Description:

Reading Nineteen Eighty-Four in Beijing 

This presentation will look at how the last and most influential book written by George Orwell (1903-1950) has been received in the People's Republic of China. Not surprisingly, it will deal with issues of censorship and surveillance, but there will be unexpected sides to the story, too. The PRC is the rare case of a Big Brother state in which for decades bookstores have stocked both Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Animal Farm (1945). The first copy of Orwell's final book to reach China was ripped in two, but this had nothing to do with it being seen as a taboo work. And Shanghai was, until recently, the unlikely home to the only "1984 Bookshop" in the world. The presenter will also provide some background on how the material he presents fits into his current book project, "Orwell and Asia," which is under contract with Princeton University Press. The book will be partly about the way Orwell's writings were affected by his spending time working as a colonial police officer in Burma, his following news stories about various parts of Asia, and his interactions with Asian intellectuals (including a Sri Lankan poet whose papers are held at Northwestern University), and partly about how his works have been read and thought about in that part of the world since his death. 

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Jeffrey Wasserstrom is a Distinguished Professor of History at UC Irvine. He often writes for general interest publications as well as academic journals, and he is the author, most recently, of Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (2020) and The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia's Struggle Against Autocracy and Beijing (2025), both very short books published by Columbia Global Reports.

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This event is consponsored by the Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs; Nicholas D. Chabraja Center for Historical Studies; Department of History; and the East Asia Research Forum.