Mainland censorship: authors cut their losses
When writing about China for a mainland readership, overseas authors face a dilemma: appease the censors or refuse to publish. Dinah Gardner talks to writers who have had to make that choice
Next to the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet, is the city's main post office. Buried under postcards of yaks, tacky tourist maps, guidebooks and Buddhist paperbacks in the post office's dusty and tumbledown bookshop is a copy of Tibet is my Home, the autobiography of Tashi Tsering. The Tibetan nationalist lived through the cruelties of pre-1950 Tibet and the madness and injustices of the Cultural Revolution. He spent six years in a Chinese jail accused of being a counter-revolutionary.
The book is a Chinese translation of The Struggle for Modern Tibet, first published in the United States in 1997. Not only is it extraordinary that a Chinese version was published at all - Tibet ranks top in terms of sensitive topics in the mainland - it also seems remarkable that such a politically charged book should turn up here, in Lhasa, one of China's most tense and heavily policed cities.
Remarkable, that is, until you realise that the version released by the China Tibetology Publishing House was carefully censored. According to a study at Columbia University, in the US, a number of changes were made, the most notable being the deletion of Tashi Tsering's meetings with the 14th Dalai Lama.
Since 2006, when Tibet is my Home came out, the mainland market for translated works has been growing steadily. In 2010, the mainland's 580 state-owned publishers (the only ones permitted to publish and distribute books nationally) acquired 13,724 titles from abroad, according to the organisers of the Frankfurt Book Fair. Two years later, Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling earned US$2.4 million for her simplified Chinese version of Casual Vacancy, making her royalties the fourth largest in the country in 2012, reported the Huaxi Metropolitan Daily.
However - and this is especially true for books about China - authors must be able to stomach the obligatory censorship if they are to be published in the mainland. While the attractions of the Chinese market - more money and the chance to engage with a new readership - grow, the costs to a writer's reputation and to the truth may turn out to be far greater than the rewards.
The cuts would have not only distorted his narrative about the country, Osnos says, but they would also have betrayed the very people he was writing about - people who are trying to make China a better place.