<
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/11/chinas-censored-feminist-movement-finds-solace-in-sally-rooney>
"When the manuscript of Sally Rooney’s
Conversations with Friends first
arrived in Peng Lun’s inbox, he hesitated. It was 2017, and Peng – who had
worked in publishing for a little over a decade – had just started his own
house in Shanghai, Archipel Press.
He had heard about the clamour from publishers that resulted in a heated
auction for the rights to the young Irish author’s first novel and thought it
might be worth having it translated into simplified Chinese.
He decided to commission readers’ reports from two women. “Because I’m almost a
middle-aged man,” he tells the Guardian, “and Sally Rooney is so young and her
novel is about young people’s love affairs.”
One review was mixed, the other was positive. So he sat down to read the
manuscript himself.
“Her writing is simple but very, very fresh,” he says. He acquired the rights,
commissioned a translation and watched as an Irish author in her mid-20s became
one of the most beloved novelists in the world.
In 2019,
Conversations with Friends, Rooney’s first novel, was published in
China. Chinese readers have since bought 150,000 copies of Rooney’s novels, a
high number for any author – for translated fiction, anything over 30,000 is
considered a bestseller. A bestselling Chinese novel is considered anything
that sells more than 50,000 copies.
Since 2017, something else has been happening in China: the government has
cracked down on feminist movements, seeing them as a subversion of the idea
that communism has already liberated women.
Words related to feminism are censored online, and although rhyming terms have
sprung up to replace them – feminists may be called “women’s fists”, which
sounds like “women’s rights” in Chinese – the crackdown by authorities led to
women self-censor. In 2022, President Xi Jinping appointed an all-male
politburo for the first time since 1997 (previously there had been, at most,
two female members).
Instead of taking to the streets, there is anecdotal evidence that young women
are turning to novels, podcasts and feminist nonfiction to learn more about
feminism in private. A 2021 study by Fan Yang, a lecturer at the Hangzhou
Normal University in Zhejiang, found that the number of feminist podcasts
increased from eight to 35 in under two years.
Zhang Yueran, an author who teaches literary studies at Renmin University of
China, says Rooney’s popularity is part of this wave."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
