One incident that springs to mind in this fascinating discussion occurred when I was working in the China Daily office in 1990-92 developing an index for the newspaper. I was privileged to associate with and accompany many of the journalists who were working on the newspaper at the time and one thing that sticks in my mind is how those working on the entertainment pages were beating themselves over the head pondering why China was unable to produce good pop/rock music when Taiwan and Hong Kong (who were then top of the pops, so to speak) were so eminently able, and I do remember wondering at the time why it did not occur to them that perhaps some of the forces at the time that were confining Cui Jian to playing only to the diplomatic crowd in Sanlitun might not have something to do with it? A similar feeling came over me in my discussions with a prominent “dissident” (but I would rather term him more near mainstream Marxist and someone I felt more aligned to) theoretician who could not bring himself to consider the fact that perhaps China was not socialist at that stage (nor any stage yet, for that matter) and so some of the theoretical conundrums in circulation at the time (“socialism with Chinese characteristics” being only one of them) might just be built on a false premise.

Darrell Dorrington <Darrell.Dorrington@anu.edu.au>

In response to Kevin Carrico’s contribution (#8) to this thread:

As Cui Jian said to me right after he first got banned (1986): “以卵擊石/we know which is the rock and which is the egg. Even if I don’t [as an artist] take an interest in politics, politics takes an interest in me and my art.” Then he quoted the poet Bei Dao: 在沒有英雄的年代裡, 我只是想做一個人 “In an age without heroes, I just want to be a man.”

Scott Savitt <scottsavitt@gmail.com>

A clear distinction between politics and art, or between “dissidents” and authors, might make sense within the first few ring roads in Beijing (if anywhere). But I can say that life elsewhere for many others is considerably more complicated.

Beyond Liao Yiwu and other examples already noted (I think also of Han Han and his literary mag), here are a few more troubling examples:

http://thetibetpost.com/en/news/tibet/4501-youth-who-wrote-qthe-power-of-the-heartq-arrested-in-rebkong-tibet

http://freetibet.org/news-media/na/china-arrests-young-tibetan-writer

http://freetibet.org/news-media/pr/tibetan-singer-arrested-concert

http://voiceproject.org/post_news/tibetan-singer-sentenced-4-year-prison-term-songs/

http://www.voatibetanenglish.com/content/article/1914322.html

http://uyghuramerican.org/article/uaa-urges-china-immediately-release-information-nurmemet-yasin-s-condition.html

Perhaps Tibet and Xinjiang are just aesthetically unlucky lands cursed by many bad poets and singers? But something tells me the reality is considerably more complex. Continue reading Censorship and salesmanship at US book fair (8) →

Hi, colleagues.

I’d like to carry forward the conversation of the last few days by registering deep disappointment with Eric Abrahamsen’s 6/17 editorial in the New York Times. The core of my problem is factual; as I’m sure many of you know, the Sichuan poet Liao Yiwu was detained and eventually given a four-year sentence for writing the poems 《黃城》, 《偶像》 ,  and especially 《大屠殺》, about the Tiananmen Massacre. This last was self-evidently unpublishable—for fear of the government censors who still hold sway—so he recorded an audiotape of the poem, and circulated that, which earned him a four-year jail sentence. His account of the abuse he endured during that prison sentence is well worth reading and has been translated as For a Song and a Hundred Songs. Liao is not the only poet silenced directly or indirectly by formal state punishment: poet Li Bifeng’s 12-year sentence was reported on by the NYT on Nov. 20, 2012 (page A6). Nurmuhemmet Yasin, a Uyghur poet and short story writer, hasn’t been seen for several years, and may well have died in jail. Eric is certainly welcome to say that he doesn’t like the work of these people, but he can’t pretend like they don’t exist. Because these are people who suffer greatly, his factual error is also a moral fault.

I also have a series of questions about the piece that center on Eric’s role as the editorial director of Pathlight magazine, which is funded, overseen and published by People’s Literature 《人民文学》, a magazine founded in 1949 and still bearing Mao Zedong’s calligraphy on the cover. This means — and correct me if I’m wrong, because these things are very rarely transparent — that Eric is much more a part of the structure he’s describing than the average translator. It may very well be that he isn’t paid by the magazine, or that his work has no impact on his opinions, but I’m curious whether his position would be retained if he had argued, for example, that state censorship is throttling contemporary Chinese literature. I read and respect Pathlight, would gladly translate for it, and am glad it exists — but it’s not an ideologically neutral space, and its level of distinction from the rest of the official Chinese literary apparatus is a worthwhile matter for discussion. It also feels like something that’s appropriate to disclose in a public forum like the NYT — would those readers have been surprised by this information?

On a theoretical level, I was truly surprised at the thinness of the ideas Eric had to share, especially considering the richness of his experience. One does not have to imprison, kill, or exile very many members of a profession before its values change: self-censorship in the Chinese case is very obviously a direct product of state censorship. Cliquishness, manneredness, and extreme care not to offend are all self-defensive mechanisms pursued by writers who do not want to die in jail or be expelled abroad. A system in which rules are arbitrary, ever-changing, and offensive breeds corruption and cronyism, as those willing to rise in the system are the ones who are most attached to the sinecure and the banquet table. Perhaps his focus on large-market literary fiction in the Beijing scene has blinded him to the immense amount of heterogeneity and foment that never makes it even close to print, the way that freethinking Internet literature is subject to deletion, or the voices of pain and doubt that only find their way into the literary fiction market in a weakened, watered-down, inoffensive way.

China is certainly not the Soviet case: it’s often worse. The “hero poets” who survive their education rarely get the chance to have any career to speak of; the fact that Eric doesn’t seem to know anything about Sichuan avant-garde poetry (similar to, but distinct from, the Han Dong group he cites) or similar scenes in other provinces reinforces how difficult it is for these poets to resist enforced invisibility. I say all this with a reasonable amount of respect for Eric, Paper Republic, and the authors he promotes. He and I are the same age, and I’ve benefited from his generosity more than once. I believe him when he says that cliquishness is to be avoided, though, so I can’t let the piece sit, because it’s weak.

I love Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village and I teach it and the students really react to it — Yan really is a truly great writer — but every time he speaks on the novel, he talks about the way in which the version we have is a crippled part of the original book he wrote. He didn’t cut that book because he’s too social or afraid to step on toes. The difference between the two is the role of the state! It’s the state, Eric. You just can’t tell because they haven’t come for you, yet.

Nick Admussen <nadmusse@yahoo.com>

As soon as art speaks to you, it is political speech. You are part of a polis. Of different polises – how do you write that? If you speak about art to other people, in a certain context, it becomes political. In the story Broken Glass 《破碎玻璃》 by Li Hao 李浩, a primary school teacher takes an art book from a student and uses it to humiliate him. With a “perverse” picture by Picasso. In this way, Picasso becomes politica l- in a similar way as he intended his “Guernica”. Eric may be familiar with this story. It will appear in the forthcoming inaugural German issue of 人民文学, modelled after the very successful and amazing “Pathlight” that many of us know.

My own art is political.

晚报！晚报！早有早报，晚有晚报。不是不报，时间未到。

Eric has a point – many times you hear, watch, read an art piece, it may simply refresh you. Make you stretch yourself. But every time you watch, hear, read a piece of art, you take part in an act. An act of communication. Something is communicated to you. Moves you.

I have translated poems by Liu Xiaobo into German and English. Sometimes they make me feel awkward and uncomfortable. Even when they are powerful. Continue reading Censorship and salesmanship at US book fair (6) →

My thanks to Mr. Abrahamsen for clarifying the distinction he draws between politics and art.

Let me summarize his argument. “Political Content” is OK with him, if it lodges in a work (a ‘medium’) that has artistic integrity; by “political speech” on the other hand he means a ‘message’ which, even if clothed in the forms of literature, is a kind of expression that lacks artistic value.  He reports that artists in China whose work has political content may suffer a slap on the wrist. Those subject to prison or sustained harassment, on the other hand, are being punished for activities outside the realm of art, and if they have been producing what are ostensibly works of art, these are in fact only propagandistic hack-work.

It is remarkable that those to whom Mr. Abrahamsen imputes artistic merit never suffer the full wrath of the state, while he is able to identify all those who do suffer it as less creative minds whose efforts do not even qualify as art in his eyes.  This cannot be a coincidence.  How could it have come to pass?  I have it! The Administration of Press and Publications, the Public Security Bureau, and the Ministry of State Security are all staffed by discriminating literary critics whose judgment is almost as good as Mr. Abrahamsen’s!  In other countries, the security services are typically made up of hard-eyed men concerned only with power, men who have no time for art, but in China, no — pay no attention to the nasty things PEN says — in China the authorities will stay their hand and temper their chastisements in deference to artists (provided they are true artists), even when the poor dears stray into forbidden content. Continue reading Censorship and salesmanship at US book fair (5) →

Abrahamsen’s attempt to draw a line between some pure kind of political expression and art that contains political ideas seems novel and arbitrary. People have been talking and thinking about these ideas for thousands of years – is there any such theory of art available? (The kernel of the argument, “Art falls apart for me the instant that the message (be that political, moral, religious, etc) pokes through the artistic fabric of the piece itself” is obviously subjective and arbitrary, not subject to any objective criterion of judgement.) In which category would works like Animal Farm and 1984 (apologies for the trite examples) fall? What about the centuries of exquisite religious paintings? Perhaps it’s irrelevant which way we categorise it, though, because this attempted taxonomy seems to me merely a sophisticated expression of the CCP’s own one, which is just about power: if the art crosses a political line, it’s politics, not art. If it stays within the Party-determined bounds of discourse, then it may be considered first art, not politics. That these bounds are not set out in a clear charter doesn’t matter. Indeed, if they were then people could game them. The very point is the intent: is the work intending to use art to make a political point? In this view, it seems that that art is not art. Orwell again.

Matthew Robertson <mprob7@gmail.com>

Source: NYT (6/17/15)

The Real Censors of China, By ERIC ABRAHAMSEN

BEIJING — The dissident Chinese writer is an apocryphal beast. There are Chinese dissidents, of course, and some of them even write, but romantic images of Soviet-style repression — hostile state censors redacting novels with a red pen, writers forced to choose between humiliating submission and courageous defiance — do not apply in China today. Dissidents are regularly disciplined or imprisoned for their academic research, their journalism, their legal activism or their ethnic identity. But a mere poem rarely lands anyone in prison. The Chinese poet-hero does not exist. Continue reading Censorship and salesmanship at US book fair (4) →

If the day comes when I’m able to summarize such a sensitive subject as Chinese censorship in a scant paragraph of quotes, in someone else’s article, to the satisfaction of all, I will hang up my keyboard and become a garlic farmer!

But in the meantime, more ink is spilled. I have an op-ed appearing in the NYT this Wednesday, unless they’ve changed their minds about it, in which I attempt to address more or less this very issue: what are the political conditions under which Chinese writers are writing? I’m afraid it will satisfy no one, but I hope it will at least provide further grounds for discussion or argument.

To take up one point from A. E. Clarke’s cogent message: I do not see art as being on the same continuum as political speech and political action. Art may have political content, but it is not political speech. I think of this not as “art for art’s sake”, or the aesthetic position, but as something more like “the medium before the message”. Art falls apart for me the instant that the message (be that political, moral, religious, etc) pokes through the artistic fabric of the piece itself.This is why I believe that Yan Lianke is the best China’s got in terms of an artist working with political content: his novels are novels, first and foremost, and not mere delivery vehicles. It is why I appreciate Yu Hua’s “China in Ten Words”, as honest political commentary, far more than his later books, which feel like commentary disguised as fiction. It is why I still, despite its undeniable emotional content, and the quality of A. E. Clarke’s translation, do not consider Liu Xiaobo’s poetry to be art.

It may seem beside the point (or callous), when people are being put in jail, to insist that a given work of art should create and remain within its own world. But I do. I feel like this is probably a very old contention, and if I were better read I could marshal the words of better thinkers than I to explain where I’m coming from. But this is all I’ve got for now.

I will say that, while I regret nothing I’ve said, I regret the lack of sympathy apparent in the original quote. In fact, I hope that sympathy has been my prime motivation for joining into these discussions at all. Sympathy for the awful creative conditions that Chinese writers labor under, and also sympathy for China’s dissidents, though as I’ve said I don’t think there’s much overlap between the two.

Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>

I could not agree more with AE Clarke’s comments on the creativity/politics quotations at the end of this article. I also hope that the paraphrasing somehow misrepresented the point of these statements, for there are few things in life more painful to watch than the China “insider” attempting to explain away fundamentally inexplicable realities.

First of all, Woeser is not in prison, although she has indeed been punished for her writings on Tibet (loss of employment, house arrest). This trend shows no signs of abating.

Second, Abrahamsen, while referencing Woeser and Ilham Tohti, unfortunately neglects the racial element of censorship and politics–it is no coincidence that two of the names he mentioned as engaged in “political activities” focus their writings on ethnic issues, the third rail in Chinese society today. When writing about these issues that are not to be discussed in any way that even slightly diverges from official narratives (see Ilham Tohti and his life sentence), the arbitrary line between creativity and “politics” becomes extremely thin, and is unfortunately determined solely by those in power.

Third, one can certainly debate the value of poems by Liu Xiaobo or his partner Liu Xia. However, it strikes me as poor taste to casually dismiss someone’s poetry while they are serving a 12 year term for speech crimes.

There is no clear line between politics and creative writing (See also the case of Murong Xuecun mentioned in the article). As a result, the pressures of self-censorship often work even better than active censorship itself. The last thing that people who have overcome the pressure to self-censor need, then, is another attempt to explain their persecution and exclusion.

Kevin Carrico <kjc83@cornell.edu>

After noting that “People use the term ‘dissident writer’ in a very confused way,” Eric Abrahamsen goes on to say (as paraphrased in Christopher Beam’s New Yorker article) that  “Dissidents like Woeser, Tohti, and Liu Xiaobo, he added, are jailed for their political activities, not their creative writing.”

The view thus presented (and since Mr. Abrahamsen is an astute and precise man, I suspect that the editing process may not have done him full justice) fails to distinguish between political acts and political speech.  I am not aware that Woeser and Ilham Tohti have engaged in political activity — in the sense of, for example, founding a political party or organizing a strike or calling for demonstrations in the streets. I believe even Liu Xiaobo’s Charter ’08 must be located in the sphere of speech rather than action; its operational clause is “We offer the following recommendations.”  It is for speech that these writers have been persecuted, speech committed to writing in the public space where a society works out its cultural values.

The view attributed to Mr. Abrahamsen could be taken to suggest that this persecution is not a blot on the Party’s record with regard to culture, because what the dissidents were doing was not purely cultural (in the sense that “writing novels” is purely cultural).  I disagree.  Challenging conventional assumptions as one envisions an alternative social order is a creative act and, surely, one of the greatest contributions a cultural worker can make to his society.  One could even argue that to qualify as great art, a work must on some level be discomfiting and subversive:  Du musst dein Leben ändern.

It is true that imaginative & poetic works such as the novels of Yan Lianke do not usually provoke the same official reaction as overt challenges to policy or historical interpretation.  But even here there are distressing exceptions.  Who could not be moved by Nurmuhemet Yasin’s touching, imaginative parable, “Wild Pigeon”?  He got ten years for it, and his publisher three.

Finally, in response to Mr. Abrahamsen’s comment that Liu Xiaobo is not a very good poet, may I share a translation I made of one of his June 4 elegies? It is that time of year.

http://raggedbanner.com/LXB/SuffocationSquare.html

A. E. Clark <aec@raggedbanner.com>

Source: The New Yorker (6/5/15)

Censorship and Salesmanship at America’s Biggest Book Fair
BY CHRISTOPHER BEAM

The China Pavilion at BookExpo America failed to attract crowds. CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY BRENT N. CLARKE/FILMMAGIC VIA GETTY

One evening last week, a group of writers, including Paul Auster, A. M. Homes, Jonathan Franzen, Ha Jin, Francine Prose, and Murong Xuecun, gathered on the steps of the New York Public Library to denounce censorship in China. Franzen read aloud a letter written by the Uighur scholar Ilham Tohti, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2014 after being convicted of separatism. Homes read a poem by Liu Xia, the wife of the imprisoned democracy activist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo. Behind them, protesters held up Shepherd Fairey–style portraits of the artist Ai Weiwei and the Tibetan writer Woeser. A sign in front read “Governments Make Bad Editors.”

The rally, organized by the PEN American Center, was timed to coincide with BookExpo America, the publishing industry’s largest trade show in the United States, which was held across three days at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. As this year’s “guest of honor,” the Chinese government had sent a delegation of more than five hundred people from a hundred publishing houses, as well as twenty-four authors, and had rented twenty-five thousand square feet of space for a China-themed pavilion. “The Chinese government is using B.E.A. to paint a rosy picture of the world of letters in China, and to present its approved literature to the world,” said Andrew Solomon, president of the PEN American Center, in a speech on the library steps. Continue reading Censorship and salesmanship at US book fair →