Late last year Jonathan Mirsky wrote a four-page feature for Newsweek called China: richer but repressed. Before the issue was released in China, his story was "carefully torn" from each of the 763 copies available in the country. Now he's told his story, detailing the costs of China's culture of censorship in the New York Review of Books:
That is the menace of what in China is called “the system.” Take Charter 08, the document published in 2008 calling for what in the west are regarded as human rights, and stating, “We should end the practice of viewing words as crimes.” This was signed by several thousand Chinese, most of whom are still at large. But Liu Xiaobo signed it, and at his trial in 2009 the charter was a major piece of evidence of his “subversion of state power.”
