THE Lowly Peon

nytimes: china goes to germany for a book fair

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20 October 2009, 7:59am

china recently attended, as the guests of honor, the world's largest bookfair in Germany. it seems like they may have missed the implications...

The book fair is not the Beijing Olympics and “cannot be controlled,” said Mr. Boos. He apologized for mishandling the symposium, but said: “It is the beginning of a cultural dialogue. And dialogue is not easy.”

“I think the people who run the book fair were kind of naïve when they invited the Chinese,” he said. “But opening this enormous window of the book fair to Chinese writers, whether they are censored or not, will give them a way to sniff out the open forum of intellectual debate.”