A quote from The Censor in the Mirror by Ha Jin in American Scholar:
In the summer of 2004, Yuan Hongbing, a Chinese writer, defected to Australia, taking with him four fiction manuscripts. After Yuan’s novels were published abroad, some top Chinese leaders were flustered. Luo Gan, director of the Politics and Law Committee of the Chinese Communist Party at the time, went so far as to give orders to punish with a death sentence whoever dared to pirate the books. Li Changchun, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau, who is in charge of ideology, issued the following directive: “The General Administration of Press and Publications, the Border Police, and Customs must work closely to prevent Yuan Hongbing’s novels from being smuggled into the mainland. We must ponder about this phenomenon: For many years our party has spent a great amount of manpower, money, and material resources in bringing up many writers, but our writers have not created any work that can trump Yuan Hongbing’s fiction artistically.” Regardless of whether Li was capable of literary judgment, he did raise a serious question for the party. The answer is clear and simple: The system of harsh censorship has crippled and “sterilized” the writers and artists who exist within its field of force.
