How my book on China and water was censored in China
Authors critical of the government find it a struggle to be published in China without restrictions
The Yangtze River in China. Credit: Julia Hiebaum / Alamy
“I’m very glad to see your book The Water Kingdom published in China last year. Congratulations!” This message from a colleague in China would have been delightful, had its content not been total news to me. I’d fervently hoped to see my 2016 book, a cultural history of China presented through its relationship with water, reach a domestic Chinese audience. I thought it might supply a useful mirror that revealed to Chinese people aspects of their culture perhaps too pervasive for them to notice. Xinran, the Chinese writer now living in the west, commented that the book “is one of the very few that will be respected both in the west and in China.”
But having now obtained a copy of the translated book, which has been published without my knowledge or consent, I find—as I’d feared—that, far from treating it respectfully, the publisher has, as far as I am concerned, censored it extensively. This includes the removal of a pivotal chapter explaining how China’s history of water management can help us understand its modern hydraulic mega-engineering, from Mao’s sometimes disastrous campaign of dam-building to the construction of the controversial Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze. I argue in the book that the ancient Chinese notion of a heavenly mandate to rule, arbitrated by the state’s ability to control the country’s unruly waters, remains a powerful determinant of governance even today.
If the book were ever going to appear within China under Xi Jinping’s repressive administration, some cuts were always inevitable. Yet I had hoped that judicious bargaining would enable the key message to survive: that we cannot understand the decisions of the Chinese Communist Party on matters such as environmentalism and climate, regional water resource management, and even the mobilisation of myth for state propaganda, without recognising the connections to the past.
Ironically, the publisher’s explanation (on being contacted by my agent) for the removal of the chapter on dams was because “in 2018 Xi Jinping spoke highly of the Three Gorges Project during the inspection of the project, describing it as a ‘national instrument,’ ‘an initiative in the history of Chinese water control,’ and ‘the century-old dream of the Chinese nation,’” rather proves my point. To this extent, the book is a plea for better cross-cultural understanding, and cautions against an overly simplistic imposition of western preconceptions on China’s goals and motivations. It tries to be both critical and culturally sympathetic.
This is why I think the censoring of The Water Kingdom exemplifies a broader issue than just the questionable practices in Chinese publishing, or even the intolerance of the Chinese government of anything that smacks of criticism. It shows how a state that spreads fear and suppresses history hides a country from itself and widens the gap between outsiders and those who seek to promote dialogue.
WHOLE THING AT PROSPECT
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/arts-and-books/how-my-book-on-china-and-water-was-censored-in-china
