Ma Jian Quotes

In the 20th century, imprisonment of writers practically comes with the territory.

Whenever citizens are seen routinely as enemies of their own government, writers are rountinely seen to be the most dangerous enemies.

If you exile a writer, however free the country he is sent to, there will always be a sense of internal constraint.

On one occasion in 1987 the security police came looking for me because of a drawing that I'd published.

I left Beijing in 1987, shortly before my books were banned there, but have returned continually.

In addition, we were unable to meet openly to discuss the progress of the book, for we were both on the list of persons banned from communicating with other banned persons.

I left Beijing in the late 1980s to live in Hong Kong because, having been blacklisted by the government, I couldn't publish my works on the mainland.

There is not a special imposition on writers to be activists. All that does is encourage writers to write propaganda. Propaganda can be written by anybody, including dictators.

At the height of the McCarthy period, writers were being hounded.

The trend in China is toward tighter and tighter control. They are basically improving their censorship mechanisms.

Libraries have had a long history of dealing with authoritarian organizations demanding reader records - who's read what - and this has led to people being rounded up and killed.

There is a long tradition in China for writers and journalists to take pen names, partly as protection from retaliation by authorities. If Facebook requires the use of real names, that could potentially put Chinese citizens in danger.

Intermediary liability enables the Chinese authorities to minimize the number of people they need to put in jail in order to stay in power and to maximize their control over what the Chinese people know and don't know.

I lived in a dictatorship in Brazil, and I was arrested three times. I felt in my flesh what it is to live under such a regime and experience deprivation of freedom.

Communism of every type and stripe brings with it an ideological straight jacket. Thought control, brain-washing, censorship, imprisonment, exile, mental and physical torture are the indispensable weapons of Communist rule.

… in many countries scholars are being sent into exile for racial, religious and political reasons, in increasing numbers .... It means that more and more people are growing afraid to face differences of opinion and yet it is increasingly important that throughout the world differing opinions should be listened to and weighed by the people as a whole.

Fidel Castro's most scandalous show trial was not mounted against a political figure but against a writer: Heberto Padilla. In 1971, after 38 days of detention, Mr. Padilla was forced to 'confess' at the Cuban writers' union to the charges of 'subversive activities.'

If you know anything about Ethiopia, they are very security conscious, a very closed environment. It's a repressive place were journalists and bloggers are arrested all the time.

My friends and family in Turkey could be arrested just for talking to me.

In the same way that Egypt and Libya conspired to 'disappear' my father and silence writers such as Idris Ali, they made me, too, to a far lesser extent, feel punished for speaking out.

I never felt like a Chinese citizen because I was pushed away at a very young age. My father, a writer, was a national enemy of the Communist Party. He was forbidden to write for 20 years. We literally lived underground. We dug a hole and lived there for years. My father cleaned public toilets, even though he was a highly respected poet. Nationality and borders are barriers to our intelligence, to our imagination and to all kinds of possibilities.

Only tyrannies understand the power of art.

We now live in a country with a thousand political prisoners, a country where each week there are new trials, where people are put in jail because they liked something on the Internet.

We know firsthand how social media and the law have been weaponized against perceived critics of the Duterte administration. We've been reporting on it from the start.

There are a lot of Yahoo users who live in countries where their freedom of expression and freedom of association is not respected and where the government is trying to put malware on their computers to track them.