A lone voice fights Chinese censorship

A lone voice fights Chinese censorship

By Richard Spencer in Beijing
Last Updated: 11:14am BST 25/04/2007

As China’s censors pronounce ever more draconian edicts against writers, newspapers and even amateur pop singers, one middle-aged woman has staged a vociferous fight-back.

Zhang Yihe, a historian whose latest banned book was a collection of biographies of Peking Opera singers, has sent a flood of open letters and petitions to the government demanding a change to censorship laws.

She has become a ghostly star of the internet: ghostly because the many posts supporting her are removed they minute they appear. But now she has won a rare victory.

The country’s chief book and newspaper censor was unexpectedly replaced on Tuesday, after three months in which Miss Zhang’s campaign has cast him in an unwanted spotlight.

Long Xinmin is being moved to a backroom role. He will be replaced by one of his deputies, Liu Jinbie, a long-time associate of President Hu Jintao who has a reputation as a reformist.

Sitting in a Beijing coffee-shop, Miss Zhang, 65, is careful not to take credit. She points out that Mr Long, whose formal title was director of the General Administration of Press and Publication, was also subject of rumours about financial irregularities.

But she cannot disguise a sense of triumph. “It’s not necessarily connected to my books,” she said.

“But as far as we have discussed it among my friends, we are very pleased.”

Censorship is not new to China, so the controversy caused by the ban on “Past Lives of Peking Opera Stars”, along with seven other books, caught many by surprise.

One factor was a leak that revealed the problem was not so much the book, but Miss Zhang’s record.

Her last book, also banned, was entitled The Past is Not Like Smoke and was a memoir of her father, an author condemned by Chairman Mao as China’s “Number One Rightist” in a political campaign that began 50 years ago this year.

Like much of her writing, it stressed the importance of not allowing history to be forgotten, a deeply sensitive issue.

Why she so offended GAPP becomes clear as she reels off lists of crimes the Communist Party tries to bury.

”People who are fifty know nothing of the anti-rightist campaign; people who are forty know nothing of the Great Famine; people who are thirty know nothing of the Cultural Revolution; people who are twenty know nothing of 1989,” she says, detailing an extensive but by no means complete list of restricted topics.

”The only people who can think about the progress of the nation are over fifty.”

The uproar on the internet forced the authorities to allow existing stocks of the books to be sold, even as editors at their publishing firms were punished.

While criticism was removed from domestic websites, however, it was voluble on uncensored Chinese-language sites and newspapers abroad.

The debate was a reflection of how difficult it has become for the propaganda department, which oversees all censorship bodies, to operate without criticism as China opens to the world.

The broadcast censorship body has come under fire for a series of puritan edicts aimed at making commercial television more “serious”, for example by dictating presenters’ hair styles.

Miss Zhang never received a reply to her letters. But she says she privately has the support of many officials.

”There are people inside the system who want a different life,” she says.

Her latest move is to mount a legal challenge. In theory, she is within her rights, but the court has not said whether the case will be accepted. “They said it is a precedent,” she said.

As the Party tries to change in keeping with the times it seems obvious to many that its authority will come under increasing threat. But that seems to be making the authorities try all the harder to force academics, writers and journalists work to its command.

In a statement that appeared old-fashioned even by its own standards, the politburo on Monday issued a call for the internet to live by Marxist values.

”Development and administration of internet culture must stick to the direction of socialist advanced culture,” it said.

“Consolidate the guiding status of Marxism in the ideological sphere.” ”All China is hired by the Communist Party,” Miss Zhang says.

“But where everyone is a hired worker, there is no way you can have a master craftsman.”