Made in Censorship

Carlos Rojas, author of Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern China:
In 1930s China, the expression opening a skylight referred to the practice by which newspapers used blank spaces to signal places where the Nationalist censors had demanded cuts, and in Made in Censorship Thomas Chen expertly uses an analysis of a wide array cultural representations of the June Fourth crackdown to figuratively “open a skylight” onto contemporary China’s censorship practices.

Haiyan Lee, author of The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination:
Thomas Chen explodes all the clichés about censorship in China with an engrossing tale about a voluble state that drowns out the silences it creates and social actors who negotiate and collude, evade and dissemble, while cheekily performing self-censorship. A revelation.

Michael Berry, editor of The Musha Incident: A Reader on the Indigenous Uprising in Colonial Taiwan:
In Made in Censorship, Chen takes us on a tour of the narrative history of Beijing 1989, from official government documentaries to iconoclastic novels and films. Chen’s brilliant readings of texts like Sheng Keyi’s Death Fugue, Wang Guangli’s I Graduated, and Stanley Kwan’s Lan Yu reveal the power of narrative to both censor and reveal history.

Nick Admussen, author of Recite and Refuse: Contemporary Chinese Prose Poetry:
This bold and pathbreaking book shatters the consensus that Tiananmen was an inert deletion from Chinese history by showing that Chinese artists discuss Tiananmen repeatedly, deeply, and diversely. Chen makes clear that the practice of censorship is creative and that much of the state’s efforts around Tiananmen attempted to create memory, not just suppress it. Incredibly timely and necessary.