Commentary “In America, I post comments without fear of disgrace In China, they’re censored, what a great loss of face!” Ironically, these lines about online censorship, translated here from the original Chinese, were what led to me being censored for the first time in my life. As an American exchange student in Nanjing completing the U.S. Defense Department’s Chinese Language Flagship Program, I competed in a Chinese-language competition for foreign students, co-sponsored by China Central Television and the Confucius Institute headquarters. I’d been invited to participate by an administrator at Nanjing University, and, rather than emulate the studious and self-serious efforts that other students made to showcase their “true knowledge” of Chinese language and culture, I instead decided to speak the truth. I wrote an irreverent poem in Chinese, titled “Forever a Foreign Devil,” which humorously addressed the reality, learned over time while living in China, that no matter how …
Commentary “In America, I post comments without fear of disgrace In China, they’re censored, what a great loss of face!” Ironically, these lines about online censorship, translated here from the original Chinese, were what led to me being censored for the first time in my life. As an American exchange student in Nanjing completing the
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