When a book crosses some lines but not others, censors generally use a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer. (Liu Xiaobo versus Orwell.) Another rule of thumb is that more leeway is given to imaginative works about authoritarianism than ones that specifically engage with its manifestations in post-1949 China. (An internet forum versus an old novel.) As a result, Chinese writers are watched more closely than foreign ones. Here’s the rub: Monitors pay closer attention to material that might be consumed by the average person than to cultural products seen as highbrow and intended for educated groups. Read: What it’s like teaching “1984” after Trump’s election

Prefer Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World? They can buy that text, too, just as easily, although its title also joined the taboo list last winter. Again, for a time last year Chinese citizens could not type 19, 80, and four in sequence-but they could, and still can, buy a copy of 1984, the most famous novel on authoritarianism ever written. The government disallows the publication of any work by Liu Xiaobo, the determined critic of the Communist Party who in 2017 became the first Nobel Peace Prize winner since Nazi times to die in prison. It’s less comprehensive, less boot-on-the-face-as Orwell might have put it-and quirkier than many Westerners imagine.Ĭensors have banned books simply for containing a positive or even neutral portrayal of the Dalai Lama. The different treatment of these texts and their titles helps illuminate the complicated reality of censorship in China. It was-and remains-as easy to buy 1984 and Animal Farm in Shenzhen or Shanghai as it is in London or Los Angeles. But censors did not bother to ban the sale of these texts either in bookstores or online. The government’s concern was that activists would use these titles to charge, in not-so-subtle code, that China was moving in a decidedly authoritarian direction. Last winter, after the Chinese Communist Party announced the abolition of presidential term limits, Beijing temporarily moved to censor social-media references to George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984.

Animal farm 1984 book