Reading the Redacted: Literature, Typography, and Censorship in Early Twentieth-Century China

Abstract This article examines the establishment of a modern censorial code in early twentieth-century China and shows how redaction marks served as a literary device more than as a tool of censorship. Tracing such redaction marks as ☐ and X to their heterogeneous origins, the article uncovers a transnational history of modern Chinese censorship and illuminates its connections with local textual traditions. The changing uses and significations of these redaction marks further demonstrate the expressive and interpretative ambiguities of typography writ large. In incorporating blank squares and the X mark into their writings, modern Chinese writers (including Lu Xun, Zhang Shewo, and Wang Duqing) rediscovered the non-censorial and even anti-censorial potentialities of these typographic markers of censorship. Through close analysis of the creative reinvention of censorial marks in modern Chinese literature, this article challenges the conventional wisdom that censorship is necessarily antithetical to literature. Instead, it argues that the censorial apparatus can be tactfully appropriated as an integral part of the typographic edifice of literature.