OK, so I write for a paper in China about various things going on in the world likely to be of interest to advanced level students of English. This month I thought I’d treat them to an obituary of Hunter S Thompson.
That meant getting the story through several managerial layers of a newspaper owned by the Chinese state – which may well consider the life and reputation of a crazed libertarian dingbat as the kind of hazmat likely to corrupt the flower of Chinese youth.
The job: get an honest account of the life, times and doings of Dr Gonzo to a Chinese readership while steering around the ideological and institutional prejudices of the medium and its controllers.
It’s worth saying that censorship in the Chinese media probably isn’t as bad as most people assume. The papers don’t fulfil their old function as a transmission belt for orders from the government to the people. Even state run papers have to operate commercially to a greater or lesser extent, and this predisposes them against boring material.
When the CCP was actually communist, you could argue that they had enough of the traditional Chinese respect for the power of words to think it worth censoring some material and mandating other material. Now that the CCP has turned capitalist, it seems to have adopted a cynical Marxist perspective: ideas don’t matter all that much, since all they really do is stimulate the circulation of commodities, something which the government is very much in favour of.
Take a look at your Sunday paper and tell me how wrong they are.
So in general, no problem. But in particular…well, there might be a few issues. The decay of communism as an ideology in China has left behind it a kind of Daily Mail morality - the familiar peurile anxiety about role models and healthy examples. There’s a deep ambiguity about the commercial tide sweeping the country. It’s provided people with the opportunity to make their own way and make money in the process, but also seems to undermine traditional patterns of belief and behaviour that go back way before the CCP was ever thought of. “No face! No face!” a Beijing taxi driver told a friend of mine recently – meaning “nothing to respect, so no prospect of respect for me.”
Back to gonzo. I knew that the editors were going to get some stuff that would put a pretty heavy strain on their tolerances, stuff about collecting guns and making home made bombs and drinking all day, stuff about the pure flavour of gonzo. So I started off with some heavy duty credentialing, listing the number of big news outlets that had featured Thompson’s death prominently. Then I got onto the guns and the peacocks on the lawn and the unexplained nighttime explosions, etc.
The only thing I left out was the drugs. This is missing the obvious in a way - failing to point out that the man you see in front of you, is, actually, a lizard. But while manic ingestions epitomised Thompson’s outlook, they didn’t actually inform it. He’d have written more if he’d been smashed less of the time, so it seemed like a form of poetic justice. And besides, it probably just wouldn’t have got through. It wasn’t worth the risk.
The work itself was less of a problem. Inasmuch as Thompson wrote with a moral outlook, his main enemy was corruption in the widest sense of the term – the kind of ethical decay that makes material corruption possible. No issues with that in China.
I took the risk of quoting from his obit of Richard Nixon, to the effect that the late president’s body should have been burned in a trash can. This was a bit tricky, because Nixon was the man who from the Western end of things started the whole China reform business off. Also, as in other dictatorships, there’s a strong orientation towards stressing the legitimacy of power. But I thought I’d give it a try and in the event it got through. I suspect that this is because, for a Chinese readership, political knockabout amongst Westerners is a form of entertainment. It’s the Chinese version of a “funny foreigner” story.
In the end, I managed to get the article through without it being knocked back or without any amendments being demanded. I think it gave a good summary of Thompson’s work, life and outlook. But I did knock these into what I believed to be a framework that got me past the gatekeepers and resonated with the readership. I didn’t translate him into Chinese but I did translate him into China.
UPDATE, Saturday: I think this needs a bit more. Once you take the drugs out of Thompson and put him in China, something odd happens. He turns into a stiff necked, aggressive Chinese reformer of the self-strengthener/May 4 movement type. Conversely, most of his imitators in the West focus on the drugs to the exclusion of any of the moral inspiration for his life and writing. Maybe this is why I was allowed to get away with mentioning his suicide, something which usually presses the buzzer marked "unhealthy influence" in the mind of a Chinese editor. Chinese intellectuals are supposed to "speak truth to power" and in context Thompson resembles some solemn scholar on his way to give the emperor a bollocking about salt taxes, opium or whatnot. Time was, that was a pretty sure way of getting yourself sawn in half, lengthways. So it all sort of fits.
Fascinating post. I was reading the China Daily around about a decade ago and on subjects that didn't touch on China it was a decent news source - and the quality of the English was pretty solid too.
Posted by: Natalie | March 07, 2005 at 01:53 AM