The Chinese call it a matter of mere "technical changes." US Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton calls it censorship. Her American publisher calls it breach of contract and wants it fixed -- now.
The former first lady pronounced herself "amazed and outraged" Wednesday that politically sensitive material had been rewritten or removed from the Chinese-language version of her memoir, without the knowledge of her or her US publisher, Simon & Schuster.
The 466-page Chinese edition of Living History -- a best seller -- does not contain Clinton's comments about the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy protests. A segment about Chinese-American human rights activist Harry Wu is reduced to almost nothing and refers to him as a spy awaiting sentencing.
At least eight other segments were changed or deleted.
"Unbelievable!" the New York senator said outside a Senate hearing in Washington on Wednesday morning.
Asked why she thought the censorship occurred, Clinton replied: "Why does any government keep information? They want to control the opinions and minds of their people." She called such an attempt "increasingly futile" in the Internet era.
Still, such retooling is standard procedure in China, where the government keeps all media on a short leash and sweeps away anything that could threaten its absolute authority or conflict with its version of how the world works.
"We have made technical changes to the content in some parts of the book in order to win more Chinese readers," acknowledged Liu Feng, the deputy editor-in-chief of Yilin Publishing House, which published the Chinese version.
"But," Liu insisted, "the changes do not hurt the integrity of the book."
They're certainly not hurting its sales. Living History is on at least its fourth printing since the memoir was released in China on Aug. 3. More than 200,000 copies have been printed, and bookstores in Beijing report brisk sales.
Simon & Schuster, the book's US publisher, has informed the Chinese publisher that its actions are a breach of contract, it said in a statement on Wednesday.
"Yilin Press represented their edition to be a complete and accurate translation of the English text. In fact, numerous changes and deletions were made to portions of the text dealing with Senator Clinton's views about China and her travels there," the publisher said.
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