China‘s history of censorship and book burnings goes back over 2000 years, when Qin Shihuang, the first emperor, supposedly issued an edict to destroy works he deemed politically dangerous. Today’s rulers, the Chinese Communist Party, continue those policies.
A book seller interviewed in The Booksellers, a documentary about antiquarian book dealers in New York City, claimed that Mao Zedong was a former librarian who also burned books.
Mao, the leader of China’s communist revolution, left secondary school and spent months educating himself in the Hunan Provincial Library.
During this period of self-education I read many books, studied world geography and world history. There for the first time I saw, and studied with great interest, a map of the world. I read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, and Darwin’s Origin of Species, and a book on ethics by John Stuart Mill. I read the works of Rousseau, Spencer’s Logic, and a book on law by Montesquieu. I mixed poetry and romances, and the tales of ancient Greece, with serious study of history and geography of Russia.
However, was Mao a librarian? No, not really: his mentor got him a job as a library assistant at the Peking University Library, reading books when not retrieving newspapers for students. Definitely he loved books and he had a job at a library, but it’s a stretch to consider him a professional librarian: am I a journalist if I file clippings for a newspaper?
Likely he feared the power of books to educate and transform others in the way books transformed him, and censorship and book burnings removed knowledge and ideals that could challenge him, not dissimilar to many authoritarian rulers throughout history. Initially the communists’ hold on power was tenuous – perhaps until the cultural revolution ended or after Tiananmen Square – and those policies has allowed the party to maintain control through today.
Image Credits
- “Chinese paper money – Mao” by kevin dooley is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
