Travels with My Censor

One reader said that the Chinese people adapt to censorship in clever ways. Credit Illusration by Javier Jan

My Chinese censor is Zhang Jiren, an editor at the Shanghai Translation Publishing House, and last September he accompanied me on a publicity tour. It was the first time Id gone on a book tour with my censor. When I rode the high-speed train from Shanghai to Beijing, Zhang sat beside me; at the hotel in Beijing, he stayed on the same floor. He sat in on my interviews with the Chinese media. He had even prepared the tour schedule on a spreadsheet, which was color-coded to represent five types of commitments, with days that lasted as long as thirteen hours. Other authors had warned me about such schedules, so before the tour I sent Zhang a request for more free time. His response was prompt: In my experience, the tours in China are always tough and exhausting. Hope you understand it.

And that was allno adjustment, no apology. In China, theres a tendency toward brutal honesty, and even the censored media may tell you things you dont want to hear. During my tour, one major Shanghai newspaper, Wenhui Daily, ran a six-thousand-word profile that began with the sentence Peter Hessler is now forty-five years old, and hes gotten a lot fatter, and he has wrinkles around the corners of his eyes. In Beijing, a television host finished his interview, shut off the camera, and said, To be honest, I liked your wifes book better than yours.

There are a couple of things that I should clarify. The first is that I weigh a hundred and fifty pounds. The second is that its not really fair to describe Zhang Jiren as a censor. Its true that he makes my books politically acceptable to the Chinese authorities, but censorship is only one of his duties. Zhang directs the nonfiction division at Shanghai Translation, where he also has to find translators, edit manuscripts, gauge political risks, and handle publicity. Hes thirty-seven years old but looks younger, a thin man with buzz-cut hair and owlish glasses. His background is in philosophy, and he wrote a masters thesis on Herbert Marcuse, the neo-Marxist thinker. Once, Zhang told me that he had studied Marcuse because his ideas are a powerful tool for Chinese to resist the long-term propaganda campaigns.

On the tour, Zhang was omnipresent, not because he wanted to monitor me but because he was responsible for virtually everything that happened. And yet his presence was quiet: usually, he was off to the side, listening and observing but saying little. He always wore sneakers, an old T-shirt, and calf-length trousers, and this casual outfit, during thirteen-hour days, sometimes made me feel like I was being given a tour of Purgatory by a neo-Marxist grad student. But I appreciated the guidance. Recently, there have been a number of articles in the foreign press about Chinese censorship, with the tone highly critical of American authors who accept changes to their manuscripts in order to publish in mainland China. The articles tend to take a narrowly Western perspective: they rarely examine how such books are read by Chinese, and editors like Zhang are portrayed crudely, as Communist Party hacks. This was one reason I went on the tourI figured that the best way to understand censorship is to spend a week with your censor.

Since Xi Jinping became President, in 2013, China has engaged in an increasingly repressive political crackdown. The authorities have also become more antagonistic toward the foreign press; its now harder for journalists to renew their visas, and many report being hassled by local authorities while on research trips. And yet the reading public has begun to discover nonfiction books about China by foreigners. More than any other editor, Zhang has tapped into this trendall but one of his six best-selling titles in the past few years have been foreign books about China. In Zhangs opinion, this reflects the new worldliness of readers, which he believes says more about the countrys long-term direction than the censorship or the propaganda does. The Party turns left this year, and maybe it turns right this year, Zhang wrote to me in 2014. In my opinion, the only certain thing is that Chinese people are much more individualized and open-minded.

In 1998, when I wrote River Town, my first book, it was inconceivable that a foreigners portrait of contemporary China would be published there, for reasons both political and commercial. There wasnt much of a market for books about China in the United States, either. I had just spent two years as a Peace Corps teacher at a college in Fuling, a small, remote city on the Yangtze River, and I finished the first draft without a contract. On the opening page, I wrote, There was no railroad in Fuling. It had always been a poor part of Sichuan Province and the roads were bad. To go anywhere you took the boat, but mostly you didnt go anywhere. The word poor appeared thirty-six times in the book; I used dirty more than two dozen times. I never thought seriously about such details until a publisher accepted the manuscript.

After that, I sent a draft to two friends from Fuling: Emily Yang, one of my former students, who was a native of the town, and Adam Meier, another Peace Corps volunteer. Their comments were almost completely contradictory. Emily wrote, I think no one would like Fuling city after reading your story. But I cant complain, as everything you write about is the fact. I wish the city would be more attractive with time. Meanwhile, Adam thought I had softened the portrayal. He was particularly concerned that I had omitted an incident that occurred near the end of our two years, when we went downtown with a video camera to record places that we wanted to remember. A crowd gathered and accused us of being journalists filming images of poverty to show Americans, which was a common charge at that time. We explained that we were teachers, but the crowd turned violent, kicking and hitting us until we ran away.

This was my most disturbing experience in Fuling, and I left it out of the first draft. One of the books main themes was the slow, sometimes painful way in which we had been accepted by locals, and I worried about undermining this message with a description of the mob in the final chapter. But, after discussing it with Adam, I decided that the scene was necessary. And this set the tone for my editing: I corrected details that were wrong, but I didnt touch anything that felt honest or raw. I left the word poor on page 1 and everywhere else that it appeared. I decided, effectively, that I would ignore a certain emotional side of the likely Chinese response.

I realized that I might not be welcome in Fuling after the book appeared. At the end of 2000, about a month before publication, I made a final trip to visit friends. I attended the wedding of one of my favorite former students, and then I gave a talk at a remote middle school where another former student was teaching. Shortly after I began my lecture, policemen arrived from Chongqing, the regional capital. They announced that the event was cancelled and escorted me off the stage. I returned to Beijing, and the following week almost everybody I had visited in Fuling was interrogated. The police detained the bride and groom to ask about our friendship, and another student telephoned me, sounding confused. Is it possible for the police to listen to what you say on the telephone? he asked. They knew all the things that you and I have been talking about recently.

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Travels with My Censor