Read Online Apologies to My Censor by Mitch Moxley - Free Book Online Page B

editors sent me to Beijing’s famous Silk Street market. Silk Street, or Xiushui, had long been a symbolic thorn in the side of Western governments and companies that wanted China to crack down on counterfeit products and intellectual property rights violations. In a rare victory for legitimate brands, Chinese authorities had recently “reorganized” Xiushui to concentrate on high-quality silk while eliminating fake goods. China Daily , in fact, wrote a story declaring the market to be 100 percent free of counterfeit products.
    â€œFind out what Westerners think about that,” Ms. Feng said.
    I arrived at the Silk Market to find the place full, from floor to ceiling, with fake products—jeans, jackets, shoes, underwear, everything. Whatever one wanted, it was all there, and it was almost all counterfeit. The silk was real, so I was told, but there were no foreigners buying it. In fact, fake stuff was exactly what foreigners wanted. “I just want cheap crap to bring back as presents,” one young American told me. (I did a little shopping myself, buying a pair of knockoff Calvin Klein underwear.)
    The next morning at China Daily , I relayed my conclusion that the reason foreigners went to Xiushui was for cheap knockoffs, not expensive silk. I was wearing the evidence.
    â€œYou can’t mention counterfeit,” the Business Weekly editor said. “We could get sued.”
    â€œBut the stuff is counterfeit. The whole market is counterfeit.”
    â€œBut the government has really cracked down on the intellectual property rights issue, sooooo . . . ,” he trailed off.
    After some debate with my editor, I was allowed to report that foreigners liked the market for its “low-cost goods.” All mentions of knockoffs were stripped from the story.
    W hile writing government-friendly puff pieces took up most of my workweek, Friday was the one day I still worked an editing shift, polishing the China Daily opinion pages. Many of the articles weren’t so much arguments supported by fact but rants supported by nothing. Many violated everything I had ever learned about journalistic ethics, including China Daily ’s own code: “Factual, Honest, Fair, Complete.” It was sometimes hard to stomach editing the opinion pages, but I didn’t have much choice. I knew any complaints would fall on deaf ears.
    The articles themselves proved tricky to edit. When articles I edited for the business section were poorly written, I would return them to the reporter for rewrites before I took to editing the story. I couldn’t do this with the opinion pages, however; the authors were often senior editors or important Chinese academics from leading universities.
    One day I edited an op-ed praising China’s state-required college entrance exam—the bane of every senior high school student in the country. Universities selected students based almost entirely on their exam scores. The story was repetitive and nonsensical. It was the fifth of seven stories of a thousand-plus words I was supposed to edit that day, and I was getting fed up. I completely rewrote the story, which we were discouraged from doing. I removed all redundancies, awkward sentences, and unnecessary jargon. The resulting story was about half the length of the original. Although it still lacked a point, at least it was written in clear, proper English.
    Late in the afternoon, one of the opinion page’s editors, a friendly middle-aged Chinese man with a gap-toothed smile, approached my desk. He removed his glasses and sighed.
    â€œMoxley,” he said, confusing the order of my names. “We have a problem. You have polished too much. We cannot fit the stories onto the page. It’s too short.”
    â€œA lot of it was repetitive,” I said. “In some paragraphs the author was trying to make one point but saying it in four different ways. So I changed it to one way.”
    â€œYes, the