Inside China’s Censorship of Foreign Publications
Svetlana Kharchenkova is a sociologist specializing in contemporary China at Leiden University. Originally from Russia, she has lived in the Netherlands for many years. In her current project, funded by the Dutch Science Foundation, she investigates how censorship of foreign books is carried out in China. She is currently writing a book on this topic.
1. What first sparked your interest in studying creative industries and cultural markets in contemporary China. And what brought you to research how Chinese book editors negotiate censorship when they select which foreign books to publish in China?
I was always interested in the arts, so cultural sociology appealed to me. Studying cultural markets is especially attractive because it allows me to highlight the alternative, edgy, creative China, which goes counter to China’s reputation among the general public across the world. In my PhD research I studied how contemporary art market emerged in China in the recent decades. That project deliberately did not center around politics, because I wanted to show that politics is not the only possible angle to approach China. I wanted to highlight that we can study the Chinese art market through approaches similar to those we use to study other cultural markets around the world and ask questions, which are also relevant to markets across the world, such as why value of art gets determined in a certain way.
Next, I wanted to focus on a cultural market that directly impacts more people than the more elitist contemporary art world. Moreover, since 2013, when the current president Xi Jinping came to power, and increasingly in recent years, cultural control has been tightening in China, and I felt that my research needs to address this development. This led me to the current project on book publishing and censorship.
2. Do you have a personal connection to your research topic and can you say something about this?
This was not the reason why I decided to focus on this topic, but I discovered a personal connection when I was reading academic literature after I started the project. I was shocked to discover that some foreign children’s books that I had read as a child in the Soviet Union contained strong ideological messaging, which I hadn’t noticed. I knew that many books were retold rather than translated because the Soviet Union hadn’t joined the Berne Convention and so it did not abide by the international copyright rules, but I wasn’t aware that my beloved books contained strong ideological messaging, which was absent in the original. The Russian-language version of Pinocchio, for example, is centered around the search for the golden key to open the door to the metaphorical communist paradise. When the door is opened in the end, all the puppets can run their theatre together and no longer be exploited by the evil theater director. Pinocchio also never becomes a real boy, and stays with other puppets. The fact that I completely missed the metaphor as a child, which was too subtle for me at the time, tells us how easy it is to influence people through books without them even noticing.
China did join the Berne Convention, and changes to books are not so drastic, and often happen with the permission of foreign publishers and authors. Yet, changes to books are usually invisible for the Chinese public, and people absorb distorted information without necessarily being aware of it.
3. What specific questions are you trying to answer through your research?
Through conducting interviews with 80+ editors, rights managers, agents, founders and directors of publishing houses and companies, and others working in book publishing in China, I am trying to understand the everyday, micro mechanisms of book censorship. I focus on what happens to foreign books and ask: how do Chinese publishing professionals select foreign books for publication in China and how do they actually publish them? Publishers everywhere need to consider “quality” and a market potential of a book the rights for which they consider acquiring. In China, there is an additional, political dimension. Editors need to consider if the book is “risky” for them because of the identity of the author or the themes it addresses.
4. Can you share one or two surprising insights you’ve uncovered how book censorship works in China and how writers adjust?
In my book I show that book censorship is not an exceptional or rare event in China; it is routinized and everyday. One of the surprising insights is that there were shared ideas among the editors about good and bad ways to censor. The good way to censor is not to delete whole passages or even chapters, but rather to implement what they call “surgical” changes. In other words, you should erase only what needs to be erased and nothing more. To do that, you need to know what exactly is off limits. This is hard, because the red line, which one should not cross, is for the most part very blurry. “Surgical” changes then require high levels of professionalism, in the eyes of my respondents.
5. How has your perspective on the topic changed through your research?
Before I started the project, I had expected to find more resistance, more strategies to circumvent censorship. It turned out that there is hardly any resistance. Most publishers accept the situation they are in and censor books, even though personally they are against censorship. That is why I put the focus of this research not on resistance, but on complicity. I ask: how do Chinese book publishing professionals become and stay complicit in censorship? This helps us reflect on a broader question: how does complicity happen more generally, beyond book publishing in China? Why, for example, did universities in the United States make concessions to Trump’s requests regarding transgender students, even though they know better? Why do we keep flying amidst the climate crisis? I hope to provide some answers in my book.
6. How difficult is it to research this topic in China and how cooperative were the editors and publishers?
Because censorship is not officially acknowledged in China, it was not easy to find respondents who would be willing to be open about it with me. What really helped is that all my interviewees are anonymized. I take protecting identities of my respondents very seriously. I am extremely grateful to people who contributed to my research, which was an act of courage on their part. Some of them told me they accepted an interview in order to get the information about censorship out there. As Chinese citizens, who want to keep their jobs and stay safe, they cannot do it themselves, but they could do it through me, a foreigner who is less vulnerable.
7. What’s something about Chinese book censorship that outsiders often misunderstand?
When I give talks on this topic, I notice that a common conception is that many foreign books are completely censored in China. The audiences are surprised to learn that George Orwell’s “1984” and “Animal Farm”, but also, for example, books with LGBTQ+ storylines, are in fact readily available in regular bookstores. While Chinese editors indeed consider some books too sensitive, in fact, many books are actually published, but their content is adjusted. For example, a mention of a Chinese dissident or explicit sexual descriptions are erased. What exactly is censored also often comes as a surprise. For example, few know that books about religion, including Daoism and Buddhism, are highly sensitive, even though religion is legal in China and many temples and churches operate openly.
8. Can your findings be applied to other countries and how censorship works?
Concrete practices of censorship and what exactly is censored differ across the world, and in China book censorship is more routinized and common than in many other countries. Yet, my research helps us think about how censorship works more generally. In my book I show how censorship is not a prerogative of the state, as is often assumed by scholars and the general public, but it is a collective practice. People, also those who work for private publishing companies, so not only for state-owned publishers, do censorship together. They hold meetings where they discuss if a certain book is too dangerous to bring to China, and if they buy the rights, they negotiate about changes to “dangerous” passages with both their colleagues and superiors and foreign publishers and authors. The public can also report already published books to the authorities, and by doing so, they also participate in censorship. It is clear that we see this collective censorship not only in authoritarian states, but also in liberal societies such as in the United States and Europe now.
9. What’s next for you—what questions are you still chasing?
The book I am writing focuses on how censorship works in China and on the perspectives and experiences of Chinese editors, rights agents, literary agents and others. Next, again with a grant from the Dutch Science Foundation, I plan to focus on the decision-making of authors in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. In my current project I learned that foreign authors are often consulted about changes to their books. They can agree, negotiate or reject the changes; in the latter case their book will normally not be published in China. I want to show that book censorship is a transnational process, which does not stop at the borders of authoritarian states. I hope that this new project will lead to a collective reflection among European authors and publishers about how to deal with censorship requests and on our own role in transnational censorship.
