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There have been some interesting results in relation to the Hugo Awards, and to the broader WorldCon environment. Kevin Standlee, a previous chair of the World Science Fiction Society (the WorldCon runners) posts Elections have Consequences:
The Hugo Nomination statistics were released on Friday, and unsurprisingly there are some oddities. Some of the disqualifications are likely politically charged over Chinese-specific matters, and others more universal. To be fair, the exact rules for qualification are complex, and some past nominees have been screwed over by esoterica of first publication dates; given the number of new voters, it's not too surprising that some nominated works fell outside of the eligibility timeline.
To be somewhat less charitable, I'm not familiar with too many previous times where nominees were listed as eligible by associated vendors before getting disqualified. The nominations are also bizarre in other ways, if one expected a largely Chinese fandom: there's a few Chinese-original pieces and editors, but not many.
Officially, there was absolutely no political pressure for these decisions, which have an explanation that the WorldCon Chendgu admins won't be providing.
On one hand, it's hard to be surprised if something wacky happened, and surely the people who set up WorldCon inside the CCP should have known it'd be a charlie foxtrot one way or the other. It's even part of the WorldCon bylaws that given a lot of power to the laws of the hosting nation, as Standlee points out. WorldCon locations are determined by member votes, even if this rounds out a little weird.
On the other hand, there were some fun questions about exactly how fair that vote for the 2023 WorldCon bid was well before this point -- quite a lot of ballots were allegedly filled out remotely and dropped off by a small number of visitors. Which wasn't and currently isn't against the rules, mind you! And the WSFS certainly wouldn't bring up questions of authenticity in 2021.
((On the gripping hand, unlike nearly every other vote at WorldCon, the location vote is heavily vetted internally rather than going through a member nominee process; only sufficiently prepared locales are listed. And WorldCon Chengdu advocates had been wining-and-dining hard for a while, which, given the logistical issues the convention had that included a complete rescheduling, might have been descisive.))
Schadenfruede isn't great for the soul, so to some extent I'm pretty happy to that a number of critics of modern WorldCon have had better things to do with their time, even if I personally have struggled not to snark a bit. And it's hard to expect too much to come from any retrospective at this point: because ballots and nominations, proving or disproving any tomfoolery incoherent as a position; more likely, it ends up with some minor tweaks to the location bid process, and just becomes one of those weird bits of fan lore, like when people wonder why Mercedes Lackey disappeared from SFWA conferences.
It's already too late to pass out the Asterisk Awards v2, and most of the winners weren't bad; many would have won regardless, even if the novel slot is definitely curious. ((Though I'm definitely less-than-happy that Scalzi squeaked in a nomination on another terrible work because of the DQ's)). Which brings up the culture war side. Standlee has an example :
To be fair, Standlee gets pushback, and eventually admits that no, that's not actually the existing law. I expect if pressed hard enough, he'd even admit it would surprise him were a Florida WorldCon's subcommittee willing to comply with such a law. (To be a little less charitable, he's probably going to be a go-to example for people on the left assuming conservative jurisdictions will ignore courts orders, if only because most people use video format or circumlocutions). And perhaps there are uses to bringing forward a nearby hypothetical over a distant reality (and, tbf, the at-least-up-as-a-bid-but-still-implausible WorldCon Uganda gets some attention on File 770).
But it's a slightly awkward comparison. It's not like either of these hypotheticals are really things this cohort experience personally, or even by second- or third-hand. Yet they're useful boogeymen.
I think most Westerners have an inaccurate view of Chinese censorship.
I’m currently visiting family in China. I can walk to the mall and visit Sisyphe Books, part of a big chain, and buy a copy of 1984, as well as a whole bunch of other books that one might naively expect would not be freely available here.
Of course there’s nothing available from the Dalai Lama, and nothing that makes direct anti-government arguments. That appears to be sufficient to get a book banned: it’s an anti-government work, or one written by someone that has expressed anti-government sentiments.
On the disqualifications, maybe this fell to an overzealous party functionary. You can buy some of these on China.
Here’s Babel: http://search.dangdang.com/?key=Babel&sort_type=sort_default
You can search Baidu for “sandman neil gaiman” and find both the comics and show.
Power is actually quite diffuse in China, at least until the central government decides to assert itself.
Chinese censorship is odd. For instance, they're currently sort of favouring street dance, and there are several TV shows with big finals hosting competitions. But you can't show tattoos, so any foreign dancers who have tattoos, or any hosts with them as you can see with Jay Park here, have to cover them up with stickling plaster (and if those fall off during dance, the show then blurs out the naughty socially undesirable tattoos or earrings on men).
Personally, I don't like tattoos, but I think it shows the kind of difference in what is and is not permissible for TV viewership in a way that wouldn't happen in the West.
Every mall in my tier three city has a hip hop dance studio.
But yeah TV is much more heavily policed than books. It has far greater influence on the hoi polloi and that’s what the party is concerned about.
As I said, Chinese censorship - from the little I've learned about it - is odd. There's not really a strict "this is censorship worthy and this is not" list, as such, but on the other hand you do have government bodies monitoring TV, radio, pop culture and they can switch on and off as they feel necessary - see the pother over effeminacy - and that puts subtle but real pressure on the industry bodies that ostensibly are the ones in charge of running the stations etc.
Chinese fans of particular actors, singers, idols can also be - to use a technical term - batshit insane, they are very active online, and malicious actors have no problem getting stars into genuinely serious trouble, and that spreads even to those who worked with them in 'guilt by association', out of jealousy ("X is more popular than Y, whom I idolise, that is not right and I'm going to get X!") and other motives.
So I'm not at all surprised that Worldcon held in China might have background interference, not even directly from the Chinese government, but from those who think that certain subjects or writers or how the topics are written may be 'problematic' and they act in advance to 'maintain harmony and not insult national emotion', as it were.
As I said, I'm laughing over the allegations because this is what the whole Purge of the Puppies was about - getting rid of wrongthink and wrongthinkers. So the outrage over this is very ironic, and the defence seems to be "but what we did wasn't censorship because it was we who did it, and besides we did it all out in the open!"
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