How to Top China’s Best-Seller List Without Really Trying

This article has been updated.

In Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong in southern China, 15-year-old leukemia patient He Danting reads The Kite Runner in between chemotherapy sessions. The high school student loves to read and wishes she were back at school, said a March 2 report about He in the local Guangzhou Daily, so nurses gave her Khaled Hosseini’s story of boyhood betrayal and adult redemption set in Afghanistan. Earlier this year, when children at the Bashu Primary School in the megacity of Chongqing were preparing for a monthlong spring festival holiday, parents organized a book lottery. Among the titles given to students for reading over the break was The Kite Runner, reported local news site Hualong Net on March 1.told FP. Such censorship is routine in China and is carried out by publishers in order to avoid getting in trouble with the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, which doles out the ISBNs required for all books and also issues publishing licenses.

Other potentially problematic content survived. Chinese publishers can be very squeamish about sexual content in books but, interestingly, a rape scene and frank references to the event are translated faithfully. (Then again, it’s hard to imagine the book making sense if those details had been removed since the violence is central to its theme of sin and redemption.) In China, instead of shielding children from this story, parents and teachers seem to have embraced the tale. Tan said Chinese students are often assigned