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Comment by joshmaker | Hacker News Reader

When I was in China I noticed that English language versions Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm were freely available in bookstores. The educated elite seems to be allowed to read or watch things that the Chinese government would surpress from getting into the hands of the masses.

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The Chinese translations are also widely available. However, I noticed that The Principles of Newspeak was removed from the Nineteen Eighty-Four, when the last time I browsed a copy of it in a bookstore.

I also bought a translated Animal Farm, with very detailed explanation that maps each paragraph to the historical counterpart in the Soviet Union, several years ago.

IMHO, people here usually take these books as some 'foreign' talks, rather than a serious argument to the reality.

"The Principles of Newspeak was removed from the Nineteen Eighty-Four"

This does not surprise me; one of the themes of Chinese government propaganda is the superiority of the simplified writing system, and so I imagine that negative treatments of any simplification of communication would be censored. I saw a Chinese movie a while back, where the king commented on how difficult communication was because of the large number of traditional Hanzi symbols (he also commented that all he wanted was a unified China, which prompted to main character to abandon his attempted assassination of the king).

The movie was Hero, a 2002 movie starring Jet Li. I tended to get a different feeling from that line. The nameless protagonist had asked for calligraphy from his opponent. However, the protagonist did not ask for any of the existing ways to write "Sword", but rather for a new expression of it. When it was written, the protagonist spent a sleepless night examining it, learning every detail and every symbol behind the writing of this single word. It is in this context that the king interrupts the story and says how silly it is to have so many ways of writing it.

Rather than being a statement of how it should be, I took it to be a statement of ignorance on the part of the king. The king did not understand how there could be subtleties in words, and wished only for simplification of the language, rather than looking for the meaning behind existing words.

I agree. Although it has been some years since I have seen the movie, I believe that near the end of the movie, the King of Qin finally understood the meaning behind the "sword" character.

Wait... That's historically true, isn't it? The Qin Dynasty unified China's writing system in an effort to unite the disparite cultures (not to censor them).

Lets not confuse history and propaganda.

I interpreted the statement as propaganda in favor of the simplified writing system, which originated with Mao Zedong's government in the 20th century. Additionally, it is worth noting that the important of Chinese unification is part of modern Chinese propaganda, and that separatist movements (e.g. in Tibet) are routinely oppressed; Taiwan is a hot-button issue for the same reason.

Traditional was already unified. Simplified was a simplification (to increase literacy levels), there is no evidence that simplified was a newspeakesqe version of chinese

It has nothing to do with Tibet nor Taiwan.

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