Hi holly_tagima,

If you're interested in Yan Lianke, you may want to contact Cindy Carter, who translated both the novel "Dream of Ding Village" and the English subtitles for the Gu Changwei film based on it. There's a lot of backstory to both works, but it isn't really my story to tell.

In general, there are multiple layers to any given case, so it can be misleading to speak of things simply as being "banned." "Dream of Ding Village" was in fact published in China, but then was never given a further print run. The advertising for the English translation of John Chan's novel "The Fat Years" describes it as "the book nobody in China dared to publish," but that "nobody" includes its author, who never submitted the novel for publication. And then there are books that get rejected by one publisher and picked up by another, or accepted by a publisher but then barred from distribution. And of course Yan Lianke has said censored himself while writing "Dream of Ding Village" in the hopes that this would allow the book to stay in print. As with most things about China, the situation is much more complicated and inconsistent than monolithic terms like "banned" and "censorship" would suggest.

All of which is to say that it's a fascinating topic, and I think there'd be plenty to talk about there if Kaiser and others are interested in putting together a Sinica podcast about it.