OCTOBER 15, 2014
It was a hot afternoon in June in the East China city of Jinan. I was returning to my hotel after an afternoon coffee, thinking of the conference I had come to attend and trying to escape the heat on the shady side of the street. My cell phone rang, and I heard the distinctive regional accent of my Chinese publisher, calling from California, where he had recently bought a home so his wife could raise their child free of China’s stifling pollution. Had I received the emails with the requested revisions, he asked. He needed a response within 48 hours. I explained that I was traveling, would be attending a conference for the next two days, and could not possibly reply that quickly. “What are you doing tonight?” he asked — knowing that it was only 4 pm in China and there were still several hours left in the day. He explained that my book launch was scheduled for mid-July, less than a month away, and we had to move quickly.
Two years ago, I had published Ancestral Leaves: A Family Journey Through Chinese History. It had received generous reviews in academic journals, but attracted little attention beyond college campuses. The interest was greater in China, where several members of the Ye family, whose history I had traced from imperial times to the present, were known to the educated public. A translation was completed early this year, and I reviewed it line by line to assure both accuracy and reasonable fluency in Chinese. Now I needed to negotiate passage through two groups of censors.
The first group consisted of people I knew. Ancestral Leaves told the history of my wife’s extended family, and while the relatives had no complaints about the English edition, they sent page after page of suggested changes to the Chinese translation. Some of these were helpful corrections of birth dates, typographical errors that had crept into the Chinese version, and certain details about their parents’ background and education. Then there were attempts to adjust the text to portray family members in a more favorable light, or to assert unusual family solidarity during the politically fraught years when former Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong ruled China. It took me most of that evening to deal with these suggestions, rejecting those that seemed inaccurate or unnecessary, but I eventually sent off a reply agreeing to the changes I felt would improve the book. The accommodation of suggestions from parties to the narrative didn’t differ that much from what any author would confront in the U.S.
Then it was time to turn to the second document. This came from the press itself: a list of suggestions for changes to allow the book to pass Chinese government censorship. Despite the tens of thousands of petty bureaucrats tasked with policing the Internet, press, and publishing houses of China, there is no way this army of censors can preview the more than 400,000 books published each year, to say nothing of the roughly 10,000 magazines and 2,000 newspapers. So each publisher has its own internal censors, who follow formal and informal guidelines to determine what may be allowed. The publisher I was working with had a reputation for pushing the envelope — the Chinese term comes from ping pong: he “hits shots that glance off the edge of the table.” His very successful business model (enough to buy that house in California) involves publishing books that are a little bit controversial, and therefore popular.
In this case, however, it was explained to me that “current conditions” — transparent code for the tight grip of China’s new President and Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping — had reduced the size of the envelope (or the ping pong table). This quickly became clear as I reviewed the 27-page document of requested changes and deletions. One large group of changes had to do with the history of ethnic conflict within China. Members of the Ye family had been officials in China’s last dynasty, the Qing, and one had served as governor of the northwestern province of Shaanxi as it recovered from a massive and destructive rebellion by the local Muslim population, much of which had been wiped out in the process. The press admitted that the narrative could not ignore this rebellion, but all mention of its ethnic dimension had to be cut.
The same principle guided discussion of the Qing dynasty itself. Manchus from the north ruled the Qing, and their armies had conquered the previous dynasty and greatly expanded the empire to include Mongolia, Tibet, and the Turkic Muslim regions that are now Xinjiang. But the Manchus are now one of the 56 official “nationalities” that make up the Chinese people, so the Manchu conquest had to be rephrased as nothing more than one (implicitly Chinese) ethnic group coming from beyond the Great Wall to rule the rest of China.
Religion was another problem. Rebellions inspired by various popular religious sects had periodically challenged China’s imperial rulers. Presumably because of analogies to the proscribed Falun Gong organization in contemporary China, references to “heterodox sects” had to be removed.
But the greatest shock came when I got to the republican era, the period between 1912 and 1949, and a discussion of the Chinese nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen’s collaboration with the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party in the 1920s. I had written that despite this collaboration, Sun opposed “communist revolution … [for] encouraging class warfare instead of national unity.” This was a well-documented historical fact, but the press’s censors wanted to take that out as well.
At this point, I decided I had had enough. It was approaching midnight; I was tired and getting increasingly irritated. I stopped reading, slept fitfully through the night, and called my translator the next morning to say we were going to have to abandon plans to publish in China. I was willing to tinker with language to get the book past the censors, but I was not going to rewrite history. Ethnic and religious conflicts had happened, and could not be erased. And if the censors could not accept the fact that Sun had opposed class conflict, who knows what they would want to change in the parts of the book that dealt with Mao’s China. Even if it would complicate my desire to promote conversations with Chinese colleagues about their nation’s past, it would be better to publish in Hong Kong, and have the conversation based on such copies as could be smuggled into China, or would somehow circulate on the Internet.
