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> the short of it is: one of the 2023 award administrators leaked a set of emails showing that the American/Canadian contingent of the committee (voluntarily! p
by wisty 3y ago
> the short of it is: one of the 2023 award administrators leaked a set of emails showing that the American/Canadian contingent of the committee (voluntarily! proactively! and incompetently!) vetted potential finalists for political statements relating to China, and then the main administrator presumably used that info to mark some of them ineligible. It should be said: there’s no indication that Chinese censors even cared about the content of the English work. Some of it had already been translated into Chinese for goodness’ sake! So the Western members of the committee appear to have been flailing about based on what they thought China wouldn’t like, and preemptively self-censored, rather than, oh, I dunno, refusing to censor anything in the first place.
That's how censorship works, though. A country with mostly free speech will clearly and unambiguously ban a list of works (or types of content). There are always some limits to speech, but debates are possible as long as the rules are clearly defined.
Authoritarians expect self-censorship and have vague rules because they expect you to be making an effort to do what they want (or at least to pretend you are). Having platforms do the censorship, and banning the platforms that do a poor job is a lot more scalable than making it all centralised.
In an authoritarian state you can't get a decent official list of banned works, and in a distopian state you can't even get a list of alllowed works. Incompetence in how censorship is applied by platforms is expected, if not always tolerated.
- wisty 3y agoBack on topic: > The way that things currently stand, I don’t think I can fully consider myself a Hugo winner. Not a writer, but I expect any Hugo is partly hard work and talent, and partly luck. Very few winners can consider themselves objectively the best. There's a video on YouTube called "Last man standing", about Steven Bradbury's 2002 Winter Olympics gold medal. He was the slowest, but everyone else fell over. So what? He should have won a medal in 1994 but was pushed over. He stood a chance in the 94 World Cup but almost died from blood loss in a crash, and it severed his quadriceps. Then he crashed again in the 1998 Olympics and broke his neck in 2000. And he still won his heat in the 2002, he wasn't a total amateur. Sure, the Hugos don't have as much physical hardship, but there's luck and hard work in every win. As long as you're playing fair, and asking for the committee to keep it fair, a win is a win.
- Timshel 3y ago> and asking for the committee to keep it fair That kind of break your whole argument. They did not. Or do you mean that it's enough to just ask ??
- wisty 3y agoThere will always be some luck and politics, but if it's outrageous then at some point it's time to make a stand and refuse it. That's up to the author I guess. In this case, I'd say I'd respect either a grudging acceptance or a dignified refusal.
- Procrastic 3y agoA lot of countries have unwritten (and written) rules around different types of media. The question is, who do you defer to to understand them? Think about the west. Between Europe and the Anglosphere, there are a multitude of norms for what you can show or describe depending on the medium, the rating, the location, the platform, and the era. In this case, there were a ton of Chinese books published by Chinese people in China, voted on by Chinese people in China, in a competition held in China. The censorship was decided by a foreigner. One might assume that those multitudes of Chinese authors, Chinese publishers, and Chinese fans would be best positioned to know where the line sits in China. It would be a shame if the result of a foreigner deciding to exclude all Chinese authors from one competition was the community deciding to avoid hosting in China in future.