Teaching Comparative

No transparency here

After the recommendation of the blog Danwei as an important source of information on China, I promised to keep an eye on it. Here's a little essay on Chinese thought control.

Jonathan Ansfield is a free lance journalist and entrepreneur in Beijing. In his August 17 blog, Spot-On, he speculated on the reasons for the delay in publishing the Chinese edition of Tom Friedman's latest book. He offers some insight into the political processes in China and a good example of how difficult analysis is when policy making is not transparent.

The Flat World Hits a Speed Bump

"The World is Flat was scheduled to hit bookshelves in Chinese earlier this summer. New York Times columnist Tom Friedman’s best-seller appeared sure to top sales in China...

"Turns out the world’s not that flat, after all. Not flat enough for Friedman in China, anyway. Today, it appears that the PRC edition of his tome will finally appear this fall... an Editorial Director Lin (he wouldn’t provide his full name) [at the Chinese publishing house said they]... had to push back their scheduled release date on short notice... in order to make 'additional revisions'...

"He stressed that the ongoing revisions were standard procedure for their translations. But he also acknowledged the delay was unscheduled and the publication date was indefinite... he said portions was not 'in accordance national conditions'... Lin also conceded: 'I fear some portions will have to be cut.'... [S]tate publishing houses or their industry minders routinely sanitize foreign titles for the Chinese market... So as with many cases where Western ideas meet Sino realpolitick, it’s hard to ascertain exactly what or who may be behind the editorial changes to The World is Flat...

"What parts of the book could be so offensive to the Chinese? To the Western reader, at least, Friedman is far more disparaging of the United States than China. He’s far more worried about American competitiveness than Chinese.

"Down in Changsha, Director Lin could offer no specifics as to what would need to go or why. The problem, he suspected, was less a matter of the content about China than Friedman's 'style of expressing it.'..."

posted by Ken Wedding @ 7:32 AM