Flora Qian on Censorship, Banned Books and Language

Growing up in China during the 1980s and 1990s, censorship has always been part of my life. I still remember the first time I discovered the Chinese translation of George Orwell’s 1984 on my father’s bookshelf as a teenager. And I remember how the book shocked and resonated with me at the same time. Later, I heard from my father, a university professor, that after the Cultural Revolution, publishing had bloomed for a brief decade and allowed many foreign books to become available for the Chinese audience in the 1980s. However, censorship tightened again nationwide after the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. And my father saved 1984 from his university’s library when they were trying to get rid of some “old stock” in the 1990s.

 After reading Orwell, I started to notice the “Newspeak” in our evening news and in some of our teachers’ speeches during the school assembly, which most of my peers casted off as boring and didn’t pay active attention to. Even our national anthem seemed problematic. What bothered me the most, however, was how young children as early as elementary school had started to tell lies in their assignments so that they could be praised by our teachers for their “selflessness” towards our communities and patriotism toward our country.

These “1984 moments” hit me from time to time throughout my adolescence and young adulthood. When working for a publisher in my first job, I witnessed how a politician only recently fallen from grace could be erased from published works as if he had never existed. I had felt very close to potentially becoming Winston Smith myself if I didn’t find a way to physically or linguistically migrate.

Years later, my novel, South of the Yangtze, was inspired by some of these early experiences. It was published in Hong Kong in 2023, where I had lived for over a decade. For me, during the writing and publishing of this novel, there was a great sadness in seeing the freedom of speech quickly diminishing in Hong Kong. And there was also an irony for a book much about censorship and self-censorship, that I faced pressure and had to negotiate and rephrase in order to keep some of the important content. For example, “The National Anthem Ordinance” introduced in Hong Kong after the 2019 protests prohibits any criticism or “insults” towards the song. This is the dilemma for many writers who come out of their authoritarian countries and choose to write in a different language – the story is told, but the people who potentially could resonate with it the most may not be able to read it. 

 Nonetheless, in Hong Kong, even though the doors were closing, there was still some room for talking about history. And many people are multi-lingual. Through my novel, I want to offer an option of breaking the boundary of thinking with a different language – it doesn’t have to be English. It could be any language that is not a native language. Many are doing precisely this already without giving much thought to it. But I want to detail the journey and make it a more conscious process, so that it might inform someone who is still seeking such options.

 If your country has a long history of censorship like China, self-censorship could live within the language itself.  For instance, there are many set phrases in Chinese, just like any other language. However, the four-character chengyu, in particular, are idioms that are held to high regard in China. People don’t think of using them as clichés, but as a sign of being more eloquent by quoting from historical context and a past intellect. One of the reasons that people like to quote from the canon is security. Since throughout the Chinese history, the freedom of speech was often silenced in brutal ways by emperors and authoritarian leaders, sometimes the only way to safely express yourself has been to quote from the past or quote from somebody in power. During the Cultural Revolution, as depicted in books such as Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai, you will read scenes in which the prisoner and the red guard in an argument are both quoting from Mao’s “Little Red Book” as they were the only safe phrases to use at the time.

In South of the Yangtze, I take some of the Chinese characters apart, into radicals, and examine the tools we use that both construct and restrict our thinking and our shared imagination. It is useful to take a mindful look at any of our native languages. By inviting more words, more voices and more perspectives instead of banning and silencing them, it will only enrich our language, culture and essentially our very own awarenesses. Each of our nuanced experiences seeks to resonate with someone, to feel seen and heard, and deserves a deeper connection instead of generalization. The danger of being denied gateways to other people’s hearts and minds and being isolated from our own feelings only serves the authoritarian, who will always encourage social, emotional and linguistic isolation in order to overtake as the only anchoring voice and “truth” for people to turn to. 

There is no time more urgent than now, to truly listen to each other with openness, and to listen again. And even though we all have imperfect tools, this is the only way we can move a step closer to a greater truth that sustains and unites humanity and that is always calling for us.