Book censorship in China
In his paper, “The Value of Intellectual Freedom in Twenty-First-Century China: Changes, Challenges, and Progress”, Raymond Pun, a professor and researcher at the Alder Graduate School of Education, states that the CCP “maintained a political censorship that can be understood in three ways: 'to retain power, to maintain community standards and to protect dogma—in this case, Maoist dogma'”.
[13] Like Mao Zedong, Xi Jinping has continued many of the practices put in place to censor media and literature by the Cultural Revolution.
Xi Jinping (November 15, 2012 – present), current CCP General Secretary, has continued to ban books in mainland China and Hong Kong that are considered “politically incorrect”.
[3] Like Mao, Xi has specifically targeted libraries to censor pro-democracy books and textbooks used in schools, all to promote “patriotism and ideological purity in the education system”.
[16] As well as censoring the publication of such books within China and encouraging self censorship, the importation and dissemination of such material is often severely punished and circulation by the way of online files is strictly controlled.
[10] China's state-run General Administration of Press and Publication (新闻出版总署) (GAPP) screens all Chinese literature that is intended to be sold on the open market.
[citation needed] The PRC has also tried to follow the Soviet model, by introducing state-run publishing houses for books in an attempt to keep a tight hold on what can and cannot be shown to the public.
[23] In 2020, Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France was censored along with works by conservative writers such as Albert Jay Nock, James Stephen, Joseph de Maistre, Richard M. Weaver, William F. Buckley Jr., Russell Kirk, and Mario Vargas Llosa.
[25] In 2021, the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China announced a ban on books in school libraries that engage in "Western veneration".
[28] Bookshops in Hong Kong have been making changes of what they sell and those books generally have less coverage over political, religious, and other sensitive issues disliked by the central government.
[35] In the same year, the Chinese government asked Cambridge University Press to block online access to more than 300 articles which contained political sensitivities from The China Quarterly.
[36] Many scholars signed a petition to call upon Cambridge University Press to oppose against the Chinese government's censorship request so as to ensure academic and publication freedom.
[38] In 2018, the editors of the Transcultural Research Book Series ended their cooperation with Springer Nature which imposed restrictions on access to more than 1,000 political science journal articles in China.
NPR reported on Sweden's response to China, where a back and forth between the two countries concerning the freedom of the Swedish publisher ensued.
[citation needed] In 2018, Summer Lopez, senior director at PEN America (an organization focused on the protection of the freedom of speech), came out with a statement concerning the CCP's actions with Gui Minhai, stating that “China's treatment of publisher Gui Minhai — a story of abduction, detention, and now denial of medical care — demonstrates flagrant disregard for the rule of law and human rights”.
[40] With pressure on Taiwanese book publishers from the CCP's government, many have turned towards self censorship just like in Hong Kong, removing all materials concerning vulgar or politically detrimental content.
