-image-Wild Swans at the Little Red Book Shop
There is only one decent English-language bookstore in Shanghai. It’s backed by Hong Kong money. There are numerous state-owned places but these have selections that are limited to language-training materials, photography books, travel guides and a handful of paperbacks. These are usually avoided by your correspondent.
Nevertheless, a lapsed subscription to the Economist prompted AsiaPundit to seek the newest issue from his local little-red bookshop. Upon entry to the small red-brick store on Hongqiao Lu, AP was shocked by what he discovered.
As shown in the bottom-left corner, Jung Chang’s Wild Swans was on prominent display at the bookstore. By prominent, we imply that it was face up and there were multiple copies (staff are not really trained at promotion, so that’s about as prominent as you will get for a state-owned bookstore).
Why the shock? Here’s a passage from Jung Chang’s introduction to the book itself (pages xxiv-xxv):
…Wild Swans is not allowed to be published in Mainland China. The regime seems to regard the book as a threat to the Communist party’s power. Wild Swans is a personal story but it reflects the history of twentieth-century China from which the party does not come out well. To justify its rule, the party has dictated an official version of history, but Wild Swans does not toe that line. In particular, Wild Swans shows Mao to have criminally misruled the Chinese people, rather than being basically a good and great leader, as Peking decrees.
. . .
That is why publication of Wild Swans is banned in China. So is any mention of the book of me in the media. Although over the years many Chinese journalists have interviewed me or written about Wild Swans, all write-ups except a couple have bitten the dust as few editors dare to break the ban. The ban is particularly deterring because the toughly worded, top-secret injunction was co-signed by the Foreign Ministry, which, for a book, is most unusual, if not unique.
As noted, AsiaPundit would not have wandered into the Little Red Bookshop were it not for an expired Economist subscription. That’s mildly ironic, given that the two magazines subscribed to by AP both had issues banned in China simply because they contained reviews of Chang’s most-recent work.
Technorati Tags: asia, censorship, china, east asia, northeast asia, jung chang
5 Responses to “Wild Swans at the Little Red Book Shop”
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July 19th, 2006 at 4:52 pm
This wasn’t one of those books that got itself on the ban list to get publicitiy? I bought one of these banned books several years ago, Shanghai Babe I think all because it was banned. Flipped through it and fell asleep.
I used to read and subscribed (paid hard earn Malaysian dollars for it) the Economist back in the early 90s. Initially, I really liked it, all those numbers and statistics make me feel good about reading from an apparent good source. But as I learnt more things about the world, I began to noticed that the Economist is biased in some of the stories that really mattered and very text bookie.
September 6th, 2006 at 11:48 am
[...] Most of this, it should be said, happens in the margins and in the black-market economy. But even in the heavily regulated world of state-run bookstores things will get through. The state-run SBT Bookstore near AsiaPundit global headquarters, and various other outlets throughout the city, are still selling copies of Jung Chang’s Wild Swans. [...]
September 7th, 2006 at 12:56 am
She means that her chinese translation of the book is banned. There’s not a huge percentage of Chinese people in China fluent enough in English for the Chinese government to care about the English version.
September 7th, 2006 at 10:15 am
Ti99er, I doubt that is the case. Actually. the government not only banned the English-language version of her Mao biography, they even banned English-language magazines that carried reviews of the book (pulling FEER and the Economist off the shelves). That said, censors are far more likely to ban Chinese-language material, and foreign-language books are far more likely to slip through the cracks even when they are subject to a ban.
October 2nd, 2006 at 10:14 pm
Apparently officially the book is banned however 2 pirate versions are available.