Orwell and China: Nineteen Eighty-four in Chinese | Hacker News Reader

Orwell and China: Nineteen Eighty-four in Chinese

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71 pointsTurukawa31 comments

I find blogs like these rather impressive: long discursions on a topic of interest, as opposed to the snappy marketing pieces that I see much more often. Clearly the author is a dedicated researcher in his field.

It's odd and ironic, but yes, the book has been repeatedly published in China and is widely available, even from a state-run bookstore. Perhaps this illustrates the point that, if you treat something like it ain't no thang, people don't notice and focus on it (the "forbidden fruit syndrome"). Or, alternatively, that most people don't care about political satire as long their lives are improving materially.

A quote by Orwell from the article, showing his ethnic/national sensitivity in 1947:

We all have these feelings in one form or another. If a Chinese wants to be called a Chinese and not a Chinaman, if a Scotsman objects to be called a Scotchman, or if a Negro demands his capital N, it is only the most ordinary politeness to do what is asked of one. The sad thing about this alphabet-book is that the writer obviously has no intention of insulting the “lower” races. He is merely not quite aware that they are human beings like ourselves. A “native” is a comic black man with very few clothes on; a “Chinaman” wears a pigtail and travels in a junk– which is about as true as saying that an Englishman wears a top hat and travels in a hansom cab. This unconsciously patronising attitude is learned in childhood and then, as here, passed onto a new generation of children.

(The article explains that 'Negro' was a term of respect at the time.)

I have no doubt that if the Party thought people would draw a parallel between them and the Party in 1984, it would be banned. The fact is, China is nothing like Oceania, or even the Soviet Union. Certain political discussions are censored, but otherwise people have almost entirely free reign to live their lives how they see fit.

The only state that even remotely resembles the world described in 1984 these days is North Korea.

The only state...

I see many parallels in Singapore, the 'Disneyland with the Death Penalty'[1] where a carefully cultivated, ever-youthful cross-section of public workers (police, army, etc.) forcibly intrude upon the departing or transiting traveller even as they flee at the airport gate lounge.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyland_with_the_Death_Pena...

Well, that's interesting. I wouldn't think of China as a prime example of an Orwellian state, but rather something out of Huxley's mind.

China is capitalist, industrial, workers are salaried, the culture is material-focused, and more than half of the population is non-religious. Politically alienated rather than politically manipulated. Censorship is not based on hate speech, but justified as a way to protect the internal market, a capitalist and pragmatic view.

That's "Brave New World" to me.

A prime example of Orwellian state in my opinion would be DPRK, or Cuba, or what Venezuela is turning into. Two major points of "1984" are a population kept poor and hate speech.

China has its Orwellian moments, just read the newspaper or watch the news inside the country, as do cuba and Venezuela, but none of those are Orwellian states. Spot on a about North Korea, Kim Sung Il must have read 1984 and used it as a template. Note, however, that North Korea is hardly the poorest state.

Outside poorest central asia and sub-saharan africa, North Korea is the poorest.

Certainly was in 90-s. Now it's getting better thanks to small business, trade with China and limited agri reforms,

There are probably some countries in SE Asia that are poorer (New Guinea, Myanmar, Laos, maybe even Cambodia). If DPRK reunited with ROK (under the ROK government, of course), it would probably only take a generation or so to catch up to ROK. They have a culture of high literacy and industry, only their government is holding them back (less developed countries have much less to work with).

Even ex-DDR still did not catch up with the rest of Germany - and one generation did pass. And they were just 3x poorer, where DPRK is more like 15x poorer than ROK.

I doubt that SE countries you listed lost 100k+ people due to hunger (in 90-s and 00-s anyway). Sure they are poor, but they can handle it better than command economy. They're used to be poor, not shocked by it.

There are just SE countries that haven't been rich and have or are are going through their fair share of poor governance. My only point was that there are plenty of other ways to be poor, even poorer. Now I have to get back to my view screen in my beijing apartment, 大哥 is watching.

I'm no expert on the subject, but I believe the way you describe China applies more for modern times, starting maybe with economic expansion under Deng Xiaping. Before that, China might have been closer to what was described in 1984.

North Korea is close to Orwell's vision, but misses the utter humiliation of "airstrip 1". In the England of 1984 defeat has been total - in the way defeat was total in Germany in 1948.

Newspeak is another element of the vision that has not quite been realised in reality. An interesting reference/contrast is Marian in Iain M. Banks' novels, a language designed by machines to free the mind! Note, the last part of 1984 is a deconstruction of Newspeak that must have been written by a scholar in a liberated future, this is referenced powerfully (for me) by Margaret Atwood in "The Handmaiden's Tale"

There is hope.

It was a lot more Orwellian in the 1950s-70s. Surveillance-wise Internet censorship and mobile devices are bringing the telesceen closer to reality these days.

>A prime example of Orwellian state in my opinion would be DPRK, or Cuba

Prime example would be all western states where the electorate votes against it's own interests.

http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Incorporated-Managed-Inverte...

Off-topic slightly, but it's worth mentioning Louisa Lim, former NPR / BBC's China correspondent had recently published the book The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited. It's worth a read.

It covered the current state of political life in China from 1989 ~ now. The whole concept of "1984 in China" is very much a topic talked about in the book. In the book it mentioned there was a case where regional government authorities forced the public to go back to work and school on Sat. and Sunday as a way to prevent crowd to gather for a weekend protest. It's rather fascinating.

Whoa, I thought she was still reporting from China. I guess she is now persona non grata.

Funny story: She came through Dallas a few months ago for a book signing tour. At the last minute I had to travel out of town. I sent my Taiwan-born gf in my place to see her speak and get a book signed. She was apparently one of the few, or the only, Asians in attendance. Louisa Lim even remarked how few Chinese have shown up to her book signings. So, even in America, Chinese here have a blind spot for recent Chinese history.

> "So, even in America, Chinese here have a blind spot for recent Chinese history."

And it's getting worse. I've noticed a trend in recent years where the new Chinese bourgeoisie and intelligentsia are outright dismissive of books and other media addressing these topics, attributing them as Western slander driven primarily by envy over China's economic miracle.

I believe she is now a visiting professor of Journalism at the University of Michigan through a grant by the Knight-Wallace Foundation.

Truly misses her voice on the radio and reporting from China.

Ironically, this website is hosted as a wordpress.com subdomain, so it cannot be accessed in China (I can't open it here)

I wish there was an auto summation tool or keywords of major topics for every link. I wonder how many good articles are closed immediately after they're opened simply because of the word count.

Back on topic, do they actually print copies of the translated version in China? It would be mighty ironic if that is the case.

Conciseness is a quality too

'concision'; better: 'brevity'

That's what instapaper is for.

How is that ironic?

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four is just the kind of book that you would expect to be banned in China – all that talk of Big Brother, Newspeak and the rewriting of history is far too close to the bone, surely. So I was amazed to come across it on open sale in a state-run bookshop, in Yanji 延吉 on the North Korean border in fact. Nineteen Eighty-four is all over the place in China, it turns out.

A Chinese website lists no fewer than 13 translations published in the PRC between 1985 and 2012, and it’s easy to find at least three or four downloadable or online translations on a quick internet search.

They are indeed printed in China, and are openly sold in China, without any government censorship surprisingly.

> They are indeed printed in China, and are openly sold in China, without any government censorship surprisingly.

Censorship applied to materials about censorship seems like it's made for the Streisand effect—look at the vibrant samizdat culture in the soviet union. A much better way is to have it fall into insignificance out of lack of cultural application. You can bet they measure up well to a government that exercises prosecution of thought crime.

I'd be interested to know if it had ever been banned there (which is a very different question about what happens now).

And let's not forget the number of times it has been challenged in US schools for communism (even though it is anti-communist) and for sexual content. http://www.deletecensorship.org/downloads/booklist_hpb.pdf

Of course you can buy it. In fact it's pretty popular. http://www.amazon.cn/%E4%B8%80%E4%B9%9D%E5%85%AB%E5%9B%9B-%E... Other books like The Brave New World are also openly sold.

"Of course"? There is no "of course" when it comes to freedom of the press in China. "It happens that" you can buy it. Someone in a position of authority decided that it, unlike many other things, would be allowed. That's all.

My Chinese tutor in 1985 was a grad student from Beijing University. He once quoted Animal Farm to me. I was surprised he had read it. He told me that the Party made it available on a "need to know basis", in English only, to students in English programs at top universities.

Things have opened up a lot since then. Animal Farm is available, in Chinese, in urban bookstores. But some things that opened up for a while closed again only to reopen later. It's not as if it's just foreign propaganda that the Chinese exercise firm state control over media.

These days, an old book with allegorical criticism of general socialist/communist concepts won't usually be considered enough of a threat to ban, but more up-to-date and specific criticism of the Chinese Communist Party, its policies, or its leadership often will be. It's hardly a matter of course to the outside world what the opaque information control process in China will be doing at any given time.

Much of the book/media selling industry is very informal, so a book/movie/tv show that goes on the banned list can actually become more available as the Pirates take it as a signal that it might be of interest.

Interesting idea about article length. I typically start reading without looking at the length. If the article is interesting I'll continue reading or just leave the tab open to finish later. If it starts to suck, I'll check the length and if it doesn't end quickly, hit the back button.

I have no idea how popular the translated versions are, but the English-language bookstore I visited on a tourist street in Beijing had a decent selection of Orwell but no 1984 or Animal Farm (you'd probably have the opposite problem in a US bookstore, with those two available but none of his Socialist stuff.)

Also missing from the 20th century canon in an decently-sized bookstore were Catch 22 and The Catcher in the Rye but that might be more a regional taste/popularity/vulgarity thing.

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