Reading
The regular reading material in the jail is People's Daily. Other reading materials includes publications in China provided to prisoners by the visiting relatives of prisoners. There is a prison library that only high-ranking prisoners were allowed to use. Most reading materials were originally donated by the former Nationalists classified as war criminals by the Communists, and consist mostly of works by Mao Zedong, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Joseph Stalin. The other source of donation is from the prisoners' relatives and reading materials donated by released prisoners.
All reading materials are screened and those deemed improper for the prisoners are rejected. However, the censorship varies according to the political situation in China. For example, after the death of Lin Biao, copies of Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong (Little Red Book) were confiscated and pages with Lin Biao's words were removed. Even during the era without any political turmoil, it is worth noting that many publications legally publicized in China and available to the general public would not be permitted for prisoners.
Read more about this topic: Qincheng Prison
Famous quotes containing the word reading:
“Like dreaming, reading performs the prodigious task of carrying us off to other worlds. But reading is not dreaming because books, unlike dreams, are subject to our will: they envelop us in alternative realities only because we give them explicit permission to do so. Books are the dreams we would most like to have, and, like dreams, they have the power to change consciousness, turning sadness to laughter and anxious introspection to the relaxed contemplation of some other time and place.”
—Victor Null, South African educator, psychologist. Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, introduction, Yale University Press (1988)
“I have this very moment finished reading a novel called The Vicar of Wakefield [by Oliver Goldsmith].... It appears to me, to be impossible any person could read this book through with a dry eye and yet, I don’t much like it.... There is but very little story, the plot is thin, the incidents very rare, the sentiments uncommon, the vicar is contented, humble, pious, virtuous—but upon the whole the book has not at all satisfied my expectations.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“After all, what is reading but a vice, like drink or venery or any other form of excessive self-indulgence? One reads to tickle and amuse one’s mind; one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)