Banned Books Week – Maybe a Selection from Shanghai’s Banned Books of 1940 Might Interest You

Posted: September 25th, 2013 | No Comments »

This week is, importantly, Banned Books Week which celebrates the freedom to read. Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 in American in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries. Scarily books on the list that have been banned after pressure include such society-threatening dangers as Captain Underpants (too rude!), The Kite Runner (gay themes) and (amazingly) Toni Morrison’s Beloved (the book banners holy trinity of sex, violence and religion). You can find out more about banned books here.

However, this blog concerns itself with old China, treaty port China and the lifes and activities of the old foreign community before 1949. So, I’m going to offer a list of books banned by the Shanghai Municipal Police censors in 1940 (the last year they got to ban books before the Japanese invaded the International Settlement). Quite why all these books were banned, seized from Shanghai bookshops and confiscated is a little unclear – sex for sure (more specifically, it’s thought, descriptions of white women having, and enjoying, sex that might have sullied their reputation with the Chinese!) as well as an attempt to force the Settlement’s book stores to ban what was banned in Britain and America (though some of these books were already available after earlier bans in Europe and America).

The following books were noted by undercover cops in Shanghai on sale in Settlement bookstores in the summer of 1940 and seized by

the Shanghai Municipal Council’s Translation Office and the Shanghai Municipal Police in the form of Special Branch (S5)…..

D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover,

Alexander Kuprin’s Yama: the Pit

James Joyce’s Ulysses

Theodoor van der Velde’s Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique as well as Sex Hostility in Marriage: Its Origin, Prevention and Treatment and Sex Techniques in Marriage

(author unknown) Sex Life in France

Ely Culbertson’s The Strange Lives of One Man, a rather racy, for the time, memoir by a contact bridge player and rampant self-publicist. Theodoor van der Velde’s Sex Hostility in Marriage: Its Origin, Prevention and Treatment and Sex Techniques in Marriage, as well as

Victor Robinson’s Encyclopaedia Sexualis

(Author unknown) The Power to Love.

S5 really hated Lawrence and also seized Women in Love, The Rainbow, The Woman who Rode Away, Aaron’s Rod, The White Peacock, Sons & Lovers, Lovely Lady, The Ladybird and The Lost Girl as well as a collection of Lawrence stories, A Modern Lover.

Personally I’m opting for Yama: The Pit as I’ve never read it – all about prostitutes in Odessa apparently….

 

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