Is my copy of 《活着》 abridged?

[murrayjames]

A Chinese friend bought me a hardcopy of Yu Hua’s 《活着》. It has a black cover and was published by 作家出版社 (2012 edition). It appears to be the standard edition currently sold on the Chinese mainland, showing up first in results on 淘宝, amazon.cn, etc.

 

My friend says the book is probably abridged or revised （删节版）, since it was published in China, and the novel presents a negative view of the party and its policies. Is this likely? The book cover and copyright page give no indication that the novel is abridged (pictures attached).

[imron]

4 hours ago, murrayjames said:

My friend says the book is probably abridged or revised （删节版）, since it was published in China,

I don't know about your copy, but my copy was bought in mainland China and it still had plenty of those critical things in it. 

 

I guess your your best bet is to read it and find out  

[艾墨本]

I have read that copy. Though I have never read any other versions, it didn't seem abridged. Plenty of criticism. After reading it, quite a few Chinese people were like "yeah, that's a good book, but that isn't what is was really like. It wasn't so bad."

[imron]

Did you hear that from people who actually went through it? Because I have also heard bad stories from people who did and I wouldn't necessarily discount the things that happened in 活着. 

[艾墨本]

Nope. The people making those comments were 18-22 year old students of mine. That quote is not a representation of my opinion, just to be clear. It is, however, a representation of how the book was read by several 18-22 year olds.

 

Edit: For those interested, "10 Years of Madness" is a great book that covers a similar period via anecdotal stories from people who lived through the cultural revolution. It's not an easy read.

[imron]

1 hour ago, 艾墨本 said:

The people making those comments were 18-22 year old students of mine.

Then I would say it's highly likely they don't really have much idea of what it was really like, coupled with a disbelief that it could actually be that bad and a general sentiment among the people who went through it to put that particularly ugly part of history behind them.

 

I'm not saying I really have much idea of what it was like either, but I've heard a couple of first hand accounts from people I know well who did live through some of the history that 活着 covered and that if anything would underplay events rather than embellish them.

 

Suffice to say, it was a messed up period of time, and everyone (Chinese or not) would do well to study it so as to avoid it ever happening again.

[Shelley]

My only knowledge about this really, is reading Wild Swans and meeting the author Jung Chang and having the privilege of hearing her read extracts from her book at an evening of three chinese authors book signing and reading. From her tone of voice and emotion expressed I don't think "its not that bad", I think it was that bad but having come through and out the other side, people just want to get on with their lives now things have improved.

 

Its a bit like people who don't want to talk about their time during WW2, it happened, its over, lets get on with things.

I have read, watched and heard many things about it, and I don't think anyone can really understand what it must have been like, so let it stay in the past, but remember to never let it happen again. This goes for WW2 and the hard times in China and any other conflicts.

[murrayjames]

Thanks everyone for your replies. I think my friend was suggesting the language would be softened in places, not that material critical of the party would be removed completely. I should have used the word “revised” rather than “abridged” in my post.

Is it correct to say that literature published in China is generally not edited for content, even when it is critical of the party and its policies?

[abcdefg]

7 hours ago, murrayjames said:

Is it correct to say that literature published in China is generally not edited for content, even when it is critical of the party and its policies?

 

I don't think that's correct. I had a friend who was a Mainland-China book publisher for a decade or so. Finally got out of that line of work because of the need to revise and revise and revise what was called "uncomfortable content." She said the process was spotty however, with some books attracting lots of official attention, and others just sliding right through untouched. 

[Zbigniew]

Yes, it's far from correct, but I think it's fair to say that the majority of the editing/censoring is done by the authors themselves before they even submit their manuscripts to the publisher.

You can read a bit more about the experiences of one of the more uncompromising contemporary Chinese authors here: https://m.cn.nytstyle.com/culture/20171117/china-novelists-book-translated-in-canada/

[Lu]

On 24/12/2017 at 8:14 PM, murrayjames said:

Is it correct to say that literature published in China is generally not edited for content, even when it is critical of the party and its policies?

No, that is wildly incorrect.

 

In China, you can write a book about Xi Jinping having seven mistresses and taking bribes from Obama, and that is fine. However, you can't publish it. No publisher would want to touch it, because the publisher will be held responsible.

 

(You can also not self-publish, because no printer would want to touch it either. Even if you manage to print it somehow, you wouldn't be able to sell it. On the larger online sites, you can only sell books with an ISBN, and you can only get an ISBN through an official publisher. (Also, the larger online sites wouldn't want to touch it, because they, too, can be held responsible.) You could possibly just put your ISBN-less book on a cart and sell it on the street, but that is illegal and also not very effective.)

 

So to publish a book through an official publisher (which is the only way you can publish a book in China), the book needs to be 'safe'. For this reason, authors censor themselves, and if necessary the publisher censors a bit as well. This way, all literature is censored without the government even touching it. The lines of what is and what isn't allowed are never made explicit, so that everyone censors a bit more just to be on the safe side.

 

Very occasionally, a book will find its way to the bookstores and then be censored and subsequently forbidden by the government. (And then the publisher loses a lot of money and possibly gets in trouble.) But this is rare, as most unacceptable books never get to that stage in the first place.

 

That's the system. However, this doesn't mean that no book can ever be critical of what happened in Chinese history. As you see in 活着, Yu Hua actually succeeded in writing a book about the horrors of 1950s through 1970s, and there are more such books. One 'rule' in this is that it is generally allowed to paint local government or party officials in a bad light, but not to blame the party as a whole, or the central government, or (Marx forbid) Mao himself. You can nicely see this pan out in Liu Zhenyun's 我不是潘金莲: the wronged woman makes her way to layer after layer of inept, corrupt or otherwise bad local officials before her case is taken up by a good, hard-working, non-corrupt national leader.

 

It also varies with time. An author told me that things have notably tightened up in the past few years, and she couldn't publish her second book as she had initially written it. She re-wrote the entire story and is hoping for better luck with that one.

[imron]

That being said, there it's far easier to get content published in book form rather than tv or film form.  The books censors seem to be not quite as stringent as the TV and film counterparts.

[Lu]

And it can also be easier to publish online than in print. I read somewhere about how Murong Xuecun handles his sensitive stuff: publish the politically acceptable version in print, then serialise the original version online. By the time the online serialisation is finished, the original can also be published in print. (Or could, at least, since I read this some five years ago and things are probably stricter now.)

[murrayjames]

Thanks again everyone for your great replies.

What I get from your posts is that there are several kinds of literary censorship in mainland China. Authors self-censor. Publishers censor. Certain books and authors are banned from publication. In rare cases, books that have been published previously are subsequently banned.

The first two kinds of censorship are invisible to the public, since they occur prior a book’s publication. The second two kinds of censorship are (at least in theory) visible to the public, since the effects of “unpublishing” a book can be observed, and books banned from publication in mainland China are sometimes made available elsewhere.

Here is a slightly different question. Are non-banned literary works censored between printings? Suppose I buy 莫言’s novel《蛙》from a bookstore in Beijing. Can I be reasonably confident that the book has not been bowdlerized since it was first published in 2009?

The reason I am asking is, I am interested in reading Chinese literature. I prefer to read (analog) books, the kind with a spine, that I can hold in my hand. I also prefer to read books that are closer to an author’s (occasionally brutal) vision, and not books that are pretty much the same as that, but tidied up here and there by the censor. If I can be reasonably confident that 《蛙》(2017) is not a bowdlerized version of 《蛙》(2009), then I would buy the book. If not, then I would be less inclined to buy the book, and more inclined to find the text of the first printing of the book online.

[Lu]

3 hours ago, murrayjames said:

Are non-banned literary works censored between printings?

I wouldn't say this never happens, but I don't think I've ever heard of it happening. Generally, you can be sure that the latest edition is at least as close to what the author had in mind as the first edition.

If you want to be even surer of uncensored texts, you can buy Taiwanese or Hongkongnese publications.

[大块头]

The character count（字数）of your copy of the book is 136,000. If your copy had large swaths of it left on the censoring-room floor, it'd be shorter than other older editions. Unfortunately, I can't find any older editions on Google Books with a copyright page available to compare. Maybe if someone here has an older copy sitting on their shelf they could share this information.

[Lu]

My copy is from 2004, says it contains 124,000 characters.

... Yah. The listed character count is more a suggestion than a hard number, I think.

[imron]

They add new forewords to every edition. The edition I have (currently in storage so can't look up specifics) had about 10 different forewords from previous editions in addition to its own foreword.