It was the scrawl of red ink snaking around paragraphs that told novelist Sheng Keyi how much things had changed. Just over a decade ago, Sheng’s best-selling breakthrough novel, Northern Girls, was published uncensored in mainland China to critical acclaim.

But last month, as editors prepared to launch a third edition of the book, the author was informed that parts of her text were no longer publishable.



“It is ridiculous,” Sheng complained, pointing to an editors’ manuscript on which a red ballpoint pen had been used to highlight sections that now needed excising. “It doesn’t feel like something that could happen in real life and it makes me quite angry.”

Sheng, 42, is clear about why parts of her once-celebrated novel have suddenly become taboo. The blame, she believes, lies with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, whose reign, which completes three years on Sunday, has brought a political chill of the kind not felt in decades.



Sipping a glass of carrot juice at a café near her Beijing home, Sheng lamented the toll Xi’s tenure was taking on contemporary Chinese literature. “Personally, I feel depressed,” she said.



Communist party spin doctors have sought to portray Xi not only as an unassailable strongman but also as a bookish man of letters. From Byron to Balzac, Walt Whitman to La Fontaine, China’s bibliophile leader has repeatedly used overseas speeches to show off the depth of his literary knowledge.

In Russia, Xi boasted of having read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Gogol; in France, he reached for Flaubert, Stendhal and Molière.

During his state visit to Britain last month, Xi attempted to woo parliament by rolling out the Bard. “What’s past is prologue,” China’s leader told MPs, quoting Act 2, Scene 1 of The Tempest.

Back in China, writers say that far from encouraging literature, Xi been squeezing the life out of it, as publishers and authors grow increasingly nervous about the consequences of printing anything that might offend the regime.



“My personal feeling is that these are quite dispiriting times,” said Harvey Thomlinson, a British publisher whose company, Make Do Publishing, specialises in translations of contemporary Chinese literature. “There is no doubt that it is getting tougher.”



Sheng, whose book, Northern Girls, follows the lives of China’s oft-exploited female migrant workers, said she believed an author’s calling was to write about the problems of society: the “injustice, the inequality and the darkness”.

One excerpt editors want to expunge from the latest edition of her 2004 novel refers to the forced abortions and sterilisations undergone by women as a result of China’s one-child policy, which was formally scrapped last month after 35 years.



“Those who exceeded the bounds of family planning policies and found themselves pregnant again had to have abortions,” reads one of the offending lines.



But writing that even hinted at the Communist party’s responsibility for such problems was increasingly taboo under Xi, Sheng claimed.



“You’d have thought that since he constantly talks about literature and how much he loves it, some new windows in [ideological] control would open to allow some fresh air in. It turns out that’s not the case. In reality it feels like all the windows have been closed,” she said.



“The environment for expressing opinion and writing has become harsher and harsher in recent years.”



Self-censorship was on the rise as writers and publishers tried to second-guess what was acceptable under the new political climate, in which government critics have been hounded or even jailed.



“People feel very scared and very timid at the moment. They are treating things with much more care than before,” said Sheng. “It’s like in a company – the leader sets some limits and each layer of management adds more limits. Everyone is wary and each one warier than the last person.”

Xi Jinping laid out his roadmap for Chinese literature and art at a now-notorious meeting in October last year that has been compared to a historic 1942 forum at which Mao Zedong told artists their primary responsibility was to the party.



In Xi’s speech, which was published in full last month, he urged writers to promote the party’s “core socialist values” and spread “positive energy” with their work.



“Good works of art and literature should be like the sunshine from a blue sky and the breeze of spring,” he said. “They should enlighten, warm and cultivate.”



Xi also lashed out at writers who sought to delve too deeply into the underbelly of Chinese life. “Some works ridicule what is noble and distort the classics, they subvert history and smear the masses and heroes,” he said. “Some works make no distinctions between right and wrong, good and bad, ugly and beautiful, overplaying the dark side of society.”

Some writers have prospered because of Xi’s Marx-infused reading of the arts. Hua Qianfang, a Beijing-based essayist, found fame after being described as one of China’s “outstanding” writers during the president’s 2014 conference.

“I don’t know when or how it started but criticising the government has become a fashionable thing,” Hua wrote in one typically pro-party article, adding: “The new leadership has introduced one good policy after another.”



Mao era revolutionary art is also staging a comeback with a government-backed production of The White-Haired Girl, a 1945 “model opera”, due to open in Beijing next month. Xi’s wife, the People’s Liberation Army soprano Peng Liyuan, will reportedly serve as its artistic director.

Yet writers who hope to focus on less positive aspects of Communist party rule say they have been hamstrung by Xi’s teachings. “I want my readers to know what’s going wrong with our society and our times,” said Murong Xuecun, an outspoken novelist whose racy books about debauched officials and corruption can no longer published in mainland China. “If you focus on the darkness rather than the stars themselves, you feel the stars are shining brighter.”

Murong, 41, said Xi’s vision for the arts risked creating a literary wasteland, as happened under Mao Zedong in the 50s, 60s and 70s.



“History has taught us that good works can sprout when control is loosened. But what we are witnessing now is a trend of tightening control over literature, art, ideas and opinions,” he said. “If this trend continues, China will fall back to the time when there isn’t any good literary work.”



One foreign publisher said the impact was already noticeable at international book fairs where the China section had become a “dead zone” in which the most prominent work was Xi Jinping’s turgid 515-page tome on governance.



Sheng said many of her peers were attempting to adapt to the new literary reality by steering clear of any topic that was remotely sensitive. “It’s an understandable survival strategy,” she said.

Others, like Sheng herself, appear to have abandoned hope of publishing books in mainland China.



Her last novel – a politically charged allegory for the 1989 Tiananmen massacre called Death Fugue – was predictably snubbed by more than a dozen Chinese publishers and eventually released last year by an independent Australian publisher called Giramondo.



“I’ll carry on writing what I please. I will not self-censor. I will not avoid things,” Sheng said. “The fun of writing is about being true to myself and my feelings. I don’t need to please anyone or anything.”



Murong’s next book, a science fiction novel called Our New Era, looks just as unlikely to appear on Chinese shelves.



Set in China in 2072, it tells the story of “a closed, poor and backward country” ruled by a Big Brother-like supreme leader. At birth all citizens are forced to undergo surgery to extract the parts of the brain that control sadness and anger. “They smile however they are treated,” Murong said.



Asked if he believed the book could be published in Beijing, where he still lives, Murong chuckled. “I will try.”



Additional reporting by Luna Lin



The censored passages

The two passages, highlighted in red ballpoint pen, that Sheng Keyi has been asked to remove from the latest edition of Northern Girls. Photograph: Sheng Keyi

Extract one translated



Spring, a time of growth, the crazy mating season, was also the time for the annual peak of public education activity at the hospital. Those who exceeded the bounds of family planning policies and found themselves pregnant again had to have abortions. After the second child, it was time to talk permanent solutions. Each couple needed to make arrangments for husband or wife to have a procedure. Either would do. Normally, the woman would have a tubal ligation, hysterectomy or some other method of sterilisation. If the woman was really not able to do so, the man would have to pay the price and go under the knife. Although the campaign had been an aggressive one, there were still many people hiding out, waiting to have a third – or even a fourth – child. Often they persevered until they had a son, after which they would be happy enough to go and see the doctor and his scalpel. The little cock. It was forever the ideal, the pride of life, a sustained revolution. When it was grown, it would bring both ecstasy and catastrophe to women. It would bear and bring forth all sorts of worries, excitement and joy.”

Extract two translated

He was lucky – his wife had given birth to three sons all at once. She was unlucky – she had given birth to three sons all at once, so had to submit herself for the operation. As it turned out, her luck was not all bad. The doctors reported that she had a rare condition that made her unable to go under the knife. She felt as if a glimmer in the dark of night had burst forth into the bright light of morning. Dachang said at once, ‘Don’t you think I’m done here? I’ve got three boys. Even if you paid me to do it, I wouldn’t want to father anymore!” “No one can say for sure. But if you’re slated for an operation, you’ve got to have the operation. It’s official policy!”

Translations taken from the 2012 Penguin edition, translated by Shelly Bryant

