China's elusive truths : censorship, value and literature in the Internet age

Censorship is usually regarded in a negative light, especially in Western reports on the repressiveness of non-Western regimes. The strict censorship laws in China, for instance, are widely regarded as being in violation of its citizens’ rights to freedom of speech, as legislated under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Nevertheless, totalitarian governments have always recognized the power of literature and, paradoxically, strict and overt censorship laws in a country such as China implicitly attest to literature’s capacity to challenge and destabilize the larger regulatory and disciplinary frameworks of a governing State. The number of Chinese dissident writers currently living in exile in the West is a reminder that literature’s subversive qualities must be taken seriously. Far from the ‘post-transgressive age’ posited by Australian commentator Robert Manne, we live in a world where the power of literature to shock, threaten and provoke is alive and well. This is made apparent when we consider the cases of Chinese writers such as Ma Jian or Gao Xingjian, who chose to leave China in the 1980s in order to be able to continue writing, or the more recent case of Liao Yiwu, forced to flee in 2011 without a word to either friends or family on the eve of the German publication of his prison memoir.