Recently, I have been reading "Consciousness Uploading" - a collection of short stories by Greg Egan in Chinese (Greg Egan).
While reading one of the stories, "Seeing," I noticed a discrepancy:
The whole world is there to gaze upon, from the latest Sudanese famine to the Chinese civil war, from a body paint fashion parade in New York to the bloody aftermath of the bombing of the British parliament.
As you can see, there is a mention of "a certain country" among specific place names, but from what I have read, there is no country called "a certain country" in this story. So I searched for the original text and found the corresponding passage:
The whole world is there to gaze upon, from the latest Sudanese famine to the Chinese civil war, from a body paint fashion parade in New York to the bloody aftermath of the bombing of the British parliament.
As expected, this so-called "a certain country" is China.
Later, I recalled that there seemed to be another mention of "a certain country" earlier in "The Hundred Light-Year Diary," and I found it (note that there is also a mention of "a certain place"):
On 8 July, 2079, when Chinese troops moved into Kashmir to ‘stabilise the region’ — by wiping out the supply lines to the separatists within their own borders — I hardly gave it a second thought.
The corresponding original text is:
On 8 July, 2079, when Chinese troops moved into Kashmir to ‘stabilise the region’ — by wiping out the supply lines to the separatists within their own borders — I hardly gave it a second thought.
There is also another passage in this story:
She said, ‘We’re helping to fund it, of course. Along with Europe, Japan, and the States. Thanks to the embargo after the Hong Kong riots, the Chinese have no war drones; they’re pitting human soldiers with obsolete equipment against the best Vietnamese robots. Four hundred thousand troops and a hundred thousand civilians will die — while the Allies sit in Berlin playing their solipsist video games.’
The original text is:
She said, ‘We’re helping to fund it, of course. Along with Europe, Japan, and the States. Thanks to the embargo after the Hong Kong riots, the Chinese have no war drones; they’re pitting human soldiers with obsolete equipment against the best Vietnamese robots. Four hundred thousand troops and a hundred thousand civilians will die — while the Allies sit in Berlin playing their solipsist video games.’
This raises concerns about how much content has been censored in this book. I don't have the time or the desire to investigate, but I found a book review on Douban that mentions at least some of it, and there are quite a few mentions - just count the number of "harmonious" in this short review.
It is worth noting that the censors in China are generally more lenient towards imported works, as this work would surely be labeled as "insulting China" if it were discovered that it described a "Chinese civil war," and it would be strongly criticized, making it impossible to be imported into China.
As I write this, I can't help but recall a sentence written by Mr. Lu Xun: "The sight is too unbearable for me to look at."
Perhaps some people may think it is exaggerated, how can this be considered a sight? In fact, it has long been a daily occurrence. Does that mean our daily life is a kind of sight?
But I cannot deny it.
In China, writing science fiction faces censorship that is almost as serious as describing reality, and most people understand that realistically depicting reality here is almost a crime.
Why is this so? The reason is easy to understand. Many science fiction works belong to speculative fiction, which assumes how the world is or introduces new technologies and then extrapolates from there. Therefore, many science fiction works focus on the future, which brings up a question: What will China be like in the future?
As Han Song, a science fiction writer, puts it: "Where is the Communist Party?" He also wrote: "The realization of any dream still relies on the Party to raise the banner." This probably sums it up.