Walter Hutchens’ Blog

Edward Cody writes about Chinese novelist Yan Lianke in yesterday’s Washington Post.

The focus of the story is PRC censorship. Cody correctly points out that despite the dramatic changes China has undergone during its reform era, the Party’s fundamental policy on art has not dramatically changed—writers still can run afoul of official government censors when they write about things deemed “sensitive.”

Author Yan Lianke notes progress, though. Previously he had to write self-criticism for six months when he wrote things the government didn’t permit. Now he just self-censors and stops getting royalty checks when that’s not been enough. At earlier times in the history of China and its Communist Party in particular, he would have simply been killed or thrown in jail for decades.

Yes, that’s progress. Like everything in China—better than it used to be, but still there is a long way to go, at least by liberal standards common in the democratic, developed world.

Politics and economics are often posited as two realms, but China can’t of course separate them completely. Commercialization has caused even government-affiliated presses to want to publish titillating stuff; thus, even “the government” can be ambivalent about media controls in China.

This summer I visited Yan’an in Shaanxi Province, the area to which the Chinese Communist Party retreated after the Long March. I visited the place where the Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature was held, where Mao gave an infamous speech about the role of literature and art in his world-view. The Party has plaques there commemorating the significance of the spot, but of course there are no memorials for the thousands upon thousands of Chinese who suffered because of the Party’s adoption of a policy that “art must serve politics.”