( No Title )
Holy shit someone finally leaked what went down with the Hugos and from a quick skim it appears to be the worst possible scenario: that is, Western award-runners PREEMPTIVELY censoring anything they thought the Chinese government might not like. Clownery AND fascism.
Additional information:
They didn’t even read the books they censored. Babel “has a lot about China in it”, so it was struck. Seriously. Also, they removed a guy for traveling to Tibet, but he never went to Tibet—he went to Nepal and Vietnam. (There were other, also stupid, reasons, but I wanted to highlight the shoddy research done by the committee.)
I recommend reading the linked report in full—there’s a lot more damning information and also people should check their sources before erroneously assuming things (cough Kat Jones and Dave McCarty cough)
This is about what I expected.
This is how it tends to work. The government doesn’t have a minder for every event and publication. They require moderation and they have some guidelines, some of them specific (mainly about maps) but mostly kind of vague. They create an environment where you’re aware some things might get you in trouble. In their government operations, sometimes they’re deliberately vague – they don’t give you a notice that a website is blocked, they just redirect your request in a circle until it times out.
Then people on the ground end up deciding what to censor on their own to avoid scrutiny, and they end up being conservative. I have no doubt the Western admins may have been more cautious than some Chinese would have been just because they’re not familiar with what space is actually available.
They should have been upfront about what they were doing. They should have done more research. They should have talked to the authors. They should have considered all of this carefully before they brought Worldcon to Chengdu.
But they didn’t, and now we have this.
The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion – File 770
Here’s the source.
Discussion ¬