'It's time, Chinese people! It's time," wrote the dissident Zhu Yufu in a poem he incautiously put online. "The Square belongs to all." By "the Square", he meant Tiananmen Square. But, alas, it does not "belong to all". Like every other public space, it belongs to the Chinese communists, as Zhu discovered when the party sent him down for seven years for "inciting subversion of state power".
Tomorrow, Britain will get a taste of dictatorial control when the London Book Fair opens. The commercial logic behind the jamboree at Earls Court is easy enough to explain. Publishers want to break into the Chinese market. To help them "seek out and capitalise on new business partnerships", the organisers said that this year's "focus" will be on China. They are keeping Beijing sweet by refusing to invite writers – as "visiting authors" – who might upset the regime. The event's managers struck me as cheerful capitalists. They want to help publishers strike deals and make money. No harm in that, particularly when they can argue that the promotion of propaganda and suppression of free thought have not been arranged by the commercial arm of the fair but by the cultural bureaucrats at the British Council.
As the British Council is a BBC-style public corporation, funded by the taxpayer, it is fair to say that its collaboration with a dictatorship is our collaboration too. To my untutored mind, the collaboration also seems to breach the council's charter. Parliament gave it the right to take public money to "promote cultural relationships and the understanding of different cultures". Not, you will notice, to prevent an understanding of how spies and censors police "different cultures".
Ma Jian, a Chinese novelist, listed the ways in which the British Council was working against cultural freedom. "These big events give China's Communist party the international face it craves and helps normalise its repression of free speech back at home," he told me. He went on to make the unarguable point that the British Council was harming the British public as well as the cause of the Chinese reformers. "By excluding all genuinely independent and critical voices," he said, "the book fair has allowed the Chinese authorities to export their censorship to a western democracy."
Despite living in exile in London, and being the author of Beijing Coma, an epic novel about the aftermath 1989 massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, Ma Jian has not been invited to Earls Court. Nor, if the organisers have their way, will visitors hear discussion of the work of literary critic, poet and Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, now serving an 11-year prison term, or of his wife, Liu Xia, a poet who has been held under house arrest for a year and a half, or of Zhu Yufu or of any of the dozens of other writers the regime has persecuted.
Instead, the literary world is being asked to applaud 31 state-approved authors the book fair administrators and the censors at China's General Administration of Press and Publication have invited to speak on the glories of their nation's literature. They are not all hacks who parrot the party line, but they have accepted a double censorship. First, they have censored themselves; then they have submitted their books to be censored by the state.
Writing a few weeks ago about the British Museum's willingness to present the Saudi royal family's approved version of the history of Mecca, I said that censorship is at its most effective when no one admits it exists. True to form, the organisers told me: "The London Book Fair does not prevent any author from attending the event. Many authors attend at the invitation of the organisers while many others attend this exhibition in response to a wide variety of other invitations."
This pseudo-liberal statement sits ill with an admission by Susie Nicklin, the British Council's director of literature, that "there was no disagreement with the Chinese government" about which writers the book fair should host in London. Nor does it explain her sly insinuation in the same press release that state-approved writers are somehow more authentic than dissidents because they "live in China and write their books there" while "other writers have left". Maybe she did not know it, but Ms Nicklin did not explain that "other writers" have left because the regime has driven them into exile.
The spin has not stopped the rumours. One of Britain's leading authorities on China told me that an editor instructed him to not make unflattering remarks about the Communist party in a piece to accompany the fair. Others described a seminar at the British Council in September on how the British should think about freedom of speech in China. It was chaired by Claire Fox, of the Institute of Ideas, the successor organisation to the British Revolutionary Communist party. This sinister clique moved as one from the totalitarian left to the corporate right without stopping at any worthwhile point in between. Observers in the audience predicted that China's combination of communist dictatorship with capitalist exploitation would appeal to Fox.
They were not disappointed. We should stop talking about human rights and freedom of expression, she said. We should hold our own government to account rather than engage in "China-bashing". Writers, she concluded, have always benefited from the creative stimulus of censorship. By her logic, there was no need to protest when oppression was good for them. It was "worse than risible", Jonathan Heawood, director of the free expression charity English Pen, told me. "I was surprised that no one from the British Council was prepared to rebut these absurd assertions."
Now he knows why the council stayed silent. The London Book Fair has been rigged. But not everyone is going along with the fix. For the first time in the fair's history, English Pen will refuse to provide a platform for the officially sanctioned authors. Meanwhile, Tienchi Liao, a wonderful Chinese intellectual, will organise a protest at Earls Court. She does not rage or shout abuse. The strongest insult she uses to describe the organisers is "dishonourable" – and it is the mot juste.
If British publishing goes along with this grubby stitch-up, it will indeed dishonour not just its best traditions but the best traditions of this country, which we – silly, complacent people that we are – do too little to defend.
