China’s Censors Announce Policy of Strict New Curbs on What Public Can Read

BEIJING — China’s newly appointed press and book censors held their first news conference Friday and made it clear that they intend to impose far stricter control over what its people are permitted to read.

The Cabinet-level media and publications office, created as part of China’s campaign against “bourgeois liberalization,” will have power over 13,000 officials in Chinese press and publishing circles, its leaders said.

They said the office has the power to close newspapers and magazines and to fire, replace and discipline editors. The office will also be able to censor publication of newspaper articles and to ban publication of books, both Chinese and foreign.

“For instance, the book written by the British writer (D. H.) Lawrence, entitled ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover,’ ” explained Liu Gao, vice director of the new office. “As you know, this book has a very obvious portrait of sexual activities.

Will Corrupt the Young

“We think that the unchecked dissemination of this book in China will corrupt the minds of young people and also is against Chinese tradition. After consulting with experts, we have made the decision to stop the distribution of this book.”

Similarly, said Liu, his office has barred publication of a new book by one of China’s most prominent novelists, Zhang Xianliang, because it describes the psychology and sexual feelings of middle-school students.

Du Daozheng, the head of the new office, acknowledged that it has already closed down four newspapers in China. It has also suspended publication of a series of popular magazines, which in recent years ran up large profits by publishing stories about romance, martial arts, crime and corruption.

“Some of them have very low and mean (vulgar) contents,” he said.

According to Du, in order to prevent being shut down, any Chinese newspaper, magazine or publishing house must uphold the “four cardinal principles”--socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the leadership of the Communist Party, and belief in Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung thought.

In addition, Du said, the new media office will make sure that all the 1,574 newspapers, 5,240 periodicals and 446 publishing houses in China have “qualified” editors and a sound leadership team.

The creation of the new censorship apparatus represents a dramatic turnabout from the time last year when the Chinese regime was talking about loosening, not tightening, government controls on the press.

At a conference on the Chinese press last summer, the deputy chief of the Communist Party propaganda department said he felt that newspaper and magazine editors should be given much greater authority to decide on their own what to publish.

Last fall, Chinese Minister of Culture Wang Meng, himself a novelist, said he felt that Chinese authorities should confine censorship to a few particularly touchy areas such as works on religion, racial minorities and “persons in sensitive positions.”

“Every year, there are over 10,000 short stories, over 1,000 novelettes and more than 100 novels published in China. If the government had to censor all of these, then the State Council would end up as a reading club,” he said.

These moves toward greater tolerance of publishing freedom ended last winter in the aftermath of the nationwide series of student demonstrations for democracy. The media and publications office was set up Jan. 21, less than a week after former Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang was forced to resign.

Edited Intellectual Paper

Du, a former editor in chief of the Guangming Daily, the official Chinese newspaper for intellectuals, was appointed last month to take charge of the office. He acknowledged at Friday’s press conference that the establishment of the office was linked with “the present struggle against bourgeois liberalization.”

However, he insisted that the main reason for setting up the new government press unit was simply that the number of newspapers, magazines and publishing houses in China has increased so rapidly that there is a need for an organization to regulate them.

Underlying the ideological disputes about what can be published in China are severe economic tensions.

The highly profitable tabloid newspapers and magazines that began publishing in China three years ago drove up the prices of paper and newsprint. By doing so, they aroused the ire of staid, serious party publications, which suddenly found themselves with fewer readers and higher bills.

Du said his new office will have its own staff of 300 to control distribution of paper and to supervise newspapers, periodicals, books, printing and publishing. It will also have control over publishing houses, bookstores and other work units with more than 13,000 people in them.

For the current year, he said, the main task of the office will be “reorganizing our press and publications. . . . This kind of straightening up will be done in a positive way. We will hold educational work for those publications having errors or mistakes.”

Du said that his new office will be responsible for carrying out “checkups” of what is written in the Chinese press. He said that these will generally appear after publication, but that, on some occasions, there will be censorship before publication.

China’s new press overseer also left open the possibility that his office might seek prosecution of some editors or writers. In some instances, he said, “we may have to turn to judicial organs.”