Censoring Lady Chatterley in Shanghai – Now on Kindle
Posted: November 26th, 2017 | No Comments »My recent essay Censoring Lady Chatterley in Shanghai: The Censorship of Western Culture and Entertainment in the Shanghai International Settlement, 1940-1941 is now available for mere pennies (all of which that come to me will go to doing more old Shanghai research)….
In the Republican period cultural censorship was a serious issue in the Shanghai International Settlement. However, usually it involved differences of opinion between the Nationalist government in Nanking (Nanjing) and the Shanghai Municipal Council in the foreign-controlled Settlement, empowered by the specific rights of extraterritoriality. Invariably the most contentious cases involved attempts by the Nationalist government to censor the Chinese media in the International Settlement. However, in the summer of 1940 and into 1941 the Shanghai Municipal Council’s Translation Office and the Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP), in the form of Special Branch Section Five (S5), which dealt with newspapers and translations in the Settlement, launched a crackdown on certain English language book titles sold in the Settlement. This crackdown occurred at a time when the long-standing censorship structures of the International Settlement authorities were being challenged by Japanese and pro-Nazi German interests, notably in the media of cinema. The result was that the Settlement authorities found themselves both imitating and extending censorship of English language books beyond that pertaining in other nations while also seeing their own censorship regime regarding cinema challenged by the Axis powers and effectively rendered impotent in a large portion of the Settlement.
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