Orwell’s 1984 in China: Big Brother in every Bookshop
As I was researching Nineteen Eighty-four in Chinese, I wondered
whether Orwell ever wrote about China. His interest in India, where he
was born in 1903, is well known, and he served in the Burma Police after
leaving school and before becoming a writer, but my guess was that
China didn’t concern him greatly. But when I went to the British Library
to check in his massive, 20-volume Complete Works [CW], I was surprised
to discover that he wrote quite a lot about China and its fate under
Japanese occupation, in particular when he was working for the BBC’s
Eastern Service during World War II.
And of direct relevance to this article, it turns out that he asked
his publishers to send a copy of Nineteen Eighty-four to his colleague,
the literary critic William Empson in Peking, where he was teaching
English literature. When he was seriously ill in a sanatorium in
Gloucestershire in 1949, Orwell wrote to his agent Leonard Moore:
“William Empson in China has asked for a copy of 1984
[sic]. I think it might be wise to get two copies sent, one from London
and one from New York. He already seems uncertain as to whether his
letters are being opened, so could you ask both publishers not to
enclose the usual card saying ‘Compliments of the Author’, as this might
just conceivably be embarrassing to him.”
Helpfully he gave Empson’s address as 11, Tung Kao Fang, Near Peking
Normal University, Peiping 9, China (30 August 1949, CW, vol 20, p 162).
It so happens that a neighbour of mine was a close friend of the
Empsons and a couple of years ago she introduced me to their son
Jacobus, who has written a book about his parents’ unconventional
marriage and his childhood in Peking. Jake tells me that not only did at
least one copy of Nineteen Eighty-four arrive safely in Peking, but
that he remembers his parents reading it so eagerly that “they had to
tear it in half so they could both read it at once!” (J. Empson, email
to the author, 8 March 2014).
Orwell had written three months earlier that
“I had vague ideas of writing [to Empson], but thought it
might be embarrassing for foreigners in China to get letters from
outside at the moment. Hetta, Empson’s wife, is or used to be a
Communist, & he himself is not particularly hostile to Communism,
but I doubt whether that would do much good under a Chinese Communist
régime”
(letter also from Gloucestershire, to his American publisher Robert
Giroux. Orwell adds that “I have been horribly ill for the last month or
so…” 19 May 1949, CW, vol 20, p 117). Orwell seems to have been
somewhat bemused by the Empsons’ departure for Peking, and in another
letter to Giroux, he says: “I’d like to know what he [Empson] has to say
about “[King] Lear,” (a reference to Empson’s recent essay on Lear,
Tolstoy and the Fool). He has disappeared into China the way people do…”
(14 April 1949, CW, vol 20, p 84). Jake says Orwell’s assessment of his
parents’ political stances is accurate.
“My mother was a member of the Communist Party from 1937
until 1956, so Orwell was quite correct in her case – my father’s
political opinions were more nuanced, as they say these days, but he
could have been rightly described as a sympathiser – wearing his Chinese
communist uniform when attending a conference in the U.S. in about
1950, for instance.”
But despite Orwell’s suspicions about the Empsons, he did not include
them in his famous (or infamous) list of alleged communists that he
drew up for the Information Research Department, a branch of the British
Foreign Office, a year or two before he died (CW, vol 20, pp 240-259).
This list of 135 “crypto-Communists & fellow-travellers” sparked a
furore when it finally came to light in the late 1990s, with some
denouncing Orwell as a government informer and others defending him
because he viewed the Communist Party as a totalitarian menace. The list
includes comments such as “Half-Caste…Main emphasis anti-white but
reliably pro-Russian on all major issues”.. Empson was a highly
influential literary critic who taught in Peking and Kunming in the late
1930s and returned to teach at Peking Normal University from 1947 to
1952, witnessing the last years of the Chinese civil war and the
Communist takeover.
Orwell’s main interest in China was related to its attempts to resist
the Japanese, who had first invaded the northeast in 1931 and the rest
of the country six years later, and he voiced his anger in several BBC
scripts. He was appalled at the eye-witness stories of extreme Japanese
cruelty that came to his attention at the BBC. With unusual insight, he
dated the beginning of World War II not to the German invasion of Poland
in 1939 but to the Japanese invasion of China.
“[The war] started, properly speaking, in 1931 when the
Japanese invaded Manchuria, and the League of Nations failed to take
action. From then onwards, we have seen a long series of aggressions …
[I]t was inevitable that Soviet Russia, however anxious to remain at
peace, should sooner or later be drawn into the war on the side of the
democracies. It was inevitable that Britain and China should ultimately
find themselves fighting on the same side, whatever differences there
may have been between them in the past …”
Predictably perhaps, Orwell does not seem to have been sympathetic to
the Communists, and gives the Nationalists the credit for China’s
success in resisting the Japanese. He notes that when the Japanese
invaded Manchuria in 1931, “China was in a state of chaos, and the young
Chinese republic was in no condition to resist. Six years later,
however, when the invasion of China proper began, order had been
restored under the leadership of Marshal Chiang Kai-shek, and a powerful
national spirit had grown up.” Orwell adds that the main reason the
Chinese kept on fighting against enormous odds is that “they are
fighting for their liberty, and the will to surrender does not exist in
them” (16 May 1942, CW, vol 13, p 324).
He also noted that “This is [Japan's] third war of aggression in 50
years. On each occasion they have wrenched away a piece of Chinese
territory and then exploited it for the benefit of two or three wealthy
families who rule Japan, with absolutely no regard for the native
inhabitants” (17 January 1942, CW, vol 13, p 127).
It was surely Japanese cruelty towards the Chinese that angered Orwell the most.
“By almost universal agreement it is a regime of naked
robbery with all the horrors of massacre, torture and rape on top of
that. The same will happen, or has already happened, to all the lands
unfortunate enough to fall under Japanese rule. Perhaps the best answer
to the propaganda which the Japanese put out in India and other places
is simply three words LOOK AT CHINA” (13 March 1943, CW, vol 15, p 28).
In Nineteen Eighty-four Orwell envisaged a world divided into
Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania which are continually at war against each
other, and shortly after the end of World War Two he envisaged how “More
and more obviously the surface of the earth is being parcelled off into
three great empires, each self-contained and cut off from contact with
the outer world, and each ruled, under one disguise or another, by a
self-selected oligarchy.”
“The haggling as to where the frontiers are to be drawn is still
going on, and will continue for some years, and the third of the three
super-States–East Asia, dominated by China–is still potential rather
than actual,” Orwell declared. “But the general drift is unmistakable,”
he said, adding rather puzzlingly that “every scientific discovery of
recent years has accelerated it” (‘You and the Atom Bomb,’ Tribune, 19
Oct 1945, CW, vol 17, p 320). This seems to be the closest that Orwell
got to linking current politics to the horrific world of his final
novel.
Orwell is famous for his interest in political language, and this
includes the use of appropriate words for various ethnicities, not a
matter that troubled many writers of his time but one which concerned
him a great deal and which he returned to again and again. In 1943 he
wrote to Penguin Books with the corrected proofs of the forthcoming
Penguin edition of his first novel, Burmese Days. Apart from correcting a
few misprints, “I have also made a few minor alterations,” Orwell says,
adding that
“I draw attention to these as it is important that they
should not be missed. Throughout, whenever it says in the text, ie. not
in the dialogue, I have altered ‘Chinaman’ to ‘Chinese’. I have also in
most cases substituted ‘Burmese’ or ‘Oriental for ‘native’, or have put
‘native’ in quotes. In the dialogue, of course, I have left these words
just as they stand. When the book was written a dozen years ago ‘native’
and ‘Chinaman’ were not considered offensive, but nearly all Orientals
now object to these terms, and one does not want to hurt anyone’s
feelings.” (21 November 1943, CW, vol 15, p 338).
Of course “Oriental” is now almost – or just as – objectionable as
“Chinaman”, and the words “racist” or “racism” would be bound to crop up
in any modern discussion of such terms, but Orwell was surely ahead of
his time in his sensitivity to such issues. The word Negro is now
archaic, but in Orwell’s time it was a word of respect, and he insisted
(more than once) that it should be written with a capital N: in a review
of a special supplement to New Republic magazine, entitled The Negro:
His Future in America he highlighted how “the facts it reveals about the
present treatment of Negroes in the U.S.A. are bad enough in all
conscience. In spite of the quite obvious necessities of war, Negroes
are still being pushed out of skilled jobs, segregated and insulted in
the Army, assaulted by white policemen and discriminated against by
white magistrates….
“In Asiatic eyes the European class struggle is a sham.
The Socialist movement has never gained a real foothold in Asia or
Africa, or even among the American Negroes: it is everywhere
side-tracked by nationalism and race-hatred…
“The word ‘native,’ which makes any Asiatic boil with rage, and which
has been dropped even by British officials in India these ten years
past, is flung about all over the place. “Negro” is habitually printed
with a small n, a thing most Negroes resent.” He adds how he has been
substituting “Chinese” for “Chinaman” in Burmese Days, adding: “The book
was written less than a dozen years ago, but in the intervening time
‘Chinaman’ has become a deadly insult. Even ‘Mahomedan’ is now being
resented: one should say ‘Moslem.’ These things are childish, but then
nationalism is childish. And after all we ourselves do not actually like
being called ‘Limeys’ or ‘Britishers.’” (‘As I Please’, 2, Tribune, 10
December, 1942, CW, vol 16, pp 23-24).
Orwell holding his adopted son Richard
|
Orwell returned to this theme in 1947, devoting an entire ‘As I
Please’ column to it. It has an added poignancy because the reason he
was looking at a child’s illustrated alphabet is no doubt because he was
by now a widower with a small adopted son, Richard. It’s a forceful
piece without a wasted word:
Recently I was looking through a child’s illustrated
alphabet, published this year. It is what is called a “travel alphabet.”
Here are the rhymes accompanying three of the letters, J, N and U.
J for the Junk which the Chinaman finds
Is useful for carrying goods of all kinds.
N for the Native from Africa’s land.
He looks very fierce with his spear in his hand.
U for the Union Jacks Pam and John carry
While out for a hike with their nice Uncle Harry.
The “native” in the picture is a Zulu dressed only in some
bracelets and a fragment of leopard skin. As for the Junk, the detail of
the picture is very small, but the “Chinamen” portrayed in it appear to
be wearing pigtails.
Perhaps there is not much to object to in the presence of the
Union Jack. This is an age of competing nationalisms, and who shall
blame us if we flourish our own emblems along with all the rest? But is
it really necessary, in 1947, to teach children to use expressions like
“native’ and “Chinaman”?
The last-named word has been regarded as offensive by the Chinese
for at least a dozen years. As for “native,” it was being officially
discountenanced even in India as long as twenty years ago.
It is no use answering that it is childish for an Indian or an
African to feel insulted when he is called a “native.” We all have these
feelings in one form or another. If a Chinese wants to be called a
Chinese and not a Chinaman, if a Scotsman objects to be called a
Scotchman, or if a Negro demands his capital N, it is only the most
ordinary politeness to do what is asked of one. (27 Feb 1947, Daily Herald for Tribune, CW, vol 19, pp 50-51).
As the article below is about translation, I would also like to add
Orwell’s touching words that he added to a list of translations of his
works (he lists no translation into Chinese but does mention editions of
Animal Farm in Japanese and Korean, produced by the U.K. Liaison
Mission, Tokyo and the U.S. Army, respectively). He added as a note:
“Some of the above translations, chiefly of ANIMAL FARM,
were not paid for. I most particularly do not wish payment to be
demanded for translation of any book, article, etc., by any groups of
refugees, students, working-class organisation, etc., not in any case
where translation will only be made if the rights are given free.
Ditto with reprints in English (I don’t think Braille versions are
ever paid for, but in any case I don’t want payment for any that may be
made).”
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four with
a banner advertising
Murakami Haruki’s 1Q84
|
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four is just the kind of book that
you would expect to be banned in China, all that talk of Big Brother,
Newspeak and the rewriting of history is far too close to the bone,
surely. So I was amazed to come across it on open sale in a state-run
bookshop in Yanji 延吉on the North Korean border in fact.
Nineteen Eighty-four is all over the place in China in fact. A
Chinese website lists no fewer than 13 translations published in the PRC
between 1985 and 2012, and it’s easy to find at least three or four
downloadable or online translations on a quick internet search. Apart
from anything else I’m speechless at the amount of reduplicated effort
all these translations involve, and also wonder how much “borrowing” has
taken place between the various translations. And in addition to all
the Mainland translations, about 10 have been published in Taiwan or
Hong Kong, according to a University of Hong Kong M. Phil. thesis.
(There is some overlap between the two categories as some translations
first published in Taiwan have since been reprinted in the PRC).
I’m not sure why the Chinese government takes such a relaxed attitude
to a book that condemns totalitarianism in such ferocious terms, or why
there are so many different translations. It’s certainly quite unlike
the Soviet Union, where the novel was banned. Certainly the squalid,
Dickensian atmosphere of Nineteen Eighty-four doesn’t remotely evoke the
glitzy skyscrapers of 21st century Beijing or Shanghai, but it is
remarkable that the authorities are so nonchalant about a book that is
supposed to frighten the wits out dictators everywhere. Perhaps it’s the
fact that the book is by a foreigner and is set explicitly in London
that makes the Chinese Communist Party feel that it can brush it off so
casually. Orwell’s other masterpiece, Animal Farm, translated literally
as 动物庄园, seems also to be widely available in China, which is equally
surprising, and the translator of Animal Farm has thrown some light onto
why the authorities have taken such a relaxed attitude to Orwell. David
Goodman of the University of Sydney quotes his late friend Fu Weici 傅惟慈
(1923-2014) as saying: “I recall talking to Fu about Animal Farm and
its translation a long way back. He said that as long as one equated the
dystopia with the USSR there was no problem. This was presumably if
asked, outside the text Fu was always…healthily cynical.” This Chinese
Wikipedia entry says the first Chinese translation of Animal Farm was
published by the leftist Commercial Press 商务印书馆 in 1948 and lists seven
subsequent translations. It’s hard to imagine an original Chinese
dystopian novel or political allegory being remotely tolerated.
Fu Weici holding a copy of his translation of
Animal Farm (courtesy of David Goodman)
|
The first, and probably the best known, of the many Chinese
translations of Nineteen Eighty-four published on the Mainland is by
Dong Leshan 董乐山 (1924-99), who, like Orwell, was an independent-minded
socialist and who like almost all Chinese intellectuals suffered badly
during the Cultural Revolution. Dong, who translated the first PRC
edition of the novel that was published in 1979, wrote a remarkably
frank introduction which is downloadable
here in an edition published by the Liaoning Educational Publishing House in 1998.
“Orwell is not a so-called anti-communist writer in the
general meaning of the phrase, and Nineteen Eighty-four is not simply a
so-called anti-Soviet work….Orwell was first and foremost a socialist,
and next he was anti-totalitarian and his struggle against
totalitarianism is the inevitable result of his belief in socialism,”
Dong declared. “He believed that only if totalitarianism is defeated
can socialism be victorious.” Dong’s condemnation of the Chinese
Communist Party’s brutality and authoritarianism is clear enough, and
becomes even more direct when he praises Orwell for not being like those
Western intellectuals in the 1930s who “paid homage to the ‘new Mecca’
[Stalin's Soviet Union] and were led by the nose through ‘Potemkin
villages’ and when they returned raved how they had seen the bright
sunshine of a new world.” (Dong was too astute to mention the Western
leftists who praised Mao’s China in the 1960s and 70s in similar
awestruck terms). But Dong saved his most daring critique for last,
concluding with the words:
“The twentieth century will soon be over, but political
terror still survives and this is why Nineteen Eighty-four remains valid
today. In any case so far as we are concerned, only if we thoroughly
negate the terror of totalitarianism associated with the ‘Cultural
Revolution’ can those people who fought for socialism for so many years
bring about true socialism which is worth aspiring to.”
Although the Cultural Revolution is now officially regarded as one of
Mao’s greatest mistakes, open discussion of the period remains strictly
banned, and Dong was extremely brave to mention the direct parallel
between it and the terrifying world of Nineteen Eighty-four.
It’s widely claimed that Dong’s translation of Nineteen Eighty-four
was first published one year after the eponymous year, in 1985, but that
isn’t correct. David Goodman has kindly provided me with the
introduction and editor’s note to the first edition of Dong’s translation,
which was published in neibu 內部 (internal/restricted) form in 1979.
This would have been available only to senior officials and
intellectuals deemed politically reliable enough to be permitted access
to such material. It was published in three installments in the
“irregularly published” periodical
Selected Translations from Foreign Literature 国外作品选译 and
is marked “Internal publication. Look after carefully” 内部刊物 注意保存. The
first installment appeared on April 15, 1979, with further installments
in May and July.
Dong says in his short introduction that Nineteen Eighty-four
“accorded with the needs of the Cold War that was then taking place and
has long been a classic anti-communist work that is highly influential,
and anyone who takes an interest in contemporary international political
material will almost inevitably encounter this book.”
Orwell holding a puppy in Spain
during the Spanish Civil War
|
Orwell is a “bourgeois intellectual” who fought on the Republican
side in the Spanish civil war, while the novel is “modeled on how
[Orwell] imagined the future of Soviet society and enormously
exaggerated some aspects which were incompatible with his bourgeois
individualist liberalism.” The 1979 introduction, published just three
years after the death of Mao and the official ending of the Cultural
Revolution, is notably more orthodox than the highly outspoken foreword
published a decade later. The earlier introduction refers to Orwell as a
‘bourgeois intellectual” and his “bourgeois individualist liberalism”
while the later one seems to have been written during a brief cultural
thaw – in Liaoning at least – which Dong took full advantage of. It also
notes how expressions such as “big brother” and “doublethink” have
entered the English language, “which shows how great its influence is.”
The (anonymous) editor’s note makes a similar point, noting that the
phrase “‘Orwellian society’ is a frequently used English expression”,
and says “Western newspapers and magazines even directly or indirectly
refer to this book as an anti-communist ‘classic’”. It says Orwell
“changed from a ‘left-wing’ to an extreme right-wing writer”, and adds:
“The way the book exaggerates and distorts all aspects of this future
society under totalitarian rule is used to incite anti-Soviet and
anti-communist feelings in the service of the Cold War and ideological
war that was then waging.”
It may seem surprising that a book by an anti-communist “extreme
right-winger” was published in China, even in a neibu edition, but
heretical works, including books by Trotsky and Bakunin, were made
available to top officials, often labelled 反面教材 (negative teaching
materials). (See here for a discussion of this in Chinese). I recall
seeing the best-selling novel Jonathan Livingston Seagull as well as
Gone with the Wind in neibu editions when I was a student at Fudan
University, Shanghai in 1975-76, and I believe other Western novels were
also published at this time as “negative teaching materials”.
There is an interesting account here of how Dong’s translation of
Nineteen Eighty-four was first published. Dong’s friend and fellow
translator Wu Ningkun 巫宁坤also recalls Dong and his efforts to translate
Nineteen Eight-four.
Dong joined the underground Communist Party in Shanghai in 1940, but
like most intellectuals he was persecuted and imprisoned during the 1957
Anti-rightist campaign and during the Cultural Revolution. He was
allowed to return to Beijing after injuring himself on a tractor, and
this is when he came across
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich 第
三帝国的兴亡 by William Shirer. According to Wu he saw close parallels between
the Nazi period in Germany and the Cultural Revolution. He secretly
translated at night Shirer’s eye-witness account of Nazi Germany which
after the Cultural Revolution was published as a neibu publication for
senior officials and was later published openly. He first encountered
Nineteen Eighty-four in
the early 1970s when he had found a job in Beijing at Xinhua news
agency 新华社 where he had worked in the 1950s. He came to the notice of
the deputy director of the agency, Chen Shiwu 陈适五, who was editing a
periodical with the title Selected Translations from Foreign Literature
国外作品选译. Chen seems to have been quite an independent-minded official for
he told Dong he was looking for “material which has reference value and
is quite long and is unconventional in character, for leaders and other
comrades to refer to.”. Dong decided that
Nineteen Eighty-four was
the ideal candidate, and as mentioned above it was published in
installment form in 1979. Only 5,000 copies of the periodical were
printed. The novel was first issued in book form in China in Guangzhou
in 1985, again as a neibu publication. This was the idea of
Cai Nüliang 蔡女良, an editor at
Huacheng Publishing House 花城出版社, who had it published in a set together with
Brave New World and
We.
It was republished openly by Huacheng three years later. It is worth
noting that although Wu quotes from Dong’s introduction in which he
states how
Nineteen Eighty-four remains valid today, for clearly political reasons he omits the reference to the Cultural Revolution.
Dong Leshan
|
Fu Weici translator of
Animal Farm, recalled in a moving tribute to Dong how his friend was in the 1970s reluctant at first to propose that
Nineteen Eighty-four be
translated into Chinese because of the all too clear parallels with
recent Chinese history including the Cultural Revolution, and much
later, in 1997, he had trouble getting a two-volume selection of
Orwell’s writings published. There seems to have been no problem with
the first volume, which was a collection of essays and criticism, but
the second volume was to have consisted of
Nineteen Eighty-four and
Animal Farm, the latter translated by Fu. At the time Fu wrote the memoir, his translation of
Animal Farm had still not been published, although it has since appeared, both alone and in combination with
Nineteen Eighty-four. Incidentally Fu notes that Dong’s later translations include
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy 锅匠、裁缝、士兵、间谍 by John Le Carré,
The Last Temptation of Christ 基
督的最后诱惑 by Nikos Kazantzakis (co-translated with Fu, this was
particularly controversial apparently, though Fu doesn’t give details)
and
Darkness at Noon 正午的黑暗 by Arthur Koestler.
The first ever Chinese translation of Nineteen Eighty-four appeared
in Taiwan in 1950, according to Walter Tsang Ka Fa’s 曾家輝 master’s
thesis, A study of three Chinese translations of George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-four (2005), which is based mainly on translations by
Qiu Suhui 邱素惠 (Taipei, 1975), Joseph S.M. Lau (Liu Shaoming) 劉紹銘(Taipei,
1984) and Dong Leshan (Guangzhou, 1985). Lau is perhaps the best known
of the translators in the west, and is co-editor of
Classical Chinese Literature: An Anthology of Translations (New York, 2000) and author of
Hong Kong Remembered (Hong
Kong, 2002). Most of the translations listed by Tsang have been
published in several different editions. In fact, he lists no fewer than
16 different translations, although he says Qiu’s translation is
“grossly abridged”, which has not stopped it from being published in 15
different editions, and this does not include recent Mainland reprints.
Tsang compares how different translators translate particular passages
(including the famous slogan “Big Brother is watching you”) and says
“there is no noticeable distinction between the translations that may be
attributable to political considerations.” Regarding Dong’s Mainland
translation, he says that
“It seems the political environment at the time of
translating the novel does not bother Dong at all. This is because he
resolutely declares in his preface to the translation that he abhors
totalitarianism and would like to warn readers – presumably readers in
China in particular as it was first released by a Guangzhou publisher –
of such horror with Orwell’s novel” (pp. 125-6).
Tsang doesn’t consider the possible influence of censorship on the
various translations, and one should bear in mind that Taiwan in the
1950s and 60s was almost as authoritarian as the PRC.
Here’s my translation of the short foreword to the 2010 edition I
bought in Yanji which was published by Qunyan Press 群言出版社 in Beijing.
The translation (and presumably the foreword) are by Fu Qiang 富强, which
is a pseudonym meaning “rich and strong”. I have uploaded the Chinese
original
here.
Foreword
George Orwell (1903-1950) was a British novelist. Among world
novels there are the so-called “dystopian trilogy, consisting of We 我们
by the Soviet Union’s Zamyatin, Brave New World 美丽新世界 by Britain’s
Huxley and the present work by Orwell, 1984.
To put it briefly, this book is a political satire. The plot is
strange, grotesque, but it seems to obey certain rules of social
development. The novel describes the evil development of totalitarianism
which has developed to an appalling degree – human nature has been
strangled, freedom has been eradicated, thought has been suppressed and
life has become extremely monotonous.
Just like this book, the book that made Orwell famous, Animal
Farm, is a very accurate – but similarly biased – novel. All the
characters are animals, and the plot is strange and original, with a
strong comic element, and to this extent it is pervaded by fear. But
Nineteen Eighty-four is entirely lacking in comedy and a bone-chilling
sense of fear fills the entire work.
The fear isn’t gory and physical however but reflects a hopeless
feeling that human nature has been extinguished. For example, the novel
describes an official language called Newspeak 新语言 whose use is
compulsory and whose purpose is to reduce the number of words in the
language to the smallest possible number so that people will not be able
to think except in terms of concepts that the state has decided.
Furthermore, no Party member can avoid being officially monitored and
there is an electronic screen in every room that cannot be turned off,
and the screen accurately transmits each sound [that it hears] to the
“Thought Police”.
Nineteen Eighty-four is Orwell’s [most] enduring work. Not only
do readers love it but it is deeply respected by scholars. Some of the
words and phrases invented in the book, such as Big Brother
老大哥，Doublethink 双重思想，Newspeak and Thought Police 思想警察are listed in
authoritative English dictionaries and are even in world circulation.
Everybody acknowledges that Nineteen Eighty-four is an extremely graphic
description of totalitarianism, and is also an extremely fierce retort
反抗 to totalitarianism. The New York Times praised this book: “No other
work of this generation has made us desire freedom more earnestly or
loathe tyranny with such fullness.” Many people are convinced that “if
one more person reads Orwell, there will be one more guarantee of
freedom.”
In fact, Nineteen Eighty-four isn’t purely a political novel but
is a journey that asks questions about good and evil and beauty and
ugliness in human nature and about reality. But while it cares about
human nature it does not turn the novel into a dry textbook or
manifesto. If that’s all it was it wouldn’t have attracted so many
readers from all around the world. Even though what it talks about is
politics, what it is really concerned about is human nature. Mixing and
human nature together so they are inseparable is Orwell’s most
successful achievement.
This is a book which reveals great truths and no matter how many
times you read it you will reach a deeper understanding each time. So
far as the reader is concerned, this is a challenge to his or her
intelligence and is also a rare opportunity to gain wisdom.
It’s worth noting incidentally that the comments about human nature
being strangled, freedom eradicated, thought suppressed and life
becoming extremely monotonous seem to have been taken straight from Fu
Weici.
Recommended Citation: Michael Rank, “Orwell in China: Big Brother
in every bookshop,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 23, No. 2,
June 9, 2014.
Michael Rank is a British journalist and
translator. He graduated in Chinese Studies from Downing College,
Cambridge in 1972 and was a British Council student in Peking and
Shanghai from 1974 to 1976. He was a Reuters correspondent in China from
1980 to 1984, followed by two years in east and southern Africa. He has
written about an English school in Tibet in the 1920s for the Bulletin of Tibetology as well as news reports.
www.globalresearch.ca/orwells-1984-in-china-big-brother-in-every-bookshop/5386465"
data-title="Orwell’s 1984 in China: Big Brother in every Bookshop">
Posts
