獨生

Am very pleased to announce that "One Child" will finally be published in book form, in Chinese, in November with Taiwan's Acropolis Publishing. Although my book on the origins and consequences of China's longest-running social experiment debuted at the end of 2015, fortuitously just as Beijing announced a switch to a nationwide two-child policy, I was unable to find a Chinese-language publisher due to tightening censorship, not just in mainland China, but also in greater China. (One reason: The notorious abduction of Hong Kong booksellers in 2015 dampened the publication of books perceived to be critical of the Chinese Communist Party.) I could have left things alone, and be content with several international editions, including in Japanese and Italian, but it just seemed ridiculous and defeatist to have written a book about China that most Chinese people could not read. I'd spent a lot of time interviewing people in China, who'd shared their stories on how they had been affected by the one-child policy, some at some risk to themselves. I wasn't willing to have their voices silenced.

So in November 2016, I did something highly unorthodox, and released a free digital version of my book in Chinese, raising funds for the translation through donations and crowdfunding site GoFundMe. In essence, I gave away the Chinese-language version of my book for free.

Crazily enough, the effort garnered some new publishing offers, including a credible one from Patience Chuang at Acropolis, who wrote that she had heard about the project from "a veteran reporter here (who) told me he knew you could not have any publishers in Chinese. He thought that is too shameful for us.”

I will still maintain the free digital version of the book, which is in simplified Chinese script, making the story of China's longest-running and arguably most painful social experiment available to the people most impacted by it. But I will also be in Taipei and Hong Kong later this year to actively promote Acropolis's version, which is in traditional script and remains the only Chinese-language version of the story available in book form. (Schedule of events will be up and updated on my Facebook page, MeiFongWriter.)

I hope those of you who support good story-telling will buy copies of the book, in whichever language of your choice, or GoFundMe so someone in China can access the story. We must be free to read, if we are to be free to think.