When the novelist Murong Xuecun (慕容雪村) showed up at a ceremony in Beijing late last year to collect his first literary prize, he clutched a sheet of paper with some of the most incendiary words he had ever written.
It was a meditation on the malaise of censorship.
“Chinese writing exhibits symptoms of a mental disorder,” he planned to say. “This is castrated writing. I am a proactive eunuch, I castrate myself even before the surgeon raises his scalpel.”
The ceremony’s organizers forbade him to deliver the speech. On stage, Murong made a zipping motion across his mouth and left without a word. He then did with the speech what he had done with three of his best-selling novels, all of which had gone through a harsh censorship process: He posted the unexpurgated text on the Internet. Fans flocked to it.
Murong Xuecun, the pen name of Hao Qun (郝群), 37, is among the most famous of a wave of Chinese writers who have become publishing sensations in the past decade because of their canny use of the Internet. Murong’s books are racy and violent and nihilistic, with tales of businessmen and officials engaging in bribe-taking, brawling, drinking, gambling and cavorting with prostitutes in China’s booming cities.
That his books are published at all in China shows how the industry, once carefully controlled by the state, has become more market-driven.
However, Murong’s prose inevitably runs up against censorship, which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is intent on maintaining despite the publishing industry’s gradual changes. Murong says he is a “word criminal” in the eyes of the state, and a “coward” in his own eyes for engaging in self-censorship.
His growing frustrations have pushed him to become one of the most vocal critics of censorship in China. After zipping his mouth in Beijing in November last year, he delivered his banned speech three months later in Hong Kong. He also discussed the issue at the end of last month in New York at the Asia Society.
Murong owes his commercial success to the fact that he has found ways to practice his art and build a fan base on the Internet, outside the more heavily policed print industry.
He addresses political issues on both a blog and a microblog account that resembles Twitter, which has nearly 1.1 million followers. He posts his novels chapter by chapter or in sections online under different pseudonyms as he writes. This Dickens-style serialization generates buzz, and the writing evolves with reader feedback. Once the book is finished or nearly so, Murong signs with a publisher. The censored print editions make money, but the Internet versions are more complete.
‘CYBERTRENDSETTER’
In 2004, the state-run China Radio International called Murong’s popular first novel a “cybertrendsetter” in a report that was reposted on the Web site of the newspaper People’s Daily, the CCP’s mouthpiece. Local officials in the city of Chengdu, where the story is set, denounced it.
The uncensored version of the novel, Chengdu, Please Forget Me Tonight, was translated into English (Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu) by Harvey Thomlinson and nominated in 2008 for the prestigious Man Asian Literary Prize.
“I simply found it extremely fun to do,” Murong said of writing online, as he chain-smoked one afternoon in his 26th-floor Beijing apartment overlooking the Western Hills, a jester’s grin on his boyish face. “Later, I realized that the writers and readers on the Internet changed the course of Chinese literature and started a new phenomenon.”
The Internet has ignited a revolution in China’s publishing industry by allowing a diversity of voices to bloom. Publishing houses can spot new talents and buy the rights for print editions. All this has contributed to the market reforms of the past decade and debate within the party about how to both nurture and control the industry.
Although its systemic censorship crushes creativity, the party craves domestic and international respect for China’s cultural output. After a four-day policy meeting on culture and ideology in October, the party’s Central Committee said China needed to bolster its soft power and “cultural security” with more “outstanding cultural products.” Last week, People’s Daily ran a commentary that called for the state to build up publishing houses into companies with international brands so their books can help spread “socialist core values.” And some officials ache for a Chinese writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Chinese rulers have long had a complicated relationship with books, promoting ones that enshrine official thought and history while banning or destroying others. Qin Shihuang (秦始皇), ancient China’s unifier, burned books and buried scholars alive. In the 18th century, the Qianlong emperor purged thousands of texts and their authors for treasonous ideas while assembling a vast imperial collection to be printed. Mao Zedong (毛澤東) and his comrades were no different.
As intellectual discourse began to flower again in the 1980s, writers like Yu Hua (余華), Mo Yan (莫言) and Su Tong (蘇童) cast a critical eye on Chinese history and rural society. Wang Shuo (王朔) wrote urban “hooligan” literature. But it was the spread of the Internet in the late 1990s that really opened the floodgates.
Younger writers went online to tell tales of boom-era China. One Web site, Rongshuxia, was particularly influential, carrying novels by Annie Baobei (安妮寶貝), Ning Caishen (寧財神) and Li Xunhuan (李尋歡) — the pen name of Lu Jinbo (路金波), now a prominent publisher who supports Murong. In recent years, the Internet has popularized genre fiction, and bookstores here now stock the whole gamut: science fiction and fantasy, horror, detective, teenage romance and, most lucrative of all, children’s stories.
“The Internet created all, and I say all, the literary trends that took off in 2005 and afterward,” said Jo Lusby, managing director of Penguin China.
POWER OVER PUBLISHING
More books are being printed now than at any time since the CCP took power in 1949. Last year, about 328,000 titles were published, more than double the number in 2001, according to official statistics.
However, the government still wields important instruments of control. The agency overseeing the industry, the General Administration of Press and Publication, has not allowed real growth in the houses officially allowed to publish books. Last year, there were 581 such houses, just 19 more than in 2001. All are state-owned, and the government is moving to consolidate them.
Those numbers do not capture an important phenomenon: Market demand has led to a boom in private houses. To publish, they must either form joint ventures with the state-owned houses or, more often, buy from them International Standard Book Numbers codes, one for each title. On paper, this practice is illegal, but the authorities turned a blind eye to it for years.
As for censorship, chief editors act as the ultimate gatekeepers. They know they could lose their jobs if published material raises the ire of officials. Nonfiction books on special topics like the military or religion go through additional vetting by the relevant ministries. In the industry, “there is a shadow over the hearts of everyone,” Lu said.
In June, officials made an example of Zhuhai Publishing House, a small state-owned company, by abruptly shutting it down. Zhuhai had published a memoir by Jimmy Lai (黎智英), a Hong Kong newspaper publisher reviled by some Chinese leaders.
The Internet does not offer writers total liberation, either, since there are online monitors. And some writers are reluctant to post entire books because of fears of piracy; Murong said he had not posted his last book, a nonfiction work about a pyramid scheme, for that reason.
Writers looking to avoid these difficulties end up doing the government’s job for it. Murong said he had abandoned two novels-in-progress that he suspected would never get published. One was called The Counterrevolutionary.
“The worst effect of the censorship is the psychological impact on writers,” Murong said. “When I was working on my first book, I didn’t care whether it would be published, so I wrote whatever I wanted. Now, after I have published a few books, I can clearly feel the impact of censorship when I write. For example, I’ll think of a sentence, and then realize that it will for sure get deleted. Then I won’t even write it down. This self-censoring is the worst,” he said.
INTERNET INSPIRATION
Murong argued with Lu when they were completing plans in 2008 to publish Dancing Through Red Dust, about the corrupt legal system.
Lu, who had bought an ISBN code from Zhuhai Publishing House, told Murong that he wanted to limit the print run because the book was too sordid.
In an interview, Lu said Murong was “the best writer under the age of 40,” but added that “Murong has one problem: His writings are too dark.”
“He’s a loner nihilist who believes in nothing,” Lu said.
Murong’s four novels and one work of investigative journalism are based on years spent in China’s fastest-growing cities. He traveled to Beijing from his family’s farm in Jilin Province to attend the China University of Political Science and Law, which trains judges, lawyers and police officers, the kind of people who figure prominently in his novels. Murong then moved from Chengdu to Shenzhen to Guangzhou, doing functionary jobs at companies.
In 2002, he began his novel of Chengdu. Using a pen name, “The Little Match That Sells Girls” — a twisted reference to Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl — he posted his chapters online as he wrote them. The evolving novel gained notoriety and was reposted on forums. It was a bawdy page-turner: The protagonist, Chen Zhong, an employee at an automobile oil and parts company, regularly engages in bribery and adultery. There are sex scenes in bars and brothels. One of his best friends is a corrupt police officer.
Writing on the Internet meant, for the most part, working beyond the curtain of censorship. The print world was different. After Murong signed a contract to have the Chengdu novel published by Zhou Wen (周文), an entrepreneur, he was forced to cut 10,000 words.
But he had an out. After the book was published, he posted an uncensored manuscript on the Internet, one that was even more complete than the chapter-by-chapter version he had written online.
“It did feel liberating,” he said.
Some writers are skeptical that uncensored books on the Internet can have much of an effect. Chan Koonchung (陳冠中), the author of The Fat Years, a dystopian novel published in Hong Kong and Taiwan, but banned in China, has seen at least two electronic versions of his book posted by fans, but he said he believed that only a small number of mainland Chinese would read it online because it could not be discussed in the news media or any other forum.
“Most people don’t know about these books,” Chan said. “So they’re not going to go onto the Internet to look for them.”
Murong eventually persuaded another house to publish a complete edition of the Chengdu novel. Publication rights generally last three to five years in China, and publishers putting out editions beyond the first one sometimes feel more confident in reinserting passages that were originally censored.
“Once a book gets past the censors and gets published, it is legitimate,” Murong said. “A couple of years later, you can publish the complete version. The logic is this: If the first version was not banned, why would the second one be?”
LEARNING THE LINES
Murong began muzzling himself with his second book, Heaven to the Left, Shenzhen to the Right, about young people trying to make their fortunes in Shenzhen.
“I already knew where the lines were, based on the experience of my first book being edited,” he said.
For example, Murong had originally intended for his protagonists to have experienced the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and crackdown, but he said he did not dare cross this “untouchable red line.”
There was another impetus to self-censorship.
“I always become good friends with the editors,” he said. “I don’t want to get my friends in trouble. If they say something is risky, or if they might lose their job over it, I’ll let them delete what they want,” he said.
As with the Chengdu novel, the complete version of the Shenzhen tale exists online. An uncensored version of Murong’s fourth novel, the one about the legal system, is sold as an e-book.
“Now that I’m aware of my self-censoring tendencies, I try to make up for it while I write,” Murong said. “I can write one version and publish a ‘cleaner’ version.”
Murong’s most painful struggle with censorship came when he worked with an editor from Heping Publishing House on his latest book, China: In the Absence of a Remedy, the nonfiction expose that documents Murong’s 23 days spent undercover to investigate a pyramid scheme. There were endless negotiations. Even a phrase like “Chinese people” had to be changed to “some people.” Murong yelled at the editor, smashed a cup on the floor and punched the wall of his home.
“It was like someone was whipping me for no reason,” Murong said. “In 2008, the censorship was painful, and I could endure it. But in 2010, I couldn’t endure it anymore.”
Zhang Jingtao, the book’s editor, said he wanted to “make the book more appropriate for our society and our times.”
“Publishing is a cultural activity, which falls under the realm of ideology,” Zhang said. “My job is to be the ideological quality control.”
The book was published last year to great acclaim, even if it was incomplete. Newspapers ran articles on Murong’s role in alerting the police to the fraud ring. The book was serialized in People’s Literature, a magazine co-founded by Mao. Its editors decided to award Murong the magazine’s annual literature prize.
Last November, the day before the award ceremony, Murong spent eight hours preparing his speech.
“The only truth is that we cannot speak the truth. The only acceptable viewpoint is that we cannot express a viewpoint,” he wrote.
It was 4,000 words long. In the end, not a single one was spoken.
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