Trickle-Down Censorship

Book excerpt: A Westerner's inside look into the workings of Chinese society. For six years, from 2005 to 2011, Australian JFK Miller worked in Shanghai for English-language publications censored by state publishers under the aegis of the Chinese Communist Party. In this wry memoir, he offers a view of that regime, as he saw it, as an outsider from the bottom up. Trickle-Down Censorship explores how censorship affected him, a Westerner who took free speech for granted. It is about how he learned censorship in a system where the rules are kept secret; it is about how he became his own Thought Police through self-censorship; it is about the peculiar relationship he developed with his censors, and the moral choices he made as a result of censorship and how, having made those choices, he viewed others. This is also the story of a re-emerging colossus - China, the world's most populous nation and one of its oldest civilizations - and how the Chinese relate to foreigners and the outside world. The so-called "clash of civilizations" is played out in the microcosm of JFK Miller's experience working under Chinese state censorship.