China’s Publishers Court America as Its Authors Scorn Censorship
May 29, 2015
Protesters, including some Chinese writers, at the New York Public Library this week while a Chinese publishing delegation attended BookExpo only blocks away.
A few years ago, the Chinese writer Murong Xuecun had the kind of career most novelists dream about. His eight books had sold two million copies in China, and he had amassed more than eight million social media followers.
But in 2011, he decided to stop publishing. He was afraid of running afoul of Chinese censors, and was even more concerned about the self-censorship that had crept into his work. Now he wishes he had never published some of his earlier books, which tiptoed around political issues.
- 查看大图Mary Altaffer/Associated PressCui Tiankai, the Chinese ambassador to the United States, at BookExpo in Manhattan, to which China sent 500 delegates from publishing houses and 26 authors.
“When I look back on them, I feel ashamed of myself,” said Mr. Murong, 41, who lives in Beijing and whose real name is Hao Qun.
Mr. Murong was among a handful of writers who gathered on the steps of the New York Public Library on Wednesday night to protest the limits on free speech and expression in China. The gathering, organized by thePEN American Center, was prompted by the presence of a large delegation of Chinese publishers at BookExpo America, a major publishing trade event taking place in Manhattan this week.
The juxtaposition was striking. This week, thousands of booksellers, librarians, publishers and authors mingled at BookExpo, at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, where Chinese publishers were being feted as international guests of honor. To mark the event, the Chinese government sent a 500-person delegation from 100 publishing houses, and 26 of its top authors. Chinese publishers claimed close to 25,000 square feet of floor space at the hall and planned 50 events around the city, including poetry readings, film screenings, author panels and presentations from its largest publishers.
Not many blocks away, Mr. Murong stood on the library steps and read aloud from an open letter he had written to Chinese censors in 2013, after his social media account was blocked and its contents deleted. “You treat literature as poison and free speech as a crime,” he said.
He was joined by prominent American writers like Jonathan Franzen, Paul Auster, Francine Prose and A. M. Homes, and by the China-born novelists Ha Jin and Xiaolu Guo. They took turns reading works by Chinese authors who are in prison or under house arrest for their writing, including the Tibetan poet Tsering Woeser, the writer Liu Xia and her husband, the poet and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, who is serving an 11-year prison sentence for subversion.
“There are all of these writers in China who are in jeopardy for expressing themselves, and if you have a government-sanctioned delegation, you’re only getting part of the story,” said Suzanne Nossel, executive director of the PEN American Center, an organization that promotes free speech.
BookExpo’s organizers called China’s featured role at the expo an unprecedented and historic meeting between the world’s two largest publishing industries.
“We’re going to remember this for a generation, because it’s going to be the beginning of opening some doors,” said Steve Rosato, the event director for BookExpo. He said the event was not an appropriate forum to address censorship.
“We’re not in the position to do anything around that,” he said when asked about PEN America’s objections. “China is a significant market and they represent a significant trade opportunity.”
China’s prominence at this year’s BookExpo highlights both the growing interplay between Chinese publishers and the international literary community, and the difficulties of doing business when standards for freedom of expression differ significantly.
China has accelerated its effort to export books and authors as part of a broader strategy to exert “soft power” by raising its cultural profile internationally. Chinese publishers have heavily promoted their catalogs at the London and Frankfurt book fairs in recent years.
Major deals are taking place between American and Chinese content companies. Earlier this year, the American e-book distributor Trajectory signed a deal with a Chinese digital company, Tencent, to distribute Tencent’s catalog of 200,000 Chinese e-books in North and South America.
“Western publishers are interested in getting access to the Chinese market, and the Chinese government is interested in getting more authors known in the West,” said Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, a history professor at the University of California, Irvine, and author of “China in the 21st Century.”
Some American publishers say that their business is booming in China and that they have not faced significant government interference.
“The Chinese appetite for Western books is really impressive,” said Niko Pfund, president of Oxford University Press. “I’ve been amazed and pleasantly surprised by how smooth and uncomplicated it has been.”
The Chinese book business has ballooned into an $8 billion industry, the second largest after the United States. Chinese publishers released 444,000 titles in 2013, up from around 328,000 in 2010. The country is adding around 20 million new English speakers a year.
Chinese publishers have been eagerly acquiring Western titles, especially by British and American authors. In 2013, they bought the rights to more than 16,000 foreign books, including nearly 5,500 from America, more than double the number purchased a decade earlier. HarperCollins exported around 9,700 English-language titles to China in 2014, and cites China as one of its fastest growing international markets. Business books and children’s books are among the most popular categories, it says.
Penguin Random House said that it exported more than 50,000 of its English-language print and e-book editions to China annually.
“Chinese people are very curious about culture in other countries,” Wu Xiaoping, president of Phoenix International Publishing Group, said in an interview through a translator after appearing on a panel at BookExpo. “There will be more and better relationships between Chinese and U.S. publishers.”
When asked whether certain topics were off limits for writers and if his publishing house adhered to government guidelines, he replied, “No comment.”
In China, censorship — and, more commonly, self-censorship — has long been a feature of the publishing industry, which is controlled by the ruling Communist Party. The government’s roughly 580 state-run publishing houses ensure that domestic fare does not broach so-called sensitive topics: gay rights, the discontent of China’s ethnic minorities, and the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protests of 1989.
“Chinese censorship works before the writer even starts writing,” said Bao Pu, publisher of the New Century Press in Hong Kong, who participated in the PEN event. “Why write a piece that you know will never get published?”
Western writers who publish their work in China are not immune to the country’s more rigid standards. Some, like the scholar Ezra F. Vogel, have reluctantly cooperated with publishing house censors. The mainland Chinese version of his biography on Deng Xiaoping omitted a number of adjectives about Mao Zedong and entire passages about Deng, but Mr. Vogel has said that the deletions were necessary to reach an audience hungry for mostly unexpurgated history about their country.
In a few cases, writers have backed out of publishing deals rather than submit to censorship. Evan Osnos, the author of “Age of Ambition,” a book about economic and social change in China, decided not to publish a translation in mainland China after editors there told him they would delete references to the artist Ai Weiwei and Mr. Liu, the jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner. “To me, making those cuts wouldn’t be engaging Chinese readers, it would be isolating them,” he said in an email.
Other writers were never consulted about changes made to their work, and learned only after publication. The writer Andrew Solomon was infuriated to learn that “The Noonday Demon,” his book about depression, had been altered without his approval, omitting his references to being gay.
“I think there’s a suggestion that because China is an enormous market, we have to defer to the Chinese internal standards of censorship,” Mr. Solomon said. “It’s somewhere between naïve and hypocritical to engage with China and not acknowledge the severity of this problem.”
紐約書展中國走紅，中國作家抗議出版審查
2015年05月29日
Sam Hodgson for The New York Times
本周，紐約公共圖書館門前的抗議者，其中還包括一些中國作家。幾個街區外，紐約書展正在舉行。
幾年前，中國作家慕容雪村取得了大多數小說家夢寐以求的事業成就。他寫的八本書在中國賣出了200萬冊，他的社交媒體賬戶吸引了逾800萬名粉絲。
但在2011年，他決定停止出版書籍，他擔心與中國審查機構起衝突，甚至更擔心已經侵入他作品的自我審查。他現在想，自己當初不應該出版某些早期的作品，那些作品小心翼翼地避開了政治議題。
- 檢視大圖Mary Altaffer/Associated Press中國駐美大使崔天凱在曼哈頓的書展上。
今年41歲的慕容雪村說，「當我回過頭看這些書時，感到很慚愧。」慕容雪村住在北京，本名郝群。
周三晚間，數名作家聚集在紐約公共圖書館(New York Public Library)的台階上，抗議中國限制言論自由和表達的舉措，慕容雪村也在其中。龐大的中國出版商代表團來到曼哈頓，參加於本周舉辦的重要出版業活動美國書展(BookExpo America)。中國代表團的到來，促使美國筆會中心(PEN American Center)組織作家參加這次集會。
兩種活動的並置產生了鮮明的反差。本周，數以千計的書商、圖書館負責人、出版商和作家匯聚在雅各布·K·賈維茨會議中心(Jacob K. Javits Convention Center)參加書展，中國出版商作為國際貴賓受到盛情招待。為了慶祝這一活動，中國政府派出了由100家出版公司的500名人員及26名頂級作家組成的代表團參展。中國出版商在展廳中佔據了大約2.5萬平方英尺（約合2300平方米）的展位，還計劃在全市各地舉辦50場活動，包括詩歌朗誦、電影放映、作家座談及大型出版商的展示活動。
在距離該中心幾個街區遠的地方，慕容雪村站在圖書館的台階上，大聲朗讀2013年自己的社交媒體賬號被禁，內容被刪除後寫給中國監管機構的公開信。他說，「你們把文學當成毒藥，把言論當成犯罪。」
與他一同抗議的有喬納森·弗蘭岑(Jonathan Franzen)、保羅·奧斯特(Paul Auster)、弗朗辛·普羅斯(Francine Prose)和A·M·霍姆斯(A.M. Homes)等美國作家，以及在中國出生的小說家哈金和郭小櫓。他們輪流朗讀因為寫作而被監禁或軟禁的中國作家的作品，比如藏族詩人茨仁唯色(Tsering Woeser)，作家劉霞及丈夫——詩人、諾貝爾和平獎得主劉曉波。劉曉波以顛覆國家罪被判11年監禁，目前正在服刑。
美國筆會的負責人蘇珊·諾塞爾(Suzanne Nossel)表示，「有那麼多中國作家因為自我表達而陷入危險，如果請來一個政府支持的代表團，那你只能聽到故事的一部分。」該組織提倡言論自由。
書展的組織者稱，中國在書展上扮演重要角色，代表着世界上兩大出版產業前所未有的歷史性會面。
書展活動總監史蒂夫·羅薩托(Steve Rosato)說，「整整一代人都會記住這場活動，因為這將是開啟某些大門的起點。」他表示，該活動不是討論審查問題的恰當場合。
「我們不適合針對那個問題做任何事，」他在被問及美國筆會的目標時說。「中國是一個重要的市場，他們代表着重要的貿易機會。」
中國在今年書展中的顯着地位突顯了中國出版商與國際文學界日益加強的相互作用，以及在言論自由標準存在巨大差異的情況下開展商業合作的難度。
為了在國際上提升文化形象，從而發揮「軟實力」，中國加快了出口圖書、推廣作家的步伐。中國出版商最近幾年在倫敦及法蘭克福書展上都大力推廣他們的書目。
美國和中國的內容出版公司進行了一些重大交易。今年早些時候，美國電子書經銷商Trajectory與中國數碼公司騰訊簽訂了一項協議，打算在北美和南美銷售騰訊的20萬本中文電子書。
加州大學歐文分校的歷史教授華志堅(Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom)說，「西方出版商有進入中國市場的興趣，中國政府也想讓西方了解更多的中國作家。」華志堅著有《21世紀的中國》(China in the 21st Century)。
一些美國出版商稱，他們的業務在中國得到了迅猛發展，而且他們並未受到政府的大力干涉。
「中國對西方圖書的興趣真的令人印象深刻，」牛津大學出版社(Oxford University Press)社長尼科·豐德(Niko Pfund)說。「事情的順利和便捷讓我又驚又喜。」
中國的圖書產業迅速發展成了一個價值80億美元（約合496億元人民幣）的行業，其規模僅次於美國，在世界上排名第二。2013年，中國出版商推出了44.4萬本書，而2010年僅有大概32.8萬本。每年，中國都會新增約2000萬名會講英語的人。
中國出版商一直在積極引進西方圖書，尤其是英國和美國作家的書。2013年，它們購買了16000餘本外國圖書的版權，其中將近5500本來自美國，與10年前的購買量相比增加了一倍還多。2014年，哈珀科林斯(Harper Collins)向中國輸出了大約9700本英文圖書，並指出中國是它增長最快的國際市場之一。它說，商業書籍和兒童圖書最受歡迎。
企鵝蘭登書屋(Penguin Random House)稱，它每年會向中國出口5萬餘本英文紙質書和電子書。
「中國人對外國文化非常好奇，」鳳凰國際出版公司(Phoenix International Publishing Group)總經理吳小平在書展的一場討論會結束後，通過翻譯接受採訪時說。「中國和美國出版商之間的關係會愈發密切和友好。」
當被問到一些話題的寫作是否受限，以及他的出版社是否需要遵守政府規定時候，他回答道，「無可奉告。」
在中國，審查——以及更為常見的自我審查——一直是出版行業的特色。該行業一直處於執政黨中國共產黨的控制之下。中國政府共有大約580所國有出版社，可以保證國內出版的書籍不提及所謂的敏感話題，如同性戀權利、中國少數民族的不滿，以及1989年針對民主抗議活動的血腥鎮壓。
「甚至早在作者動筆之前，中國的審查過程就開始了，」參加筆會活動的香港新世紀出版社出版人鮑朴稱。「人們為什麼要寫明知永遠無法出版的作品呢？」
在中國出版作品的西方作者也無法逃脫中國更為嚴苛的標準所帶來的影響。例如，學者傅高義(Ezra F. Vogel)就不情願地與出版社的審查者進行了合作。他寫了一本鄧小平傳記，但這本書的大陸版省略了一些關於毛澤東的形容詞，還刪節了一整段關於鄧小平的內容。但傅高義表示，為了讓那些對本國基本完整的歷史如饑似渴的讀者讀到這本書，這些刪節是必要的。
少數情況下，作者沒有向審查屈服，而是選擇了放棄出版交易。《野心時代》(Age of Ambition)的作者歐逸文(Evan Osnos)決定不在中國出版此書的譯本，因為編輯此前告訴他，他們要刪去關於藝術家艾未未和仍處於監禁之中的諾貝爾和平獎得主劉曉波的內容。這本書講的是中國在經濟和社會方面的變化。他在一封電子郵件中說，「在我看來，刪除這些內容並不是在與中國讀者交流，而是會把他們孤立起來。」
還有些作者在作品出版前根本不知道作品內容的變動，直到作品出版後才知道。當《正午的惡魔》(The Noonday Demon)一書——這是一本關於抑鬱症的書——的作者安德魯·索羅門(Andrew Solomon)得知自己的書在未經他允許的情況下被更改之後十分生氣，更改後的版本刪除了他提到自己是同性戀的內容。
「我認為，有人會建議，因為中國是個巨大的市場，所以我們必須遵守中國內部的審查標準，」索羅門說。「討好中國，不承認這個問題的嚴重性的做法，說好聽的叫天真，說難聽的叫虛偽。」
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