Censorship

[Author note: To glimpse some of the future faces of Chinese media – my students – please click here.]

From: Chris Eberhardt

To: Thomas Friedman

Subject: Looking for an Arab Spring in China

Dear Thomas Friedman:

Ludvík Vaculík’s novel The Guinea Pigs is charming and unsettling at the same time. From the outset, Vaculík disarms the reader by treating the tale as if it were being read to us by a parent at bedtime. “Our family,” the protagonist tells us, “is originally from the country.

A few days ago I predicted that, if PEN World Voices Festival kept up its smart pace, at the closing night Wole Soyinka would be “pondering the discrepancies in the duality foundations of M-theory.” Turns out, I wasn’t that far off! For the Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture, rather than pontificating on the magical realm of string theory, Soyinka delivered an address dripping in other forms of magic, sorcery, and necromancy. Writers, he says, have the power to change the world with their supernatural powers.

PEN American Center is taking it up a couple of notches this year. The hub of this year’s World Voices Festival of International Literature is centered in the über-hip Chelsea and Meatpacking neighborhoods of Manhattan, specifically at the Standard Hotel and the High Line Park, both head turning features of this snappy area, where supermodels and Diane von Furstenberg brush up against the Hudson River and some of New York City’s most exciting architecture.

BEIJING I have been told that in China there are three kinds of people, men, women and female Ph.D.s. I would also say that in China there are three groups of people, the elites, old hundred names (the common Chinese), and government officials.

BEIJING - A conversation via Google gchat, I was in China, she was in the United States:

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia — Just days before Christmas, Hungary's new right-wing government, which now controls a near-invincible two-thirds of parliament, succumbed to temptation: It rubber-stamped a draconian-sounding new media law that looked as if it would slip a leash of censorship around the necks of both traditional and online media.