China's Knickers In Knots over Book Mentions

China is excising any mention of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama and the China-Tibet border dispute in Australian nonfiction books published for export to China. Memo to China censors: Facts are stubborn things and denying them does not make them less true, just the population of Chinese readers more ignorant.

All of this publishing drama because of a biography written by an ancestor, Felicity Jack, about an Australian, Robert Logan Jack that made a reference to the China-Tibet border. Amazing their eagle eyes can catch book references, but not the tons of algae problem at an Olympic site right beneath their uptight noses. China massacred Tibetans demanding freedom and blame the Dalai Lama for the heaps of censuring remarks tossed their way in the aftermath. China's One China policy goes for Taiwan and Tibet.

It is one of those things that make you go hmmm, as Australian publishers got this message before. Now UNSW Press and Melbourne publisher, Hardie Grant, have seen this issue before. Keeping 1,500,000,000 people under intellectual lock and key is going to get harder not easier, somebody should tell the Chinese bureaucrats.