> the short of it is: one of the 2023 award administrators leaked a set of emails showing that the American/Canadian contingent of the committee (voluntarily! proactively! and incompetently!) vetted potential finalists for political statements relating to China, and then the main administrator presumably used that info to mark some of them ineligible. It should be said: there’s no indication that Chinese censors even cared about the content of the English work. Some of it had already been translated into Chinese for goodness’ sake! So the Western members of the committee appear to have been flailing about based on what they thought China wouldn’t like, and preemptively self-censored, rather than, oh, I dunno, refusing to censor anything in the first place.

That's how censorship works, though. A country with mostly free speech will clearly and unambiguously ban a list of works (or types of content). There are always some limits to speech, but debates are possible as long as the rules are clearly defined.

Authoritarians expect self-censorship and have vague rules because they expect you to be making an effort to do what they want (or at least to pretend you are). Having platforms do the censorship, and banning the platforms that do a poor job is a lot more scalable than making it all centralised.

In an authoritarian state you can't get a decent official list of banned works, and in a distopian state you can't even get a list of alllowed works. Incompetence in how censorship is applied by platforms is expected, if not always tolerated.