Chinazism

China’s library officials are burning books that diverge from Communist Party ideology
By Gerry Shih

Xi Jinping scrupulously follows Hitler's every step.

BEIJING — Library officials in northwest China recently hoped to demonstrate their ideological fervor and loyalty to the Communist Party by purging politically incorrect books and religious materials in emphatic fashion: they burned them.
Then they uploaded a report — and a photo — to showcase their work.
The book-burning incident, with all its dark historical precedents from this country and Nazi-era Germany, has heightened alarm at a time when Chinese intellectuals see their society tipping further into authoritarianism.
The incident gained widespread attention on Sunday after Chinese social media users noticed a report on the Library Society of China’s website from a library in Zhenyuan County, which declared it had removed “illegal publications, religious publications and deviant papers and books, picture books and photographs” in an effort to “fully exert the library’s role in broadcasting mainstream ideology.”
The library’s announcement said the event was attended by education and culture bureau officials. 

It included a picture of employees burning a stack of books outside the entrance of the library, which was adorned with a red banner declaring it would “grasp the themes of education and promote the comprehensive and strict development of the party.”
The incident was likely a response to a new directive from the Ministry of Education calling on school libraries to cull teaching materials, analysts said. 

Chinese authorities in recent weeks have talked up the importance of tightening their grip over classrooms following Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests, which Beijing believes are a product of the city’s independent — and "wayward" — education system.
The ministry did not respond immediately to a request for comment on Monday.
The nationwide memo from October called for a ban of materials that harmed national unity and sovereignty, contradicted the Communist Party’s direction and path, or propagated religion, among other things.
But for many Chinese, and even some of the country’s tightly controlled news outlets, the sight of local officials trumpeting book-burning was too much.

A view inside the Bookworm cafe-bookshop in Beijing, a few days before it was shut down last month. 

Chen Youxi, a prominent defense lawyer, warned officials that book burning “goes down in history” and loosely compared it with the Cultural Revolution in a social media post that was censored hours later. 

The Cultural Revolution, which started in the mid-1960s and lasted a decade, was an attempt to purge Chinese communist society of the remnants of traditional and capitalist elements.
The Beijing News called for an investigation into the library in an opinion column. 

That was also censored.
On Monday, the Zhenyuan government told local media it would investigate the library incident but offered no further comment. 

Much of the social media firestorm had been scrubbed clean; some posts that remained suggested the burned materials shouldn’t have been archived by the library in the first place.
Zhang Lifan, a historian in Beijing, said the online outrage reflected anxieties among educated Chinese about the chill settling over their country.
“Frustrations have building the last seven years over growing repression of intellectuals and freedom of speech,” Zhang said, referring indirectly to the administration of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. 

“The popular anger reflected something that’s long-standing.”
The Zhenyuan incident reflected the current climate in which local officials believed they could gain political points for dramatically culling books, Zhang added.
“They saw it as positive thing, a proud thing to report,” he said.
While originating from a county of 513,000 people in one of China’s most impoverished regions, the Zhenyuan episode seemed to strike a nerve in a society that is deeply reverent of the written word — and keenly cognizant of its history of despotism.
On Twitter, which is accessible in China using special software, many remarked that the first Chinese emperor burned books and buried intellectuals alive — a practice immortalized in the idiom “fenshu-kengru” — to cement his grip after uniting the country in 221 B.C.
Others drew comparisons with 1930s Germany, where Nazi student groups burned “un-German” books before the regime targeted ethnic minorities. 

Still others pointed out an anecdote nearer to home: the founder of modern China, Mao Zedong, joked to colleagues at a 1958 Communist Party conference that he buried 46,000 scholars compared with the Qin emperor’s 460.
By late Sunday, many Chinese flooded social media to post their twist on a 19th century poem about the first Chinese emperor.
“His Great Wall of ten thousand li stands firm today,” they wrote, using a traditional Chinese unit of distance. 

“We are again seeing the Qin Emperor of those years.”

China Is Burning Books Again

Censors are on the lookout for political mistakes—even in print runs for foreigners.
BY AMY HAWKINS

Books about Chinese dictator Xi Jinping are displayed at the Beijing International Book Fair in Beijing on Aug. 23, 2018. 

The year is 1925, and Shanghai is in flux. 

Communists, Nationalists, and Triad gangsters are all fighting for control of this vice-laden city, and one “preeminent bon vivant,” Victor Sassoon, is fighting to keep evil at bay. 

Almost a century later, however, on China’s south coast, Sassoon is burnt to a crisp, a victim of the government’s ever-tightening restrictions on the imaginative world.
Victor Sassoon was a real person—but he’s also the hero of The Sassoon Files, a roleplaying game supplement (think Dungeons and Dragons) designed by Jesse Covner and Jason Sheets, two Americans living in Japan. 

Last week, via a recorded video message, Covner broke the news to their 511 followers—who had crowdfunded $24,183 to make the book a reality—that the entire print run of The Sassoon Files had been destroyed by the factory in Guangzhou contracted to fulfil the order. 

A government official had visited the manufacturer and ordered that all the books be destroyed within 24 hours, even though they were scheduled to be shipped directly overseas, with no plans for sale to the Chinese market. 

“I couldn’t believe what I heard,” lamented Covner. 

“I’d never heard of China’s government getting involved with printing issues for export to foreign markets.”
The Sassoon Files is the latest casualty of the Chinese government’s ever-increasing political paranoia and determination to control the global narrative. 

Whether it’s demanding that Cambridge University Press censor its offerings in China, grooming foreign journalists, or expanding its infiltration of Western newspapers with inconspicuous supplements from the state-run China Daily, Beijing’s propaganda drive has gone from the defensive to the offensive.
As the journalist Louisa Lim and researcher Julia Bergin have argued, the Chinese Communist Party has embarked on an “aggressive drive to redraw the global information order.” 

Part of this drive is controlling what can and can’t be produced in what used to be the world’s workhouse, regardless of who the intended audience is, or of the commercial consequences. 

The printing industry in China is worth about $93 billion—making up more than 10 percent of the worldwide total, and second only to the United States.
Jo Lusby, a former CEO of Penguin Random House North Asia who now runs her own publishing consultancy in Hong Kong, stresses that rules about what printers in China can print have always been in place, and those with a license to print foreign ISBNs know that they will face extra administrative hurdles and scrutiny. 

“It’s like trying to print a T-shirt that says ‘Free Tibet’ in China—that factory would get shut down,” she explained. 

Industry veterans have navigated these murky waters for a long time. 

What has changed, though, is the expanding list of topics deemed sensitive.
Earlier this year, this list was put in writing for the first time and circulated among publishers. 

Its scope is farcical: As well as widely known sensitive subjects such as Tibet, Taiwan, and the Tiananmen Square massacre, any mention of any political figures whatsoever is verboten. 

Lusby said that even the phrase “Deng Xiaoping-era policies,” a common proxy term for the reform and opening up of China that began in the 1980s, has been flagged before.
This rule is where The Sassoon Files faltered—one of the options in the game is to work as a secret agent for Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong’s second in command. 

“The cultural department examined the books and found some false reports about the men of Chinese history, so did not allow us to print [them] and ordered us to destroy the books,” a spokesperson for China Seven Color Group, the factory used by Covner and Sheets, told Foreign Policy. 

Covner and Sheets declined to comment, citing security concerns for their friends and colleagues in China.
It is not just newcomers who have had print runs scuppered by China’s censorship laws. 

Last year, the Australian publishing house Hardie Grant was forced to abandon two book projects after its Chinese suppliers refused to cooperate. 

Both issues were cartographical: In one book, the font used for Taiwan on a hand-drawn map was the same size as that used for China, which was “unacceptable,” they were told; the other book, a children’s atlas, showed a hard border between China and Tibet. 

Maps are a particular shibboleth in China, where “incorrect” images are regularly destroyed.
Sandy Grant, Hardie Grant’s co-founder, said that he hadn’t anticipated any problems, given that neither book was pegged for release in China. 

Still, the publisher tried to find workarounds. 

But when the illustrator of the Taiwan map refused to compromise on the design, and color printers for the children’s atlas in other countries were too expensive, both books had to be dropped. 

“We don’t want to change what we do,” Grant said, “but anything that requires international mapping we will [now] not do or look at very carefully.”
Grant believes the result of China’s demands is that self-censorship “is not just a risk in the industry—it is prominent.” 

As in many other sectors, such as technology, aviation, and film, publishers around the world are having to consider how far they are willing to capitulate to China’s view of the world in order to exploit its economic offerings. 

In the case of publishers, though, it is not about reaching a Chinese audience—it is about what version of China to communicate to the rest of the world. 

For Lusby, the issue of self-censorship is not clear-cut, although she conceded that it can “creep in” in the “tiny judgement calls” that publishers are forced to make over, for example, whether Taiwan should be listed as a separate country. 

Major academic publishers have already conceded to censoring for the Chinese market, if not the global one.
Any publisher has to consider the cost of printing in order to be commercially viable. 

Cheap black-and-white printing is available worldwide, but China still has a market edge when it comes to color or other special features—one publisher estimates that it is 40 percent cheaper to print books in China than it is in North America. 

This could change, though, as publishers feel less confident about investing resources into print contracts that could fall through at the last minute or be subject to lengthy delays. 

Printing is where “the commercial meets the political,” Lusby said, adding that rising labor costs in China and delays caused by factories being forced to close because of air pollution reduction targets have meant that Chinese printers are becoming less competitive.
What is certain to make Chinese printers less competitive is book burning. 

China Seven Color Group said that The Sassoon Files was the first time that it had been forced to take destructive action—a technique once common in the bonfires of the Cultural Revolution.

Publishers might be willing to put free speech concerns aside for the sake of profit, but if Chinese printers are forced to bear the brunt of the government’s obsessions, they’ll pay a sharp price.