The Bookworms of China

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore who is a Beijing journalist writes this article. In China, sense they are a communist country, censors every book that gets published there. However in recent years, everything about that has changed. “Driving sales is a literate population that emphasizes education and self-improvement. Censorship has become less draconian since Mao’s time and publishing has become more commercial. As a result, readers of Chinese books today have more choice of genre, voice and subject matter than they have had at any time in the last 60 years.” (Montefiore, “Bookworms”).  In the past censorship has been so bad that many schools and libraries had to be shut down due the Cultural Revolution due to the fact that books were being banned and the places that still had the banned books were being forced to shut down. “Writers under Mao could be executed, imprisoned or ostracized for political incorrectness.  But such suffering became part of China’s creative legacy in the 70’s, thanks to “scar literature,” a popular genre that describes the horrors of the era.”  (Montefiore, “Bookworms”).  Now China is becoming a lot more liberated and more books in all sorts of genres are being published. “There are challenges, of course. As in the West, online retailers are squeezing independent bookstores and digitization is hurting sales of printed books; more distinctively local is the problem of piracy. And while international publishing houses are eager to enter this market, local writers and publishers complain that because of red tape the number of books published in China is still well below par for a country this size. There is also censorship and political pressure. No guidebook of forbidden topics, no glossary of forbidden words, exists.” (Montefiore, “Bookworms”).

           

      This article relates to education because sense very few books can be published, it greatly effects children, teens, and college students who are enrolled in schools or universities. Without books the literacy rates drop down very dramatically and I am pretty sure that students do not learn enough without those censored books to broaden their minds and keep them aware about what is going on in the world. Personally, I believe that censoring books is a huge waste of time for the Chinese government. I mean I think the fact that sweatshops, how women are aborting their daughters due to the fact that in Chinese culture, families value their sons more, and the fact that there is extreme poverty going on in Beijing is a little but more important than what is being written in books.
http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/the-promise-of-chinas-publishing-industry/