man, you guys are really missing the point.

the people who should be "outraged" are not westerners in general (why should you guys care about this any more than anything else?) but the writers who are content to have their work censored. this article is specifically directed at writers and the publishing industry - a generally left wing group of people who like to act tough in the west, implying that they are the heroes that are stopping our governments from sliding into fascism, get hysterical over any form of censorship or invasion of privacy here in the west (not to mention sexism or racism) but are apparently willing to shrug their shoulders and take money from Chinese publishers and allow their work to be tailored to fit the narrative of a repressive dictatorship in someone else's country.

the people who suffer when artists collude with dictatorships are not the artists themselves, who are getting paid, but by the people who don't have the benefit of reading a wide and diverse range of opinions.

On top of the lack of concern, there was also an Escher-like chain of deniability, with authors deferring to agents, who deferred to publishers, who deferred to foreign rights agents, who deferred to Chinese co-agents and publishers who said they were following their gut, trying to conform to a set of unwritten but implied government guidelines. The opacity and the web of shared but poorly delineated responsibility lets many people off the hook.

As an author myself I have to say that's pretty sad, like I said, especially from a group of people that complains about every little thing here in the west. Apparently we writers can rally behind the cause of only publishing women for a year, but can't seem to figure out a way to stand up to censorship of our own books in a dictatorship.