THE WORD “censorship” has been tossed around with abandon lately–applied to everything from Bill Maher losing sponsors for his failing political comedy show to robust criticism of creepy left-wing cartoonist Ted Rall. Below you’ll find an example of what the real thing looks like. Last month President Bush gave a well-received speech to the students at Tsinghua University, often referred to as the MIT of China. The speech made news because the administration pressured the dictators in Beijing into agreeing to broadcast it live in China with a simultaneous translation.
This was a real breakthrough, and not to be scoffed at. But according to someone we will call a correspondent in China, the broadcast was not advertised, nor was the time of the speech known in advance. A translation appeared in the government press, but the correspondent was curious to see the speech as it was published in this country, suspecting not unreasonably that the official translators had truncated it. And how. Roughly half of the speech “disappeared” in the Chinese version.
