How China's Censorship Affects What You Read

There was some discussion at and around the Frankfurt book fair not long ago about China's censorship policies. If you think this is only about freedom of thought and expression for the people of China, think again. The Chinese policies may well have a direct impact on what we read in the United States.

Although most American black-and-white books (including most novels and narrative nonfiction, as well as some illustrated titles) are manufactured domestically, most full-color books from large publishers are printed in China (as are some one-color titles). Color printing is vastly cheaper in China than it is in the U.S. (The alternative is printing domestically but raising the cover price significantly in order to make the book profitable.) But Chinese printers (even those owned by U.S. companies) cannot print anything that the Chinese government finds objectionable. The list of what is forbidden is long and convoluted; some major items on it include anything to do with Taiwan or Tibet (including maps that depict those places as something other than "China"); mention of the Dalai Lama, the Tiananmen Square protests, or anything alluding to Chinese censorship; nudity and other sexual content; and more.

American publishers don't want to be censored, but when the Chinese manufacturer balks at content for a book, a decision must be made. Keeping the content that China won't print means finding somewhere else to print the book. Depending on the nature of the content at issue, another manufacturer in that part of the world, e.g., Singapore, might take it on at comparable cost (although not always; China has volume). Or perhaps not. Then the question is whether the content is so important to the book that the publisher is willing to pay the cost of printing it in the United States--and will that additional cost shift the balance on this book from profitable to unprofitable?



A publisher asks: How important is the problematic material to the book? If it's major/essential, the publisher probably anticipated the issue and planned to print somewhere other than China.

If the problematic material is small or minor, not integral to the book, the straightforward solution is to take it out (or, anticipating the issue, ask the author not to include it in the first place; although if it's a minor part of the content, it's more likely to be an unanticipated issue). This kind of self-censorship doesn't happen a lot--but it happens. As a reader, you should be aware of that.

Even if the publisher decides to retain the minor, non-integral material and move the print location, it's more likely to affect overall cost to make the book and therefore its profitability. And thereby the author's track record with the publisher: if your book doesn't make much money, is it worthwhile to a publisher as a business beholden to stockholders (or their own ability to survive) to do another one with that author?

Two examples of this subtle decision-making from my own professional experience:

A couple years ago, we published a beautiful coffee table book about the Great Wall, featuring photography by a National Geographic photographer. As we worked with the author to select photos and edit the text, we were cautious about including anything that might be problematic for printing the book in China. We didn't take anything out, but if the author had originally thought to include anything that might have been an issue, he was prepared not to.

More recently, we launched a series of books that includes one on modern China. In that case, it was essential to the integrity of the book that we be able to include material the Chinese government would take issue with (including a photo of the Tianenman Square protest); we struggled to make an arrangement whereby some titles in the series could be printed domestically while others printed in China (printing the entire series domestically would have raised the cover price beyond what we think most people would want to pay for these books, or we would lose money on the deal), with all of the series looking the same, and the costs working out to keep the series as a whole affordable. At the same time, the Chinese printer wanted to vet any maps (not just of China and environs--any maps at all) in any of the books before they could permit them to be printed there. We were pretty sure the maps wouldn't be a problem, but you can bet we looked at them closely to make sure.

Now all of publishing is about making choices that rule things out:

We make a choice about what kind of publisher we want to be, and that rules out our publishing books that don't fit that category.

We make choices about the audience for a particular book or type of book, and that means we will reject manuscripts that don't fit that bill, and cut or change material in a manuscript we're publishing that isn't geared to that audience.

We make choices about cost, editorial standards, taste, etc., etc.

None of that is censorship. (Recently an author cried censorship about our removing something from a photo in her book. We were removing it because the book was expected to be popular with kids, and the image in question would keep schools, libraries, and some parents from buying it. We'd rather have those sales than not. We retouched the photo to obscure the part at issue, rather than remove the picture, which we liked. Another publisher might have made a different decision. Not censorship, just a business decision about who we are as a publisher and who the readers of this book are likely to be.) If you don't like our choices, you can take your book somewhere else, or you can buy a book from someone else.

Sure, it's also a business decision too to exclude material from a book in order to print it more cost-effectively overseas. But all the large publishing houses are in the same boat as far as manufacturing costs and profitability. Going to another publisher doesn't change the numbers, and probably doesn't change the decision. China's policies become a form of de facto censorship.

Even if we decide not to remove the material in question, and even if the information at issue is readily available in books that are printed in the United States (e.g., one-color books), the fact that we as publishers find ourselves having to think about it, not as a matter of our own decisions about who we are or want to be as a publisher, but because of strictures set by another country's government--that is economic censorship.

As I said at the outset, this affects a limited number of books and a limited subject matter (but what's to say the list won't grow?). Limited though the impact is, in a global economy the decisions of one country do have effects in others. So what was discussed in Frankfurt wasn't just about the freedom of the Chinese people. It is about all of us.