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:
“After which you led me to water
And bade me drink, which I did, owing to your kindness.
You would not let me out for two days and three nights,
Bringing me books bound in wild thyme and scented wild grasses
As if reading had any interest for me ...”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“... in doing our psychology, we want to attribute mental states fully opaquely because it’s the fully opaque reading which tells us what the agent has in mind, and it’s what the agent has in mind that causes his behavior.”
—Jerry Alan Fodor (b. 1935)
“A reading machine, always wound up and going,
He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing.”
—James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)