State censorship and the book trade

The history of the book in China tends to regard the Ming and the Qing dynasties as censorship states. The Ming is portrayed as the dynasty when censorship became a feature of state control: no longer an episodic occurrence, but something approaching a political movement: the beginning, as one study from Shanghai puts it, of the long night of state suppression of the expression of ideas in China. ¹ What the Ming began, continues this logic, the Qing continued and intensified. Its greater capacity to inspect and intervene in local affairs only spread the net of censorship even more tightly over society. ² The evidence in this essay confirms that the late-imperial state did indeed prohibit books and ban writers. But the assertion that these initiatives constituted something that could be called state censorship is a modern construction. Judging the Ming and Qing to be censorship states may depend too much on looking back from the nightmarish blackouts that twentieth-century Chinese states imposed on Chinese readers and writers, and not enough on looking at what actually occurred when a book, or more often a writer, was brought to an emperor's attention, or what an official argued for when he offered a text for imperial suppression.