Posts tagged 'censorship'

Barney Rosset, one of the most influential publishing figures you never heard of, died last month, aged 89.

Rosset is probably best known for the ground-breaking legal battle he fought to print uncensored versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1959, to pave the way for publishing a banned book he was passionate about, and thought the censors would be far tougher on: Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.

He was a self-confessed ‘maverick’ who published what he liked – and lived a long and colourful life.

Barney Rosset: [They] said I was a maverick. not in the mainstream. [They were] right.'

He dropped acid with Timothy Leary, introduced Samuel Beckett to William Burroughs (he discovered the latter when Allen Ginsberg brought him the manuscript for The Naked Lunch), rejected J.R.R. Tolkein (‘I couldn’t understand a word of it’), flew to Bolivia to beat the CIA to discovering Che Guevara’s diaries, and played piano and drank lemonade with Jack Kerouac and his mother.

In 1951, Rosset bought the fledgling publishing company Grove Press, which had three paperback books on its list. ‘I was doing nothing at the time and thought, This might be interesting,’ he told The Paris Review in 1997. He took the company’s entire inventory to his New York apartment in three suitcases.

Personal freedom was at the core of Rosset’s philosophy. ‘When I grew up in Chicago, communism was my idea of personal freedom. Especially freedom to make love.’ He joined the party, but abandoned it in disgust after he met with reality while visiting Czechoslovakia in 1948.

Writers came to Grove because ‘it championed their work in a hostile environment’, though it often paid low advances.

Rosset said Lady Chatterley’s Lover didn’t much interest him as a novel. He published it as part of a long-term strategy to publish Tropic of Cancer, which he’d loved since he discovered a French edition while at college. He decided that as D.H. Lawrence was a more respected figure than Miller, he ‘would be easier to present as “literature” in the courts’.

‘We prepared very carefully. We decided the best thing to do was send the book through the mail so it would be seized by the post office … The post is a federal government agency, and if they arrest you, you go the federal court. That way you don’t have to defend the book in some small town.’

Grove won the case on appeal, on the basis that the novel has ‘literary merit’. ‘I still don’t like that idea,’ he reflected in 1997. ‘It seems like a compromise to me. But without my really noticing it at the time, that’s what the defense became, and we won.’

Rosset battled to convince Miller to let him publish Tropic of Cancer. ‘He was afraid … He wasn’t such a great crusader,’ he said. ‘He wrote me a letter in which he said: now people come to Paris to buy the book, and they bring it back, and each book that gets into the United States is read by fifty people. What happens if you publish it and we actually win the case? In five years they’ll assign it in college courses and no one will want to read it!’

Eventually, he persuaded him, with help from Miller’s French publisher, Olympia Press. After fighting multiple post-publication obscenity trials in the US, he also won out against the censors – and in the process, changed the law and the publishing culture.

Rosset published Samuel Beckett, after all the established publishers declined Waiting for Godot – which went on to sell well over two million copies. He published Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X, after Doubleday gave it up following Malcolm’s assassination. He published Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book, even though Grove had to make deals with distributors and give them an extra ten percent – because people did steal it. ‘To me, if Random House wouldn’t publish it, that was enough – we would do it.’

And of course, Grove published the Beats – Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs. ‘To me,’ he said, ‘it was writing that came out of Henry Miller. Of course, Miller didn’t recognize them … But the writers – Kerouac especially, and Ginsberg – they had the same free spirit as Miller. They were a way of living, like Miller was.’

A New York Times tribute published after Rosset’s death reflected: ‘If you were a literary young man at the time and wanted to impress the kind of soulful-eyed girl who wore black turtlenecks and smoked Gauloises, there was no better way than to have a stack of Grove books in your dorm room: some Beckett, Burroughs, Robbe-Grillet, Céline. You didn’t necessarily have to have read them. They just had to be visible.’

‘The whole thing was not for real,’ Rosset mused in 1997. ‘It was an unreal time.’

To hook into current debates about freedom of speech and censorship, you can watch the recent Wheeler Centre event Gagging for Freedom, with Jonathan Green, Bernard Keane, Leslie Cannold and James Allan.

Freedom of speech – and freedom from persecution for writers, in particular – has often been a subject for The Wheeler Centre’s events and articles.

This week, Salman Rushdie, one of the world’s most famous persecuted writers, had to cancel his appearance (then the video session that was to replace his physical presence) at India’s Jaipur Literary Festival, due to threats of violence.

Kabita Dhara, veteran of the Jaipur Literary Festival and publisher at Brass Monkey Books (a company that specialises in bringing Indian writing to Australian audiences) gives us the low-down on why it happened – and how it’s connected to Indian politics.

When asked what word he would use to describe the controversy that has surrounded his scheduled appearance at the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) last week, Salman Rushdie uses the word ‘farce’. In an interview with NDTV’s Barkha Dutt, after a scheduled video link with the festival (to make up for his inability to physically attend) was also cancelled due to threats of violence, Rushdie explains that he has been visiting India for years now; he has spoken at events in India a number of times in the past few years. So why all the fuss now?

Fingers are pointing to the fact that it is election time in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, which borders the state of Rajasthan (the state of which Jaipur is the capital). When it was announced that Rushdie would be appearing at the JLF, the Darul Uloom Deoband an ‘influential fundamentalist Islamic seminary’, demanded that Rushdie’s visa be withdrawn. (A poorly thought-out move: Rushdie, born in India of Indian parents, has documentation that means he doesn’t need a visa to enter India.) Consequent events suggest that the government, after initially supporting Rushdie’s visit both on a federal and state level, had second thoughts and decided that courting the 20% Muslim vote in Uttar Pradesh was more important. (One Indian TV presenter likened the situation to instances where villages that struggle with no electricity for years get given free laptops come election time.)

Jaipur, India

Just days before Rushdie was expected in India, emails purporting that three assassins were travelling to Jaipur from Mumbai to murder Rushdie were sent to the festival organisers and government officials, and subsequently to Rushdie himself. Government officials seemed unable to guarantee Rushdie’s safety and doubted that they could control the situation (even though they manage just fine with other visiting international dignitaries and sporting teams). Rushdie decided that it would be irresponsible to attend the festival due to the danger to festival-goers and because of the stress it would place on his family. It was later found that the emails and their content were probably fabricated, and now no organisation is taking responsibility for the emails or the intelligence that informed the emails.

When a video broadcast to the JLF crowds was organised to replace Rushdie’s initial scheduled appearance, the festival organisers again received threats of violent protests in Jaipur and had to cancel. All of which begs the question, while a democracy might see it as prudent to ban a book, how can it, effectively, ban the author? When the government banned The Satanic Verses when it was published in 1988, then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi took pains to clarify that the ban was because of concerns that the book would offend India’s Muslims and cause civil unrest, and that it did not reflect on the literary quality of the work.

The Satanic Verses is banned in India under a law that prevents its importation and dissemination, which raises the question of whether the ban is even relevant anymore given that the book can be downloaded from the internet. This does not mean its author is banned, or that one cannot discuss the book. When four other writers – Hari Kunzru, Amitava Kumar, Jeet Thayil and Ruchir Joshi – decided to read from The Satanic Verses at the JLF, to protest the treatment of Rushdie, they too found themselves under threat of prosecution, although Kunzru and Kumar deliberately read passages that had nothing to do with Islam but reflected instead the quality of Rushdie’s work.

The worrying aspect of this whole saga is the lack of clarity as to, firstly, whether the threats to Rushdie were orchestrated by government officials in a bid to dissuade Rushdie from attending the JLF because of impending elections (an Indian TV presenter charmingly referred to this possibility as ‘match-fixing’) and, secondly, who these people actually are who claim to be speaking for India’s Muslims. While the answer to the first is crucial to answering the second, it can only be speculated on, given that the only evidence is that which has been gleaned from media reports and literary blogs. So let’s consider the answer to the second.

While The Satanic Verses is still banned in a number of countries, after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, in 1998, the fatwa on Salman Rushdie that started the whole controversy was lifted. The book is available in some predominantly Muslim countries such as Turkey, Egypt and post-Gaddafi Libya, and has been translated into Turkish and Arabic. Most relevant to recent events in Jaipur, the book has long been read in India by those who bought it from overseas or downloaded it from the internet – and this group includes Muslims. A number of Indian Muslims have spoken up in defence of Rushdie’s right to free speech and have even sent him messages of support on social media. As Rushdie says in his interview with NDTV, the average Indian Muslim has more to worry about in day-to-day life than to protest about the visit of a writer. So which Muslims were threatened by Rushdie’s presence in Jaipur?

While it is in an elected government’s mandate to pass laws to protect the people of its country, when that country is a democracy, it also has the responsibility to balance that mandate with allowing freedom of expression as granted in its laws and Constitution. A burning question for Indians is how is the world’s largest democracy can justify stifling healthy debate because of threats of violence. (Where is Amartya Sen’s ‘argumentative Indian’ now?)

I will give the last word to Rushdie himself. In a passage in the last chapter of The Satanic Verses – a complex meditation on alienation, migration, Western materialism and the political manipulation of religion (amongst other things) – Rushdie has one stuttering character say, about India,: ‘Fact is … religious fafaith, which encodes the highest ass ass aspirations of human race, is now, in our cocountry, the servant of lowest instincts … ’

Kabita Dhara is director and publisher at Brass Monkey Books.

Today, lazy music writers and smartphone-toting trivia cheats can commiserate over a common problem: Wikipedia has blackened the English-language version of its encyclopaedia for 24 hours.

The action is part of a wider campaign against two controversial bills being considered in the US – the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). Both bills are strongly supported by motion picture and music industry anti-piracy lobbyists.

Users attempting to view Wikipedia’s English articles are instead shown a blacked-out screen, offering information about the SOPA/PIPA legislation. Source: en.wikipedia.org, accessed January 18, 2012

But critics argue that whilst many may support the bills' legitimate intentions to curb piracy, they bestow upon US authorities unprecedented powers to censor online media with a ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ approach, infringing the rights of innocent parties in the process. The legislation – if passed – would also affect sites beyond US borders. Last November, Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt labelled SOPA “Draconian”.

Salman Khan (founder of khanacademy.org, which hosts 2,700 free educational videos on topics ranging from advanced algebra to the Cuban missile crisis) has produced an eleven-minute video explaining the proposed legislation and its startlingly broad impact. Khan provides a clear, highly visual elucidation of the laws and the ways they could empower authorities to effectively destroy websites like Facebook, YouTube or any which allows users to post comments (including yours truly).

The New York Times meanwhile has offered an open-ended discussion on the issue, with Room for Debate posing the question, ‘What’s the best way to protect against online piracy?’. Those offering their considered responses include representatives from the Motion Picture Association of America, Copyright Alliance, Cato Institute and BrainPickings.

Wired.com ‘censored’ its website with black redaction marks. Source: wired.com, accessed January 18, 2012.

With the bills to be considered by the House and Senate in coming weeks, some politicians have already changed their stance. But whether or not the laws progress further, the tense relationship between freedom of speech and protection of intellectual property is unlikely to be resolved simply.

A list of protesting sites can be found at Mashable, or by visiting SopaStrike.com, who coordinated the protest. You can scroll through a gallery of blacked-out pages at GigaOm. For a more irreverent take on the blackout, see The Oatmeal’s protest: we don’t want to spoil the surprise, but it’s an animated GIF featuring Oprah, a koala and a whole lot of love.

In his 2007 essay, ‘The Ecstasy of Influence’, prominent US writer Jonathan Lethem wrote about the essentially shared nature of art and why copyright laws are a betrayal of the spirit of literature. He demonstrated the point by compiling the bulk of the text by stealing lines and sentences from other texts. “Contemporary copyright, trademark, and patent law is presently corrupted,” he wrote. “The case for perpetual copyright is a denial of the essential gift-aspect of the creative act.”

It’s a point his compatriot David Shields took a step further in his 2010 book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, in which he argued against the concept of originality and authenticity in a text that was completely lifted from a multitude of other sources. (Here’s a review.)

We cite these works because there’s been an ongoing debate in art and IT communities for some years about the negative impacts of intellectual property, especially in its online applications. The online intellectual property debate will shape not just how we consume art and entertainment but also the future of the web itself. The Protect IP/Stop Online Piracy Acts are bills currently before Congress that, if passed, will have major impacts on free expression on the web. Activist bloggers are calling the bills a meal ticket for IP lawyers, an internet border around the US, and a potential political blacklist tool. Learn more by reading this article and watching this video.

The literary world has always been riddled with controversy. There’s a couple of controversies doing the rounds that we found of interest for what they say about about a new anthology of American poetry has brought to the fore age-old controversies about the vagaries of taste. A review in the New York Review of Books of the Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry has taken the anthology’s editor to task on several grounds. In reply, the anthology’s editor, prominent poet Rita Dove, has dubbed the criticism, penned by noted poetry critic Helen Vendler, as “sad”. The snarky exchange highlights the challenges of arriving at a literary canon.

Meanwhile, have you ever scanned Amazon book reviews before buying a book and wondered how reliable they are? Have you ever wondered how Amazon comes up with its bestseller lists? Here’s an article on how both the reader reviews and the bestseller lists can be manipulated by those in the know. Another Amazon-related controversy relates to the deal it’s done with public libraries in the US on lending ebooks. Penguin is so unhappy with the deal it recently withdrew ebooks from libraries.

Western countries pride themselves on publishing cultures based on free speech – but is there a case to be made that a kind of self-imposed, market-based censorship exists? The question comes to mind while viewing this comparison of the covers of Time magazine’s US edition to those of its international edition.

Only six per cent of Chinese people are happy, according to a poll published earlier this year in China. This may explain why China spends more on internal security than on its military, according to a CNN report, possibly reaching just under $100 billion this year.

It may also explain why the Chinese government has continued to target high-profile dissenters like artist Ai Weiwei. In the latest twist of an ongoing saga, supporters of the artist have stripped down to their birthday, the Guardian reports. The move follows the news late last week that Ai Weiwei and his collaborators were being investigated for having breached anti-pornography regulations by posing in a series of group nude photographs.

It’s been a tumultuous year for Ai Weiwei, as we’ve reported before. Earlier this year he disappeared for 81 days, held in detention for “economic crimes”. The artist was recently slugged with a bill of about $2.4 million for tax arrears and associated fines, which he claims is part of a series of punitive actions meted out on him by the Chinese government as part of a broader crackdown on dissent. Ai Weiwei claims thousands of supporters have sent him donations totalling up to $800,000 to help him pay his bills.

Earlier this week, visiting Chinese writer-in-exile Liao Yiwu told the Age the Chinese government has cracked down on dissent to prevent spillover effects from the Arab Spring. “The Chinese people were excited when they heard what happened in [the] Arabic world,” he said. “They [went] to the cities, [and] that made the government extremely nervous and they tried to suppress it.” As previously reported, Liao fled China in July after decades of harrassment and suppression by Chinese authorities. “I have the responsibility to let the world know about the real China hidden behind the illusion of an economic boom – a China indifferent to ordinary people’s simmering resentment,” he subsequently wrote in The New York Times.

While Liao Yiwu’s friend Liu Xiaobo, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and key figure behind the Charter 08 movement, is currently serving an 11-year prison sentence for subversion, the Guardian reports his writings are about to be published in English. No Enemies, No Hatred, consisting mostly of Liu’s poems, will be published in the US in January with a foreword by Václav Havel. The newspaper has published the translation of a poem written from prison to his wife, who is reportedly missing.

Correction

When we first published this article, we stated in the last paragraph that Liu Xia was believed missing. This is not the case: she is in fact under house arrest.

Liao Yiwu will be appearing at the Wheeler Centre tonight at 6:15pm

Dissident Chinese writer Liao Yiwu has published an account of how he escaped China in the New York Times. We have previously reported on the writer’s travails on several occasions. Earlier this year, Liao Yiwu was prevented from attending the Sydney Writers Festival by Chinese authorities. Then in July we reported on his flight into exile in Germany. Now, a more detailed account has emerged, one that bears all the hallmark’s of his contrarian insouciance.

“For a writer, especially one who aspires to bear witness to what is happening in China, freedom of speech and publication mean more than life itself,” Liao writes. “I have the responsibility to let the world know about the real China hidden behind the illusion of an economic boom – a China indifferent to ordinary people’s simmering resentment.” Liao, the author of a series of fascinating interviews entitled The Corpse-Walker (published in Australia by Text), has already served a four-year prison sentence, during which his recalcitrance earned him the nickname ‘the Big Idiot’. He also writes of the treatment of another prominent Chinese poet-dissident, Liu Xiaobo. Liu, who in 2008 co-authored Charter 08 – a manifesto demanding greater political and human rights – and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2010, is currently in the third year of an 11-year prison sentence for publishing seditious material. Charter 08 was initially signed by some 350 Chinese intellectuals and has since been signed by about 10,000 more.

Dissident Chinese writer Liao Yiwu has gone into exile. Liao is the compiler of The Corpse Walker, an astonishing collection of interviews with 27 Chinese at the fringes of society in the People’s Republic. As previously reported in the Dailies, Liao was prevented from attending the recent Sydney Writers' Festival by Chinese authorities, and anyone who has read The Corpse Walker would understand why. It’s a searing and indispensable indictment of Chinese history since the 1950s. (Here’s an excerpt and here’s a review.)

Liao Yiwu, photographed in Cologne last year, via Wikipedia

Liao’s dissident spirit was forged during his childhood. He almost died of starvation as an infant during the Great Leap Forward, a series of economic reforms that crippled the Chinese economy and unnecessarily triggered famines that claimed the lives of millions. During the Cultural Revolution, his father was branded a counter-revolutionary and had to divorce his wife to protect the children. Liao came to prominence as a writer after he wrote a poem, called ‘Massacre’, following the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. It landed him in prison for four years, during which time he earned the name of the ‘Big Idiot’ because of his willingness to defy authorities. During his period in incarceration, his wife left him. Following his release, Liao has struggled to continue his work as a writer and as a player of the Chinese flute. The interviews he conducts with the victims of Chinese government policy have regularly landed him and his associates in trouble with authorities. On one occasion, after interviewing two members of the outlawed Falun Gong, he received a knock on the door from two members of the police. Instead of answering the door, Liao jumped out of a third-storey window and lived on the run for three months, never to return to his apartment.

While suppressed in China, The Corpse Walker has sold strongly in foreign markets, particularly in Germany – hence Liao’s decision to move there. There’s a cloack-and-dagger aspect to the Associated Press report of his journey into exile: he changed planes in Hanoi and Warsaw before arriving in Berlin.

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has been released from detention without trial after almost three months in detention. The government’s official news agency Xinhua reported he was released “because of his good attitude in confessing his crimes as well as a chronic disease he suffers from.” Authorities say the artist and his production company stand accused of tax evasion and destroying incriminating evidence. Here’s how we covered the story previously.

‘The Peacock Skirt’, one Aubrey Beardsley illustration which did not land Bob Gould in legal hot water, via WikiCommons

Booklovers across Sydney, and especially in the city’s inner eastern suburbs, will have been saddened this weekend by news of the passing of Bob Gould. Gould, owner of Gould’s Book Arcade in Newtown (his twelfth bookshop), was a stalwart of the trade, as well as one of its more colourful identities. After spending some time as a full-time anti-Vietnam War activist, Gould opened his first store in 1967. Described as “the archetypal political activist”, he continued his rabble-rousing ways, writing prolifically and testing the limits of obscenity laws. He ran foul of the authorities several times for stocking what was then seen as objectionable material – including the erotica of Aubrey Beardsley and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, which was initially banned in Australia. In fact, Gould claimed to have been arrested 12 or 15 times.

In a Sydney Morning Herald report, his daughter Natalie said her father was dismayed by the current state of the political left in Australia. ‘'One of the last things he said to me was that the Labor Party was falling apart and destroying itself.’‘ Bob Gould died after falling in his bookshop. He was 74.

Liao Yiwu, photographed in Cologne last year, via Wikipedia

Meet Liao Yiwu, an author and musician from China’s Sichuan province, which borders Tibet in central China. In his guise as musician, he plays the Chinese flute. In his guise as a writer, he’s a poet, novelist and reporter of some distinction. Not to mention courage. A poem he wrote following the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 – simply entitled ‘Massacre’ – landed him in prison for four years. While in prison, he earned the nickname ‘the Big Idiot’ from fellow inmates for his stubborn defiance of prison authorities. On the 20th anniversary of the massacre, the Paris Review published an essay called ‘Nineteen Days’, in which Liao chronicles how he’d spent the day of the massacre and each of its anniversaries since.

A collection of interviews he recorded with 27 Chinese people on the fringes of society – The Corpse Walker – was a best-seller in Germany (here’s an excerpt, and here’s a review). It was published in Australia by Text last week. Liao had been scheduled to visit Australia to appear in the Sydney Writers' Festival, but has been prevented from travelling to Sydney by Chinese authorities. Festival director Chip Rolley was quoted as saying in The Age’s report that, in addition, Liao has been ordered to desist from publishing his works internationally.

In March 2010, Liao was on his way to a literary festival in Cologne when he was dragged off a plane in Chengdu and placed under house arrest. (After 14 attempts, Liao was eventually permitted to travel to Germany in September, where the above photograph was taken.) Chinese authorities seem to have a thing for airport drama. As we’ve covered before, leading artist Ai Weiwei was arrested at an airport on April 3 this year before he disappeared. He is still missing. After his release from house arrest last year, Liao sent out an email which read, in part:

“Words alone cannot express my outrage. I never considered myself to be a political dissident. I had no interest in politics or in drafting any political manifestos, but my friend Liu Xiaobo was right when he said, ‘To gain and preserve your freedom and dignity, there is no other way except to fight.’

“I will continue to write, document, and broadcast the stories of people living at the bottom rung of society, despite the fact that my stories won’t please the Communist Party of China. I have the responsibility to make people understand the true spirit of the Chinese, which will outlast the rule of the totalitarian government.”

Liu Xiaobo was prevented from travelling to Norway last year to accept his Nobel Prize for Peace, and China has demanded Norway issue an apology for awarding the prize to the writer.

(Click to watch video.)

The line between freedom of speech and vilification is a contentious one. That platitude was borne out last week when the Wheeler Centre hosted a Talking Point event featuring Bernard Keane, Leslie Cannold and James Allan, chaired by Jonathan Green. The discussion centred on the Federal Court action against columnist Andrew Bolt. Discussion touched on whether free speech is a privilege of ‘elites’ who are able to navigate the costly judicial system. The heat generated between the panellists was just about as high as it’s ever been at a Wheeler Centre event.

Image of an anti-war protester in Sydney, 2005, via WikiCommons

A video claiming to represent the true story behind the Fortescue Mining Group/native title affair has been published on a new website called ‘The True Yindjibarndi Story’. Crikey has reported that Fortescue Mining Group is behind the video and the website. It’s the iron ore mining giant’s response to a controversial video published last week by IndyMedia.

Both videos are wildly differing accounts of a native title meeting held last month in Roebourne, Western Australia. The publisher of the original video claimed, “The video shows the actions of this miner in trying to entrap and bully traditional owners into a land use ‘Agreement’ that will see massive disturbance of country and will swindle generations of Yindjibarndi people.” The Fortescue website counters, “On April 4 a misleading, heavily edited video of a [sic] important community meeting was circulated online. It is important that the facts are told.”

The original video allegedly shows Fortescue trying to push through a deal worth more than $10 million for their Solomon Hub mining project despite the concerns of Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation (YAC). Fortescue’s legal team reportedly asked Vimeo to remove the video because it “incites racial hatred”. It also claimed the video contravened state and federal laws, including Western Australian defamation laws. Vimeo removed the video, but it has since been uploaded to YouTube. Reforms to federal defamation law passed in 2005 make truth an allowable defense and restrict the ability of most corporations to sue for defamation.

The story is one of several recent manifestations of the age-old tug-o'-war between freedom of speech and censorship. We’ve covered the legal proceedings in which News Limited columnist Andrew Bolt is alleged of having written two blog posts that were racially discriminatory against a group of indigenous Victorians, and the unlikely allies that have rallied to his side in the name of freedom of expression. Further afield, China’s crackdown on dissidents has claimed high profile figures like Ai Weiwei, Australian based novelist Yang Hengjun and even Bob Dylan.

The Sydney Morning Herald recently asked four figures from publishing, academia, the law and politics about the need for absolute freedom of speech. Their responses were as varied as they were compelling – the Griffith Review’s Julianna Schultz concluded, “Freedom of speech is not absolute, but essential.”

The Wheeler Centre Talking Point event, ‘Gagging for Freedom?’ is next Thursday, April 28 at 6:15pm. The discussion will be chaired by Jonathan Green and will feature Leslie Cannold, Bernard Keane and James Allan.

If bad artists copy and great artists steal, as Picasso quipped, Ai Weiwei has been paid a high, if backhanded, compliment. Chinese art’s provocateur-in-chief has been charged with plagiarism after being arrested at an airport in Beijing on April 3. Foreign governments have called for the artist’s release, according to the New Yorker, which published this fascinating profile of the professional rabble-rouser last year. In his last interview before his arrest, the artist said, “China in many ways is just like the middle ages.”

As part of a recent installation at Tate Modern, Ai Weiwei had 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds hand-made and painted and spread over the floor of the museum’s Turbine Hall (“Each seed has been individually sculpted and painted by specialists working in small-scale workshops in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen”). The dust generated by visitors walking over the installation forced the museum to temporarily close it for health reasons.

Websites supporting Ai Weiwei have appeared in response to news of the arrest. Tate Modern expressed its support for the artist by displaying a banner on an outside wall demanding his release, and a protest has been held outside the museum.

Turntable image by Johnny Magnusson via WikiCommons

Crikey’s Bernard Keane wrote yesterday about the reasons behind the Chinese government’s crackdown on dissenting voices. It comes at a time of widespread criticism of 69 year-old singer-songwriter Bob Dylan following his first appearance in mainland China. Dylan was happy to have his set list vetted by government officials anxious to avoid a show of political dissent by one of the leading figures of the 60s counter-cultural movement. According to one report, there were worries he’d try to protest the arrest of Ai Weiwei. Here’s a review of the concert.

The anti-Dylan critics have not spared him their vitriol – Azar Nafisi accused him of hypocrisy. Maureen Dowd vented her spleen at Dylan in a widely reprinted op-ed column: “The idea that the raspy troubadour of ’60s freedom anthems would go to a dictatorship and not sing those anthems is a whole new kind of sellout,” she wrote. Her column generated much online noise, such as here, here and here. Here’s an especially interesting one with good background on the crackdown.

The affair has also provoked discussion on what exactly Dylan’s political position might be. As Charles Saar Murray pointed out in The Observer, Dylan was never entirely comfortable with the way he was co-opted as radical baby-boomers' voice of choice: “The notion of Dylan as a hardcore political activist and polemicist, or as a dyed-in-the-wool man of the left, is not only antiquated but was essentially erroneous even in the early 60s.”

Anyone who’s ever seen Dylan live will agree with a telling point made by The Guardian’s Mark Lawson: “his renditions are now so idiosyncratic and his inter-number mumbling so impenetrable that it remains entirely possible that he performed both of his most famous protest songs, and made an impassioned plea for the release of Ai Weiwei, without either Chinese censors or audience noticing.”

But we can’t help but wonder: what if Dylan knew exactly what he was doing? What if he decided that the power of poetry is potentially more seditious – in a slow-burn kind of way – than any short-term grandstanding? It seems appropriate to end with what a young Chinese man who attended the concert made of it all: “People say he’s out of date, but he has experience and wisdom. He’s a sheng ren – a sage, like Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King.”

Update: Here’s a report on Dylan in Australia in which he describes being in Australia as “like a feeling where the windows are closed and you can’t open them”. Oh Bob, you ol' charmer you.

News Limited op-ed writer Andrew Bolt has been in court this week defending himself against claims blogs he penned contravene racial discrimination laws. The court case centres on two blog posts written by Bolt – ‘White Fellas in the Black’ and ‘White is the New Black’ – in which he suggests that some people’s claim of Aboriginal identity is motivated by self-interest. Nine applicants claim the blogs breach discrimination laws. Rather than suing for damages, they’re seeking an apology, legal costs, a court order to prevent the blogs' republication and “other relief as the court deems fit”.

The case has been keenly observed and has prompted a debate about identity and free speech. Yesterday, the ABC’s Media Watch presenter Jonathan Holmes responded to a piece by Chris Berg claiming that he was advocating restrictions on free speech. Bolt has found some surprising allies, such as Crikey’s Bernard Keane, who, while arguing that free speech trumps the content of Bolt’s blogs, invoked Godwin’s law.

Meanwhile, Canadians are getting ready to vote, and are facing their own free speech conundrums.

Two intriguing stories this week have triggered a renewal of the debate about free speech. It was feared Dr Yang Hengjun (known to friends as Henry), a Chinese-Australian crime novelist and prominent blogger on contemporary China, was being held captive by Chinese authorities after disappearing from an airport in Guangzhou. The writer, whom Greens Senator Scott Ludlam described as one of the most influential political bloggers in China, divides his time between the People’s Republic and Sydney. John Garnaut’s op-ed gave readers a personal insight to the story. Yang has since given the ABC assurances that he expects to leave China in a matter of days.

Nonetheless, a fog of intrigue continues to hang over the story, as if it were lifted from the pages of a political thriller. Yang’s political thrillers include the bestselling ‘Fatal Weakness’ series: Fatal Weakness, Fatal Weapons and Fatal Pursuit. The novels, published online, feature plots in which government corruption is endemic. An English-language excerpt can be read here. According to the writer’s agency, Creative Works, Yang’s novels “tell of an American plot to control China, set right before the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Too sensitive to be published in China, these Chinese language novels have been read by millions of Chinese online …” Yang adds a personal message: “I want to thank the Beijing authorities personally on my own behalf because without their strong suppression of freedom of publishing, I would never have become the first political espionage novelist in China.”

The New York Times reports Yang last blogged on March 27, the day he disappeared. “The entry criticizes Peking University in Beijing for a new policy that aims to re-educate students who are deemed to have ‘radical’ thoughts.” The Times report continues: "The Chinese government, in the harshest crackdown in years, is holding scores of human rights advocates, political writers, lawyers and dissidents. The roundup began in late February after calls for a revolution modeled on the protests in Tunisia surfaced on the Internet in Chinese.”

Earlier this year, another Chinese writer, Murong Xuecun, visited the Wheeler Centre and spoke of the difficulties of maintaining independence as a Chinese writer. Local crime writer and Wheeler Centre Fellow Andrew Nette has also blogged on the Chinese crime fiction scene, which is a popular source of critique of low-level and mid-level government corruption. And while the book industry in Australia worries about the future of publishing, Chinese writers are showing that, despite stringent censorship, the web can reach a massive reading public with a voracious appetite for controversy, courage and truth.