occasions went viral and led to his dismissal.

The authorities are clearly worried about where all this public anger could lead. We learn from a NYT essay (Masters of Subservience) that Wang Xiaofang (王晓方), author of 13 popular fictional exposés such as Civil Servant’s Notebook (公务员笔记), has since reportedly been unable to publish his three newest works.

His blacklisting has now been followed up by a curious news item that, in its own low-key way, may signal a further clampdown on this unwelcome genre.  Via Chinanews.com (官场小说质量甚忧), the very authoritative Guangming Daily reports that the General Administration of Press and Publication Product Quality Supervision and Inspection Center recently found that just 58.8 percent of a sampling of so-called “officialdom novels” (官场小说 or guānchǎng xiǎoshuō) met their standards for editing and proofreading.

Such findings are not to be scoffed at, because GAPP (as it is known) is fully empowered to implement censorship guidelines . . . or ban publication entirely.

Yan Lianke (阎连科) is one of just 5 authors—and the only Chinese—who has made the shortlist for this year’s Man Booker Int’l Prize.

Coming in the wake of Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize for Literature, this poses a thorny PR challenge for the authorities: how do you explain to your people that yes, another of our authors is being (justly!) highlighted in the West, but, um, several of his best works can’t be purchased in the Middle Kingdom?

From mainstream media Chinanews.com’s piece (阎连科入围 “布克国际奖”), we learn all the basics that a Chinese reader unacquainted with the prize might need to know: its history, names of the shortlisted authors in 2013, and so forth. We even get an interview with the author in which he speaks enthusiastically about the recent translation of his novel <受活> (Lenin’s Kisses, tr. Carlos Rojas) and how its popularity has helped raise his profile in the West.

What we don’t hear about—not even a mention, mind you—are the earlier novels which have made a name for him overseas particularly among English, French and German speakers. Specifically, <为人民服务> (Servir le peuple, tr. Claude Payen, and Dem Volke Dienen, tr. Ulrich Kautz),  and <丁庄梦> (Dream of Ding Village, tr. Cindy Carter). Probably because the former is banned in China, and the latter was published only briefly, and then in censored form.

If you’d like to understand how mainstream China media “massaged” initial international coverage of Mo Yan, see Packaging Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize for the Masses.

Mo Yan (left) and fellow Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo

Nobel-winning writer “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary”? Misinterpreted visionary? Or just a government stooge?

You decide.  Ah, yes, don’t forget to read one of his novels first! But in the meantime, here’s a factoid to chew on:

In Dec. 2012, 14 of his novels figured on the authoritative list of Top 30 Best Selling Works of Fiction in China compiled by OpenBook (开卷排行)

In my efforts to get around the New York Times paywall (I’d gladly pay but have no credit card with which to do so) and the read-just-10-articles-per-month limit, I have taken to visiting its relatively new Chinese web site (纽约时报中文网) where the only limitation—and it’s a major one—is the Great Firewall of China that effectively blocks access to most residents of China.

But since I have a VPN service based in Hong Kong, I can read the Chinese-language New York Times to my heart’s content.

There are some interesting things going on here, media-wise.  To wit:

• Some articles can be viewed just in Chinese, just in English, or with both versions on the same screen. The latter feature will certainly increase readership and build loyalty in China where English learning is madly popular;

• Curiously, the English version of some articles can only be accessed via the Chinese.  An example:  一个被官方取消却意外成功的中国乡村艺术节. I’ve searched the New York Times in English, but the only way I could find the English version—An Unlikely Harvest—was to click on “English” inside the Chinese article.

• Some articles are being commissioned directly in Chinese, and there is no English version. An example: A fascinating piece on self-censorship in China cinema written by Chinese journalist Li Dongran, 比电影审查更可怕的，是自我审查.

Admittedly, I am notoriously bad at Internet basics like using search engines, and there may simply be a gap between the time when Chinese versions are translated and appear in the English-language New York Times.

But for now, it looks to me like the New York Times is experimenting with innovative ways to bring its China coverage—some of it commissioned solely for Chinese readers—to PRC netizens.

In Outrage at Guangdong Newspaper Forced to Run Party Commentary, the South China Morning Post reports:

Demonstrator’s placard: “I do not agree with your every word, but I will defend to death your right to say it.”

Journalists at an outspoken newspaper in Guangdong challenged the provincial propaganda authorities yesterday after the paper was forced to run a commentary glorifying the Communist Party and drop an article calling for proper implementation of the constitution.

In a rare, open challenge, journalists at the Southern Weekend [南方周末] said they were outraged that the propaganda office ordered changes to the paper’s first edition of the new year, just a day before its publication yesterday, without the consent of the page editor who had already signed off on the page and left work.

Some were furious that an introductory message headlined “Pursuing dreams”, which said Chinese people were closer to achieving their dreams because of the hard work of the party, was forced into the package. They said they believed it had come from provincial propaganda chief Tuo Zhen [庹震] and also complained that it contained factual errors.

They accused the propaganda office of “raping” the paper’s editorial autonomy. While recognising that the paper could not refuse to run the introductory message, they remained defiant, opening a microblog account and issuing an open letter – later removed – expressing their frustration. About 15 of them were subjected to restrictions on their use of microblogs after discussing the incident at work.

For an interesting account of the affair in Chinese by Hong Kong journalist 张洁平, read 從「跪著造反」到「站著反抗」─《南方週末》新年獻禮.

“The return of the enfant terrible of Chinese cinema [Lou Ye] was bound to cause a stir,” writes Brice Pedroletti in The Guardian. “He had been banned from making films in his own country for five years after presenting Summer Palace at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival without authorization.” But his Mystery (浮城谜事) has at last been launched in China , albeit with some scenes cloaked in darkness:

The launch party for the first film by Lou Ye [娄烨] to be screened in China for 10 years was held in Yugong Yishan, a trendy music venue in central Beijing, once the headquarters of a Chinese warlord. Lou Ye, dressed in black from top to toe, mingled with the crowd of journalists and friends, while on stage, the group Zhao Ze played one of the film’s theme tunes.

Mystery (Fucheng mishi) was presented at the Cannes Film Festival last May and released in China last month. It is a story of a love triangle that turns to tragedy against the smoggy backdrop of Wuhan, taken from a woman’s real-life account about her unfaithful husband that caused a stir in China in 2009. This is Lou Ye’s seventh film but only the second (with Purple Butterfly in 2003) to have been released in his own country. It nearly failed to make it this time, when a last-minute battle with the censors led to three seconds and 23 frames being darkened and Lou Ye removing his name from the credits. The censors didn’t come out all that well either, since Lou Ye decided to go public and post all his exchanges with them live on Weibo, China’s Twitter, which brought him widespread public support.

At NPR Books (Grim Chronicle),  Louisa Lim reports on a newly translated look at the disastrous Great Leap Forward and speaks with its author, Yang Jisheng (杨继绳):

It’s not often that a book comes out that rewrites a country’s history. But that’s the case with Tombstone [墓碑], which was written by a retired Chinese reporter who spent 10 years secretly collecting official evidence about the country’s devastating great famine. The famine, which began in the late 1950s, resulted in the deaths of millions of Chinese.

For Yang Jisheng, now 72, the famine hit home while he was away. He was 18, busy preparing a newspaper for his boarding school’s Communist Youth League, when a childhood friend burst into the room and said: “Your father is starving to death.”

Yang rushed home to find a ghost town — no dogs, no chickens, even the elm tree outside his house was stripped of bark, which had been eaten.

For an in-depth review of the book and how it was re-packaged by the translators for publication in English, see China, Worse than You Ever Imagined.