The Chinese government has banned George Orwell’s dystopian satirical novella Animal Farm and the letter ‘N’ in a wide-ranging online censorship crackdown.

As Mike Krieger has recently noted (here and here), what China is doing is dangerous:

Narrative is particularly important to lunatics who run a global empire, and the U.S. media’s almost always happy to oblige. For example, the media’s enthusiasm to swallow government propaganda is what led to the Iraq war disaster, in addition to so many other societal tragedies I write about here on a daily basis. While the marriage between U.S. government propaganda and a complicit corporate media has been a demonstrable danger to the world, we shouldn’t for a moment think American propaganda is the only threat. Other powerful governments use it as well, and China is no exception. With Russia obsession dominating almost every domestic media headline these days, Americans are woefully ignorant regarding the explicit intentions the Chinese government has for the world.

And as The Independent reports, experts believe the increased levels of suppression - which come just days after the Chinese Communist Party announced presidential term limits would be abolished - are a sign Xi Jinping hopes to become a dictator for life.

The China Digital Times, a California-based site covering China, reports a list of terms excised from Chinese websites by government censors includes the letter 'N', Orwell's novels Animal Farm and 1984, and the phrase 'Xi Zedong'. The latter is a combination of President Xi and former chairman Mao Zedong's names. It was not immediately obvious why the ostensibly harmless letter ‘N’ had been banned, but some speculated it may either be being used or interpreted as a sign of dissent. This censorship is fortified by the Great Firewall of China - a term which refers to the combined force of technological and legislative measures which tightly control the internet on the mainland.

Why should you care about China's seemingly totalitarian shift? Krieger concludes poignantly: