MCLC: Lawsuit over banned memoir

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MCLC LIST
Lawsuit over banned memoir
Source: NYT (4/25/15)
Lawsuit Over Banned Memoir Asks China to Explain Censorship
By IAN JOHNSON
“Li Rui’s Oral Account of Past Events” was published in 2013 in Hong Kong. Credit Sim Chi Yin for The New York Times
BEIJING — When Li Nanyang flew here from Hong Kong two years ago, she brought something eagerly anticipated by many Chinese historians and thinkers: several dozen copies of her father’s memoir. In it, Li Rui, a 98-year-old retired Communist Party official, offered an unvarnished, insider’s account of his experiences in the leadership.
But as Ms. Li passed through customs at the airport, the authorities seized the books, an experience shared increasingly by Chinese travelers arriving home.
Though China’s censorship of the Internet is widely known, its aggressive efforts to intercept publications being carried into the country have received less notice. Ms. Li hopes to change that with a lawsuit she has filed in Beijing challenging the legality of the airport seizures. She doubts she will get her books back, but she is seeking something perhaps more potent: an official explanation for an act of censorship.
Li Nanyang is challenging the confiscation of copies of a book by her father, Li Rui, a party elder.  Credit Sim Chi Yin for The New York Times 
In a nation with the world’s largest population of Internet users, Ms. Li’s legal battle might feel as if it belongs to another time. Yet it is precisely because of China’s sophisticated Web filters that books and other old-fashioned print publications remain a significant outlet for Chinese writers and readers seeking to elude censorship — and a problem for the party in its efforts to limit information that contradicts its sanitized version of history.
For decades, these books flowed quietly into China from Hong Kong, a British colony until 1997, where residents still enjoy greater freedoms. But Chinese authors and publishers say border controls have sharpened dramatically in recent years, making it much riskier to bring banned books to mainland China.
“I feel helpless — there is no way I can change the policy,” said Yin Hongbiao, a professor at Peking University. Like many Chinese scholars, he has published his work in Hong Kong, including well-regarded histories of Mao Zedong’s destructive Cultural Revolution, but has had problems bringing copies of his books home.
Mr. Yin said customs officials had seized his books on several occasions over the past three years, making it difficult to share his work with other scholars. “It’s very hard to get around,” he said.
The tighter border controls — called the “Southern Hill Project,” referring to a watch post monitoring Hong Kong to the south — include expanded use of X-ray imaging on luggage, especially for travelers who appear to be ethnic Chinese arriving on flights or trains from Hong Kong. The authorities have also put tour guides on notice and asked them to pass on warnings to visitors who might be tempted to buy the political magazines and unauthorized biographies of Chinese leaders sold in Hong Kong bookstores.
The focus, though, has been on people who bring in bundles of books, which are easier to spot in X-ray images.
The heightened measures date to the run-up to the Communist Party meeting in 2012 when Xi Jinping took power. A regulation issued in January of that year said all travelers from Hong Kong must submit to stricter luggage controls.
“Hong Kong has become an important source of harmful publishing activity,” a widely circulated order said. The materials, many published in the United States or the West, it added, “distort Chinese revolutionary history, party history, the history of New China and reform and opening, disparage the party and government leaders.”
It took time, but Hong Kong publishers say the impact of the new regulations is now noticeable. Some report a significant drop in sales as word has spread among visitors from the mainland that they can no longer bring back books or magazines with content considered politically objectionable.
“The effect on sales has been obvious,” said Bao Pu, whose New Century Press has published many books on sensitive chapters in Chinese history. “The control of Hong Kong publishing has significantly tightened.”
Customs authorities in China have broad powers to seize anything, from pornography to works that ”disturb social order” or “attack the Chinese Communist Party.” But when seizing a publication, officials rarely say which clause it has violated. Such ambiguity leads travelers to refrain from bringing any book or publication into China that could cause even the slightest alarm.
Ms. Li’s lawsuit is trying to force customs officials to specify what they object to in her father’s memoir. That has put them in an awkward position, in part because her father remains a party member in good standing.
Though he was purged from the leadership several times — including a stretch of about 20 years when he labored in the countryside after challenging policies that led to mass famine in the late 1950s — Mr. Li was rehabilitated after Mao’s death and played a crucial role in restoring to power other party members, some of whom remain influential. And yet he regularly calls for more democracy in the party, and supports a journal that delves into darker sides of the Communist Party’s history.
His 467-page memoir, “Li Rui’s Oral Account of Past Events,” published in 2013 in Hong Kong, is part of that tradition. In the kind of detail that is airbrushed from official histories, Mr. Li candidly describes the disastrous policies of Mao and a crucial meeting in 1959 when opponents tried to stop him. Mr. Li also shares his views on officials he met in his career, including most of the country’s top leaders.
Ms. Li said that her father was ordered not to speak to foreign journalists nearly a decade ago and that he declined to join her lawsuit because of his age. But in February, he attended a meeting to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the death of Zhao Ziyang, the reformist party secretary sacked before the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. According to two people present who asked not to be identified, Mr. Li spoke of his book’s seizure and the party’s failure to establish a constitutional government.
Ms. Li, 65, who lives in the San Francisco area after a career in the Department of Energy’s National Laboratories, said the lawsuit was her personal quest to highlight that failure.
“I want people to think less like subjects and more like citizens,” she said. “I want people to take responsibility for changing China and not wait for higher-ups to reform the system.”
“I don’t expect to win,” she added, “but I want to draw attention to the custom office’s practices.”
A court in Beijing accepted her lawsuit in September after she established that she was still a Chinese citizen despite living abroad for the past 25 years. According to Chinese law, a hearing was supposed to have been held within three months. But the courts have issued a series of extensions, most recently this month.
“They can keep postponing the case,” said her lawyer, Xia Nan, “even though it’s not in keeping with the spirit of the law.”
Liu Junning, a scholar of political philosophy who has been blacklisted, said he did not think Ms. Li had much chance of getting an answer from the government.
“If the authorities want her to win, she can win,” he said. “But if she wins the case, it would be seen as an encouragement to others.”
Li Pei contributed research.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on April 28, 2015
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