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Made in Censorship
The Tiananmen Movement in Chinese Literature and Film
by Thomas Chen
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Book Presentation:
The violent suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations is thought to be contemporary China’s most taboo subject. Yet despite sweeping censorship, Chinese culture continues to engage with the history, meaning, and memory of the Tiananmen movement. Made in Censorship examines the surprisingly rich corpus of Tiananmen literature and film produced in mainland China since 1989, both officially sanctioned and unauthorized, contending that censorship does not simply forbid—it also shapes what is created.
Thomas Chen explores a wide range of works made despite and through censorship, including state propaganda, underground films, and controversial best-sellers. Moving across media, from print to the internet, TV to DVD, fiction to documentary, he shows the effects of state intervention on artistic production and consumption. Chen considers art at the edge of censorship, reading such disparate works as a queer love story shot without permission that found official release on DVD, an officially sanctioned film that was ultimately not permitted to be released, a novel built on orthographic elisions that was banned and eventually reissued, and an internet narrative set during the SARS epidemic later published with alterations. He also connects Tiananmen with the story of COVID-19 in China and considers the implications for debates about the reach and power of the Chinese state in the public realm, both domestic and abroad. A bold rethinking of contemporary Chinese literature and film, this book upends understandings of censorship, uncovering not just what it suppresses but also what it produces.
About the Author:
Thomas Chen is assistant professor of Chinese at Lehigh University.
Press Reviews:
Despite the official attempts to blot out the record, Chen sheds light on how Chinese filmmakers and writers have provided a keyhole through which to view this historic event. Recommended. Choice Reviews
This bold and pathbreaking book shatters the consensus that Tiananmen was an inert deletion from Chinese history by showing that Chinese artists discuss Tiananmen repeatedly, deeply, and diversely. Chen makes clear that the practice of censorship is creative and that much of the state’s efforts around Tiananmen attempted to create memory, not just suppress it. Incredibly timely and necessary. Nick Admussen, author of Recite and Refuse: Contemporary Chinese Prose Poetry
In Made in Censorship, Chen takes us on a tour of the narrative history of Beijing 1989, from official government documentaries to iconoclastic novels and films. Chen’s brilliant readings of texts like Sheng Keyi’s Death Fugue, Wang Guangli’s I Graduated, and Stanley Kwan’s Lan Yu reveal the power of narrative to both censor and reveal history. Michael Berry, editor of The Musha Incident: A Reader on the Indigenous Uprising in Colonial Taiwan
Thomas Chen explodes all the clichés about censorship in China with an engrossing tale about a voluble state that drowns out the silences it creates and social actors who negotiate and collude, evade and dissemble, while cheekily performing self-censorship. A revelation. Haiyan Lee, author of The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination
In 1930s China, the expression opening a skylight referred to the practice by which newspapers used blank spaces to signal places where the Nationalist censors had demanded cuts, and in Made in Censorship Thomas Chen expertly uses an analysis of a wide array cultural representations of the June Fourth crackdown to figuratively "open a skylight" onto contemporary China’s censorship practices. Carlos Rojas, author of Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern China
Through incisive analyses of literary and artistic works made in and through censorship, Chen reveals censorship’s subtle operations as an apparatus of both prohibition and production. This important new book is a must-read for anyone interested in the modern institutions of censorship and propaganda. Guobin Yang, author of The Wuhan Lockdown
A welcome and timely publication. The China Quarterly
An insightful correction of the simplistic view of the Tiananmen memory. It is also one of the rare academic books that is also enjoyable to read. China Information
Thomas Chen has provided us with rich cultural insights into the gray zone that lies between complete repression and absolute freedom. The China Journal
By examining how Chinese authors and filmmakers have grappled with censorship in creating works about a politically sensitive event, and by thinking through his own engagement with a taboo topic, Chen’s findings have major implications for any scholar working on contemporary Chinese culture and society. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Center
Shines for its witty, insightful, and theoretically sophisticated readings of the artistic texts. The lasting academic value of Made in Censorship is undoubted; it seems "overdue," but the fact that it comes thirty-three years after the event allows the author to better demonstrate the breadth and depth of its lasting impact. Journal of Asian Studies
The result is a nuanced approach to the subject, which is to be welcomed. H-Socialisms
See the publisher website: Columbia University Press
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