Made in Censorship: The Tiananmen Movement in Chinese Literature and Film

Thomas Chen

Published by Columbia University Press 2022

Made in Censorship

The Tiananmen Movement in Chinese Literature and Film

Thomas Chen

https://doi.org/10.7312/chen20400

Overview
Contents

About this book

Despite sweeping censorship, Chinese culture continues to engage with the history, meaning, and memory of the Tiananmen movement. Thomas Chen examines the surprisingly rich corpus of Tiananmen literature and film produced in mainland China since 1989, contending that censorship does not simply forbid—it also shapes what is created.

Author / Editor information

Thomas Chen is assistant professor of Chinese at Lehigh University.

Reviews

Guobin Yang, author of The Wuhan Lockdown:
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.

Carlos Rojas, author of Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern China:
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.

Haiyan Lee, author of The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination:
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.

Michael Berry, editor of The Musha Incident: A Reader on the Indigenous Uprising in Colonial Taiwan:
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.

Nick Admussen, author of Recite and Refuse: Contemporary Chinese Prose Poetry:
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.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
INTRODUCTION Making the Censored Public Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
CHAPTER ONE Rebuilding the Republic: State Propaganda in the Wake of Tiananmen Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	17
CHAPTER TWO Songs from Afar: Contesting the Official Narrative from the Periphery Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	51
CHAPTER THREE Transgressive Cuts: Making a Scene in the Postrevolutionary Age Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	98
CHAPTER FOUR The Orthography of Censorship: Participatory Reading from Print to the Internet Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	132
CONCLUSION The Other Side of Censorship Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	167
Glossary Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	177
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	179
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	207
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	225

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Illustrations
- Other: 11 figures

eBook

Published: June 1, 2022
ISBN: 9780231555326