One of the features of this year's Taipei International Book Exhibition that opened Jan. 27 and closed Feb. 1 was a display by California-based Chinese exiled poet and essayist Bei Ling on banned books and underground literature from China. Of the 100-odd items of the Chinese banned and underground publications on display under the banner of "A Tendency Exhibition, " were the hotly sought "China's Food Contamination" written by Zhou Qing and published in 2007, and Feng Congde's "June 4 Diary, " published in May 2009, 20 years after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
The founder of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, an organization of Chinese writers and intellectuals based in Boston, Massachusetts, and dedicated to the freedom of expression, Bei Ling was arrested in China in August 2000 for "illegally publishing" his journal there.
He is on the executive board of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine, and a research associate at Harvard University's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. His poetry, essays and book reviews have been published in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, The New York Times, Harvard Review and many other U.S. publications. His poetry has been translated from Chinese into English, Japanese, German, French and Spanish.
Original article can be found HERE.
The founder of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, an organization of Chinese writers and intellectuals based in Boston, Massachusetts, and dedicated to the freedom of expression, Bei Ling was arrested in China in August 2000 for "illegally publishing" his journal there.
He is on the executive board of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine, and a research associate at Harvard University's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. His poetry, essays and book reviews have been published in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, The New York Times, Harvard Review and many other U.S. publications. His poetry has been translated from Chinese into English, Japanese, German, French and Spanish.
Original article can be found HERE.
