User:FangzhuLu/sandbox article three

Book censorship in China

Hello everyone! This is my sandbox for Book censorship in China article. Here are some newly added sections as well as some original sections. For those new sections (History & Recent development), all information is newly added through research. For original sections (Hong Kong and List of censored books), I copied the current content on the topic page and bold the information I added or any changes I made. Thank you!

History (a newly added section)
Book censorship has covered a long period of time in China. Both domestic and foreign books which do not meet the central government's requirement will be censored and forbidden to be published.

In the 213 BCE, ancient China conducted a book censorship movement called "burning of books and burying of scholars". Qin Shihuang, the first emperor of Qin dynasty, suppressed all books related with Confucian thoughts and many Confucian scholars were buried alive.

In the 18th century Qing dynasty, Qian Long emperor asked his officials to censor books published in the 17th century which contained any anti-dynastic or heterodox thoughts. All these books must be burned in order to avoid having a bad negative impact on the next generation's thoughts.

In the 1960s and 1970s, especially during the period of Chinese cultural revolution, books which were allowed to be published were very limited, only including classics of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, books written by Mao Zedong and Lu Xun, few political readings and “Revolutionary opera” books. Books beyond this scope were all banned from selling and borrowing. In 1971, there were only 46 state-owned publishing houses. Students who wanted to see those censored books circulated handwritten, string-bound copies among their classmates.

Mainland China (bold parts are newly added)
(note: I create this section according to Yilin's suggestion. The original paragraphs under the lead, beside the first paragraph, are moved here.)

Even though the book censorship is widespread across mainland China, censorship is a negotiable process regarding some agreed-upon historical facts.

Hong Kong (an original section, bold parts are newly added)
Compared with the mainland China, publishing in Hong Kong remains less censored. Publishers such as New Century Press freely publish books, including lurid fictional accounts, about Chinese officials and forbidden episodes of Chinese history. Banned material including imported material such as that published by Mirror Books of New York City are sold in bookshops such as "People’s Commune bookstore" patronized by shoppers from the mainland. Nowadays, as more and more mainland tourists travel to Hong Kong, the central government tends to have a greater control over the book publication . There are more book store closures and less willing publishers. '''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. This can be regarded as a kind of self-censorship or soft censorship. In 2018, some Hong Kong booksellers who trafficked banned books are found missing. Some independent publishers in Hong Kong who sell politically sensitive books hide those forbidden books behind a counter or rent their bookstores on higher floors in some commercial buildings where few people know them.'''

Recent development (a newly added section)
In 2012, Chinese government has authorized 580 Chinese state-owned publishers to publish more than 16,000 foreign books, including well-known books such as Henry Kissinger's "On China" and and Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”.

In 2015, 12 American publishers,including Penguin Random House,Macmillan Publishers,W. W. Norton& Company, signed a pledge to oppose against Chinese government's censorship targeting foreign authors' works. Many foreign authors found that some of their books' content was removed when translating into Chinese without their knowledge. Some authors did not know enough how Chinese censorship actually worked, so they just signed contracts stating the insurance of their original content without double-checking whether the translation version had any content changes. Most expurgated content is related with political sensitivities or political incorrectness.

In 2017, publishers at a book fair held in Beijing needed to exercise self-censorship by avoiding selling books related with sensitive topics, such as 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests, Tibetan Sovereignty Debate and Political status of Taiwan so as to adapt to one of the largest book publishing markets in the world. In the same year, Chinese government asked Cambridge University Press to block online access to more than 300 articles which contained political sensitivities from the China Quarterly. 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. Besides, the Chinese government imposed restrictions on the access to foreign children's books since they believed that children should be more in touch with books reflecting Chinese values.

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. If the content books or journals do not fit the Chinese Department of Propaganda's agenda, those books will be banned from publication and selling.

List of censored books (an original section, bold parts are newly added)
This is an incomplete list of books that have been or are censored in China in various ways. Since there are too many censored books, I added several other censored books.