Books III

Maybe I haven't been to the right places, but it seems to me that Chinese bookstores are filled with Chinese literature and rarely translations of non-Chinese works, not because they are censored but because maybe there is not a large enough market to make it worthwhile for publishers to stock the shelves. Who knows, maybe the modern Chinese reading audience, like many descendants of ancient cultures with a collective memory of past greatness, can't stand modernity and want to escape into a more idyllic past, where hindsight provides a sense of reassurance instead of the frightening unknown of the century ahead.

There is still a large enough print market in the US where books like John Adams stays at the top of the Bestseller List for months. Obama's books, whether or not you agree with his ideology, reinforces the CIVIC CULTURE of community politics and discourse. But Chinese in general do not want to cause a ruckus, to rock the boat. Demonstrators or protestors, no matter how just the cause, are seen as trouble-makers. The bomber-jacket-wearing Lincolnesque Joe Six-pack in the Norman Rockwell painting who stands up in a townhall meeting to speak his mind is seen in Chinese eyes as a neer-do-well who should go with the flow and not bring trouble to our small town.

Chinese Central Television usually likes to air the parliamentary brawls in Taipei, to demonstrate how dangerous and chaotic democracy is. Perhaps CCTV would also like to air the riots of construction workers whose fly-by-night employers with close friends in the Chinese Communist Party left them without months in back-pay? Perhaps CCTV would like to air but five minutes of the Taiwanese political talk shows (complete with hunch-backed, Larry-King-brand suspender-wearing hosts)?

Perhaps if the works of American union organizers and European anarchist agitators were translated into Mandarin? I respect the work of Mormon missionaries who speak FLUENT Chinese and preach the good word in China, but I think it would better serve the working class Han if translated copies of US Army Technical Manual TM-31-210 were passed around, to give a voice to People whom the Party is supposed to represent, but I digress.