The Chinese censorship meme

This chapter argues that, in public discourse in countries such as the US and the UK, Chinese censorship has become something of a meme. Even in respectable media outlets, Chinese censorship is often referred to without understanding of nuance and without proper fact-checking. Part of the problem is that censorship in China is understood solely as regulatory control exercised by an authoritarian government. Other types of censorship, more akin to those found in Western democracies, such as restrictions on obscenity and defamation, are routinely overlooked. Since censorship of literature—the topic of this book—involves a wide range of political, social, and moral aspects, this chapter proposes to adopt the framework of New Censorship Studies, treating censorship as a spectrum of impositions ranging from formal silencing to structural foreclosure, with a large gray zone in between. The majority of phenomena to be studied in this book are located somewhere in that gray zone.