Literatur in China

Hier ein spannender Artikel bei Perlentaucher über die Literaturindustrie in China. Ein Auszug:
“Was mich dabei am meisten faszinierte waren zwei aufs erste völlig unvereinbare, gleichwohl machtvolle Trends: Auf der einen Seite eine schiere Explosion an Aufbruch in eine publizistische Vielfalt, der offenbar die staatliche Führung wenig anhaben kann und will. Und auf der andren Seite so genannte “Netzwerkeffekte“, die bewirken, dass an der Spitze der Erfolgslisten ganz, ganz wenige Autoren, Bücher und Themen – übrigens sowohl internationale wie auch chinesische – alles andere hinter sich lassen.”

An Uncensored Merry Christmas

Censorship in China rings political bells. Hearing or reading about it, we imagine an author or an artist being deprived of his or her freedom of expression. Books and Movies are being banned—it all has this distinct authoritarian scent to it, especially in the Chinese context.

To be sure, there is harsh political censorship in China. However, the issue is much more complex than is portrayed in Western popular media. In fact, the political suppression of the individual freedom of expression in China occurs against the backdrop of a freedom of consuming information increasingly vanishing in Europe.

To give an example. At times we read that a Chinese movie is being shown outside of China while ‘banned’ on the mainland. The government vocabulary of ‘ban’ of course summons up an entire set of political imagery. But it will not tell us what the conditions of censorship in China are, what ‘ban’ actually refers to. I would argue that a wholesale ban is the only way for the government in China to have some sort of control over the information people have access to. Because in a country, where there are no limits to the copying and distribution of dvds, cds, books, etc., you can get any movie you want, fast and cheap. Thus, brutal movies or movies with sexual content are easily accessible, even to children. A government ban appears as the only, and arguably ineffective, way to curtail this access. In short, censorship in China is a policy that has to deal with the fact of a huge, dynamic and essentially uncontrolled market of producing, and distributing various forms of information.
The situation is much different in European liberal societies. Here, the market (production / distribution) of movies, books etc. is tightly controlled by a legal regime of copyright protection and prefigured by various moral-economic rating regimes. It is a tame market, currently only upset by the Internet. There is no politics directly involved here, giving the whole system an air of liberty, which information control in China lacks.

However, the legal regime of copyright protection in Europe nonetheless also features a policing system—and imposes heavy fines on those trying to dodge the system’s rules. It works according the postulate of absolute intellectual property: „all rights reserved“. (There are, however, also new approaches attempting to be more sensitive to the complexities involved in creating content. See the creative commons and their principle of „some rights reserved“). This SPIEGEL-Online Article, on the other hand, highlights how far governments and the industry are willing to go in order to secure copyrights.

The moral-economic rating system is even more intricate. Take the case of movies. In Germany a film has to undergo FSK – Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle (Voluntary Self-Control). An euphemism, of course. There is nothing really voluntary about it, if you want to bring the film to the box office, you have to rate it yourself according to FSK standards. This moral self-sanctioning therefore works so well because of its economic implications.

In China there is no such standardized rating system. Nor is there a proper legal and judicial framework for effectively steering and curtailing the distribution and production of content, of intellectual property. So the only way is to ban content. In Europe, there is not much need for banning because content controls itself according to pervasive rating standards and a tightly controlled system of producing and distributing that very content.

In China consumption is much less controlled than in the West. This has it advantages and disadvantages. It does, however, leave one with a peculiar sense of freedom. A freedom of consumption. One could of course argue that, in turn, freedom of expression suffers. However, both need not be opposed, for, what is the most common and everyday form of individual expression today but consumption—the food we buy, the books we read, the clothes we wear, the music we listen to. Oddly enough, from this perspective China appears more „free“ than Germany, for instance, does.

A peculiar outgrowth of this freedom is the fact, that the even major Chinese search engine Baidu features an mp3 search (like google offers an image search), and the platform for freely distributing music content. Google on the contrary, based in the States, does not offer such a service and certainly never will.

Restaurantbesuch in China

Davor warnt dieser Artikel bei SPIEGEL-Online. Hier zwei Aufnahmen von meinem letzten gastro-kulinarischem Abenteuer – Sichuan Hotpot. Köstlich!

Besondere Darbietung, live Nudelzubereitung in Kungfu-Manier.