At Frankfurt book fair, only official China can show its face

China is guest of honour at this year's Frankfurter Buchmesse, but critical authors like Dai Qing are only allowed to appear in the margins.

Dai Qing laughed as she displayed several books that are banned in China on her dinner table next to her plane ticket to Frankfurt. "The secret diaries of prime minister Zhao Ziyang I smuggled in myself after a trip to Hong Kong," said the outspoken 68-year-old writer and environmental activist.

"It is a disgrace that we still can't read what we want here," she added in an angry tone. "It seems as if these ridiculous rules are getting stricter by the day. And we writers are helping them by censoring ourselves, whether consciously or unconsciously."

Official pressure

Censorship in China is the theme Dai Qing chose for her lecture in the margin of the Frankfurter Buchmesse, which opens on Wednesday. She was supposed to have been an official guest of the book fair, which this year has chosen literary China as its main theme. Two thousand Chinese publishers, writers and poets have been invited to represent the new China, much like athletes at the Olympics.

But Dai Qing, who is well-known outside China for her campaigns against political repression and costly projects like the Three Gorges Dam, is not welcome at the official event.

After protests from China, the Buchmesse withdrew its invitation to Dai Qing and poet Bei Ling. According to the German chapter of the writers association Pen, Buchmesse director Jurgen Boos caved to pressure by the Chinese ambassador to Germany. Pen, which has advocated on behalf of Dai Qing for years, then invited her to come to Frankfurt anyway.

The Chinese diplomat was probably anxious to keep Dai away from Chinese vice-president Xi Jinping. The future leader of the People's Republic is currently touring Europe, and he is a guest of honour at the opening ceremony of the Buchmesse. "I know him slightly. We met once at the wedding of a distant cousin," Dai Qing grinned.

Red princess

Dai Qing is a genuine 'red princess', even though she hates the moniker. Her father, an early revolutionary, died in 1945 during the war against the Japanese. Dai Qing was subsequently adopted by one of chairman Mao's ten marshals. As the adoptive daughter of one of China's most powerful men, she worked as an engineer in the Red Army, was a faithful member of the party and, because of her knowledge of English, spied on visiting foreign writers. One of them was the American author Studs Terkel, who later became a friend.

During the eighties, as Dai Qing started working as a journalist, she drifted away from the party. She broke off all ties after her book about the Three Gorges Dam was banned, and she spent 10 months in prison after the Tiananmen demonstrations of 1989. All her books, including her prison memoirs, are now officially banned – but are easily available unofficially.

The same goes for the books on her dinner table. Chinese who buy banned books in Hong Kong, where censorship remained more lax even after reunification, and bring them back to the mainland risk little more than a fine if they're caught. As a result, books are increasingly on the shopping lists of the 17 million mainland Chinese who go on shopping trips to Hong Kong every year.

Two visions of China

Dai Qing: "You can read anything you want in China, but most people don't even know of the existence of such books. There is the internet, of course, but that hasn't made much of a difference yet. Writers who want to be published in China know exactly what is historically and politically sensitive, so they work around the pitfalls. The publishers are all state companies."

"I am invited to Frankfurt and I am not invited to Frankfurt," she said as she waved her plane tickets and visa around. "It is so typical of the schizophrenic situation in China and of the Buchmesse itself. It is a clash between two visions of China, between censorship and freedom of expression, repression and openness, between the image that China likes to project to the rest of the world and the reality."