In Censorship and Salesmanship at America’s Biggest Book Fair , Christopher beam argues that categorizing China’s community of writers into “dissidents and collaborators misses the nuances of Chinese publishing and politics”:
“People use the term ‘dissident writer’ in a very confused way,” said Eric Abrahamsen, an American translator and publishing consultant who lives in Beijing, and who drew up the initial list of Chinese authors to invite to B.E.A. Chinese writers don’t go to jail for writing novels, he said: “If that was happening in China, Sheng Keyi [盛可以] would be in jail. Yan Lianke [阎连科] would be in jail. And not only are they not in jail, they’re part of the system. They’re part of the Writers Association. They’re drawing a stipend from the government. They’re getting literary prizes. They have difficulties — sometimes they have trouble publishing, sometimes they don’t win prizes they would have otherwise — but their feet are on the streets.” Dissidents like Woeser [唯色], Tohti [伊力哈木·土赫提], and Liu Xiaobo [刘小波], he added, are jailed for their political activities, not their creative writing. “People talk about Liu Xiaobo as a poet,” he said. “But he’s not a very good poet, and he’s not in jail because of his poetry. He’s in jail because of his political commentary on Charter 08.”
Altaic Storytelling 