Censorship in China: Part Three

New on the site this time:

Only one of my translations - Xu Jilin’s brief comments on the American election. In “What is the Meaning of Taylor Swift's 100 Million Dollar Ragdoll Cat?”  Xu argues that Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris will swing the election in Harris’s favor.  The piece is not meant to be deep – Xu wrote it in his spare time while traveling in Turkey – but illustrates nonetheless the degree to which Chinese intellectuals are following the US election.  The link to censorship is that Xu took it down shortly after posting it.

The other translation – into Chinese this time - is of a piece I published recently in China Books Review on China’s New Left, in which I criticized New Left intellectuals for having embraced the state. I was flipping through my WeChat subscriptions a few days after arriving in China in early September, and to my surprise found it translated and available online in China. 

Turnabout is fair play, I guess; I don’t ask my Chinese authors for their permission before I translate their work, and this translator did not talk to me or the China Books Review.  The translation appears on the WeChat forum of someone who claims to be a former railroad worker who was fired for his activism.  In other words, a genuine leftist who appreciated my takedown of the phony New Left in China.  It appears that former railway workers read widely.

I was a bit taken aback, because while the piece is hardly scathing, I did not write it to be read in China – and there I was.  Foreigners have been detained and harangued for hours for less.  I mentioned this to a Chinese friend, who wisely remarked that “if anyone notices it, the censors will take it down.”  Well, here we are three weeks later and not only is the piece still available in China, but it has also been read almost 40,000 times.  Of course, this is a drop in the bucket in China, but surely a personal best for me.

A couple of notes for readers planning trips to China. 

For phone service, I used eSim (you have to have a fairly recent, top-end phone) and Airalo (a company that provides eSim services) and my phone was perfect throughout (you don’t have a Chinese phone number, or any phone number, but you have WeChat and WhatsApp and can phone through them if necessary).  I use Astrill VPN, but did not turn it on for my phone, because what eSim and Airalo do is connect you to Internet service providers in China, so of course I did not want to block that.  I don’t know why, but Google services worked like a charm on my phone from start to finish; I could even listen to Spotify on the Beijing subway.  The only downside was that a Chinese phone number remains necessary for certain apps, and you don’t have one, but there are sometimes workarounds if you are persistent.  I turned the Astrill VPN on for my laptop, otherwise no Google, so for me, no life.  Everything worked like a charm most of the time.

In order to promote tourism, the Chinese government now allows foreigners to pay via WeChat (Weixin) and Alipay (here’s a Youtube video that I did not watch on how to do this).  All you have to do is enter your credit card number and you’re ready to go.  You may have to do things twice, and there are a couple of bugs here and there (you can order cars and cabs through the Alipay service, but not Weixin, because Weixin requires a Chinese phone number, which a friend might loan you), but in my case it was worked 99% of the time, a very welcome change from last year.
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Enjoy!
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