Made in Censorship

Made in Censorship is a highly-engaging study of the ways in which the almost unmentionable June Fourth (1989) democracy movement and its violent suppression have been productive of a variety of meaningful literary and cinematic discourses. Made in Censorship is also a reconsideration of censorship and how it works, often paradoxically, in the People's Republic of China, as a productive endeavor: “This book's central argument is that censorship does not merely cross out or strike through; it also forms and fashions, molds and manipulates” (2). The way in which Chen flips the script on censorship, which we usually think in terms of suppression and elision, is indicative of a refreshing intellectual boldness and confidence on the author's part. As Chen himself points out, a significant portion of the academic community also participates in the censorship of June Fourth by consciously or unconsciously evading it ourselves. June Fourth, for many, continues to be the “elephant in the room,” and it is in shining the light on this elephant (in its oblique literary and cinematic refractions) that Chen demonstrates his boldness.Within this set of questions, Chen has brought together a compelling collection of fiction and film to discuss. His first chapter concerns the production and dissemination of the government's version of the events of June 4, 1989, in the form of a work of reportage literature and a television documentary (both produced by the People's Liberation Army). Chen reads them “against the grain,” indicating that they cannot be properly understood when taken at face value, yet they still influence the parameters of the discursive space. Chapter 2 follows this with analyses of documentary (Wang Guangli's 1992 film I Graduated) and fictional works (Tang Xiaobai's 2001 narrative film Conjugation and Sheng Keyi's 2012 novel Death Fugue) that allude obliquely to June Fourth. The films achieve this by being filmed independently (without official permission), but this raises questions about the scope of their circulation and whether they can be considered as existing within the Chinese public sphere in the same way as mainstream media and approved works do; Sheng Keyi's novel was not published in China but in Taiwan, with an English translation appearing in 2014.The third chapter concerns Stanley Kwan's Lan Yu and Lou Ye's Summer Palace, the first of which was filmed surreptitiously in mainland China by the Hong Kong director, while the second was allowed by the government to be filmed but not to be released. Both refract political-historical experience through the lens of sexuality, thus drawing attention away from the raw politics of the democracy movement in a way that had been established in literary practice since the early 1990s. Finally, chapter 4 discusses two novels that experience orthographic changes over time and across platforms—Jia Pingwa's 1993 novel Ruined City, which was banned around a year after its publication because of the author's use of blank squares to indicate redacted content yet gets unbanned later with the removal of the squares, and Hu Fayun's internet novel about SARS, Such Is This [email protected], which was later published in print with significant edits.The Tiananmen movement in Chinese-language fiction and film has been approached by other scholars, notably Belinda Kong in her 2012 book Tiananmen Fictions outside the Square: The Chinese Literary Diaspora and the Politics of Global Culture. Chen argues that his book complements Kong's because hers is exclusively about texts external to mainland China, where his primary concern is with those working within China in the system of censorship. The distinction seems straightforward, but only from the point of view of production, not consumption. For example, Sheng Keyi lives and works in China, but the novel Death Fugue was never published there. Similarly, films that are shot surreptitiously in China and released outside are also only partly affected by the censorship system. An additional complication arises when Chen points out correctly that Beijing is increasingly attempting to shape global discourse on China, pushing censorship beyond its borders in various ways, which one would think would then lead Chen to focus on texts like those that Kong discusses as well.One might expect a book on censorship, even literary censorship, to be focused a great deal on bureaucratic mechanisms, political maneuvering, and literary sociology (like Perry Link's 2000 book The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Literary System), and while Chen addresses the sociopolitical backdrop well enough for the reader to follow and contextualize it, Made in Censorship nevertheless shines for its witty, insightful, and theoretically sophisticated readings of the artistic texts. The lasting academic value of Made in Censorship is undoubted; it seems “overdue,” but the fact that it comes thirty-three years after the event allows the author to better demonstrate the breadth and depth of its lasting impact

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