Clinton Memoir Censored by State-Owned Chinese Publisher
Sep 29th, 2003 • Posted in: NewsBEIJING
The Chinese publisher of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s memoir last week admitted that the translated text has been censored, with the removal of 10 passages criticizing or commenting on Chinese policy.
Simon and Schuster, the memoir’s U.S. publisher, last week demanded a recall and full translation of the Chinese version of Clinton’s “Living History” — a move that was shrugged off by Liu Feng, vice editor-in-chief of Yilin Press.
Liu has defended the edits as “minor, technical” alternations that helped the publisher get the book to market before piracy cut too deeply into sales, reported the New York Times.
The edits include the removal of several passages, including one mentioning Tiananmen Square and another lamenting China’s “dismal record on human rights and its policy of condoning forced abortions as a means of imposing its ‘one child policy.’”
Another edit recasts Harry Wu — described by Clinton as a “human rights activist who had spent 19 years as a political prisoner in Chinese labor camps” — only as a person “prosecuted for espionage and detained awaiting trial,” noted the Times.
“We have made technical changes to the content in some parts of the book in order to win more Chinese readers,” Liu insisted. “But the changes do not hurt the integrity of the book.”
Liu’s Yilin Press has printed more than 200,000 copies of Clinton’s book in at least four editions, reported the Associated Press.
Simon and Schuster last week posted side-by-side translations of the missing and edited passages in English and Chinese. The translations are available free of charge on the company’s Web site.
