[desdiv]

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four is just the kind of book that you would expect to be banned in China – all that talk of Big Brother, Newspeak and the rewriting of history is far too close to the bone, surely. So I was amazed to come across it on open sale in a state-run bookshop, in Yanji 延吉 on the North Korean border in fact. Nineteen Eighty-four is all over the place in China, it turns out.

A Chinese website lists no fewer than 13 translations published in the PRC between 1985 and 2012, and it’s easy to find at least three or four downloadable or online translations on a quick internet search.

They are indeed printed in China, and are openly sold in China, without any government censorship surprisingly.

[duaneb]

> They are indeed printed in China, and are openly sold in China, without any government censorship surprisingly.

Censorship applied to materials about censorship seems like it's made for the Streisand effect—look at the vibrant samizdat culture in the soviet union. A much better way is to have it fall into insignificance out of lack of cultural application. You can bet they measure up well to a government that exercises prosecution of thought crime.

[DanBC]

I'd be interested to know if it had ever been banned there (which is a very different question about what happens now).

And let's not forget the number of times it has been challenged in US schools for communism (even though it is anti-communist) and for sexual content. http://www.deletecensorship.org/downloads/booklist_hpb.pdf