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※ [本文轉錄自 Gossiping 看板 #1JEcX69g ]

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就前幾天3/29的新聞而已，英國「衛報」的報導。
大概說一下內容：

澳洲的小說家LA (Louisa) Larkin 在2012 寫了一本關於
南極研究站被傭兵包圍的驚慫小說，被讀者文摘英文本看上，
準備在文摘裡刊登節縮本。但在交付印刷的過程中，
被負責的中國印刷廠發現，Larkin的小說裡有個人物的母親
因為加入法輪功在中國被迫害，所以出走到澳洲。
即使小說的故事完全不是以中國迫害人權問題為主題，
而且讀者文摘英文本也沒在中國上市，但中國的檢查制度的
黑手同樣伸進來。



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中國藉著低價的印刷成本，搞起跨國的思想檢查，連美國人都得屈服，
而且這次屈服的是讀者文摘，冷戰時代標竿的反共刊物。
那些說中資藉由服貿而進入臺灣印刷業和出版通路後，不會影響
言論自由的人，只能說太天真無知了。

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/29
/readers-digest-chinese-stooge-censorship

How Reader's Digest became a Chinese stooge

Reader's Digest is alleged to have censored stories in its publication to
maintain a cheap publishing deal in China

Nick Cohen
The Observer, Saturday 29 March 2014 18.00 GMT


The notion that the formerly mighty American publisher Reader's Digest would
allow the Chinese Communist party to censor its novels would once have
appeared so outrageous as to be unimaginable. In the globalised world, what
was once unimaginable is becoming commonplace, however. The Australian
novelist LA (Louisa) Larkin has learned the hard way that old certainties no
longer apply as the globalisation of trade leads to the globalisation of
authoritarian power.

The fate of her book is more than a lesson in modern cynicism. It is the most
resonant example of collaboration between the old enemies of communism and
capitalism I have encountered.

Larkin published Thirst in 2012. She set her thriller in an Antarctic
research station, where mercenaries besiege a team of scientists.

Larkin was delighted when Reader's Digest said it would take her work for one
of its anthologies of condensed novels. Thirst would reach a global audience
and – who knows? – take off. Reader's Digest promised "to ensure that
neither the purpose nor the opinion of the author is distorted or
misrepresented", and all seemed well.

One of Larkin's characters trapped in the station is Wendy Woo, a
Chinese-Australian. Woo fled to Australia because the Chinese authorities
arrested her mother for being a member of the banned religious group Falun
Gong. Larkin has her saying that she had not "learned until much later of the
horrific torture her mother had endured because she refused to recant".

State oppression in China is not a major theme of a novel set in Antarctica.
But Larkin needed to provide a back story for Woo and a link between her and
the villains of her drama. In any case, she was a free author living in a
free country and was free to express her abhorrence of torture and the denial
of freedom of conscience. Or so she thought, until she discovered last week
that she was not as free as she thought.

The cost of printing makes up the largest part of the price of book
production. Publishers have outsourced manufacturing to China, like so many
other industries have done. The printing firm noticed the heretical passages
in Larkin's novel. All references to Falun Gong had to go, it said, as did
all references to agents of the Chinese state engaging in torture.

They demanded censorship, even though the book was a Reader's Digest
"worldwide English edition" for the Indian subcontinent, Australia, New
Zealand, Malaysia and Singapore – not, you will note, for China.

Phil Patterson from Larkin's London agents, Marjacq Scripts, tried to explain
the basics for a free society to Reader's Digest. To allow China to engage in
"extraterritorial censorship" of an Australian novelist writing for an
American publisher would set a "very dangerous precedent", he told its
editors. Larkin told me she would have found it unconscionable to change her
book to please a dictatorship.

When she made the same point to Reader's Digest, it replied that if it
insisted on defending freedom of publication, it would have to move the
printing from China to Hong Kong at a cost of US$30,000.

People ask: "What price liberty?" Reader's Digest has an answer that is
precise to the last cent: the price of liberty is US$30,000. The publisher,
from the home of Jefferson, Madison and the first amendment, decided last
week to accept the ban and scrap the book.

Globalisation has turned the world upside down. Reader's Digest was so
anti-communist in the cold war that its enemies muttered that the CIA might
as well have been funding it. They sneered at its middlebrow manners as much
as its politics – "I mean condensed novels for Christ's sake."

In 1982, the sight of Solidarity, a genuinely working-class movement, rising
against the Soviet occupation of Poland, disoriented the western left. Susan
Sontag, who knew how to hurt when she had to, wiped the smiles from a few
lips by raising the despised Digest. At a meeting at New York town hall
attended by the publisher of the Nation, and many another eminent figures
from the American left, she told her listeners that they had been so keen to
defend the victims of McCarthyism and American capitalism that they had
forgotten about the victims of Soviet communism.

Imagine if you will, she continued, "someone who read only the Reader's
Digest between 1950 and 1970 and someone in the same period who read only the
Nation or the New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed
about the realities of communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause.
Can it be that our enemies were right?''

The audience booed her. But although you can find many on the left as
indifferent to universal human rights today, I'll say one thing for them: no
one can smack them over the head with Reader's Digest now.

During the cold war, business had to be anti-communist. The communists wanted
to take capitalists' money and, on occasion, to kill them too. Since the fall
of the Berlin Wall and the rise of the state capitalist dictatorships in
Russia and China, defending free speech, defending even the right of an
author to criticise torture in passing, may risk the chance to profit. For if
China offers the cheapest printers and a huge market, who wants to alienate
its leaders? No one, if the grotesque spectacle of the "market focus on
China" at last year's London Book Fair was a guide. The British Council and
the British book trade kept the Communist party sweet by refusing to invite
any Chinese "visiting authors" whose work had upset the regime.

When the Chinese Communist party was Maoist, Reader's Digest denounced it.
Now it guarantees profits, Reader's Digest censors on its behalf. When Putin
was in the KGB, bankers, lawyers and industrialists deplored the old Soviet
Union. Now Putin is in the Kremlin, they ensure that the first aim of David
Cameron's advisers in the Ukraine crisis is to do nothing that might "close
London's financial centre to Russians".

Everyone knows LP Hartley's line: "The past is a foreign country: they do
things differently there." If that were ever true, it isn't now. For most
people, the present is foreign and frightening. The intellectual left that
Sontag so magnificently upbraided in 1982 had little real power. You only had
to look at it to see that.

By contrast, the publishers, banks and corporations, who have taken over the
role of deferring to Moscow and Beijing, have power and money and the ability
to use both.

--
There are a lot of things we don't want to know about the people we love.

                                                    --- Chuck Palahniuk

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