The Surprise Censorship Battle Over My Cocktail Book Has Left Me Shaken—and Stirred

Politics Taiwanese Whiskey Goes Down a Lot Easier Than Chinese Censorship My cocktail book was held hostage by a Chinese printer. I never expected to end up here. Aekachai Lungmin/iStock/Getty Images Plus Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. “Censorship issues,” read the subject line of the surprise email from my editor. We weren’t expecting anything from her at that point: Along with my co-author, I’d already gone through the line revisions, layout tweaks, page proofs, and finally cover design for my new book. The file was off to the printer and the burden of writing off my shoulders. This was supposed to be the calm between the frantic race to meet deadlines and the excitement of publication day, a time when I wouldn’t have to think about the project that had consumed so much of the past two years. I certainly wasn’t thinking about how our text might be censored by an authoritarian government halfway across the world, but that was the news that email came bearing. Our book, The Bartender’s Library, is a guide to spirits and cocktails, hardly the stuff of political controversy (though feel free to get us going about tariffs). It might inspire debate about the proper garnish for an old-fashioned, the ratio of gin to vermouth in a martini, or, perhaps, whether it’s worth seeking out a bottle of Taiwanese single-malt whiskey. That last bit was the problem. Our printer was in China, and we had mentioned Taiwan, a democratically self-governed island of 23 million people that the government of China regards as its own and threatens to annex through military invasion. And so we, two Americans writing for an American publisher for a primarily American audience, found our book targeted by China’s repressive censorship regime. In the nearly 400 pages of our book, we made only a few passing references to Taiwan, none of them commenting on its political status. We had written instead about how its hot tropical climate produces a whiskey that provides an interesting contrast to that aged in damp and chilly Scotland. We also recommended a single malt from acclaimed Taiwanese distillery Kavalan in a flight of whiskeys from up-and-coming origins. These brief mentions were enough to trigger rejection by our Chinese printer, which requested that we instead reference “Taiwan, China” or just “China,” the latter erasing Taiwan entirely. Our book about drinks was suddenly caught up in the government of China’s increasingly transnational repression of speech, an effort in which it seeks to control discourse on sensitive topics both domestically and abroad. We now faced an unanticipated dilemma about how to get our book into print. We’re not the only ones ensnared. In recent decades, China has often flexed its economic muscle to shape the language used by international businesses. Taiwanese athletes in the Olympics, for example, compete under a different flag and the name Chinese Taipei. In 2019 the general manager of the Houston Rockets deleted and apologized for a tweet supporting pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong after backlash from the Chinese Consulate and the suspension of streaming Rockets games in China. Hollywood studios alter plots of movies in exchange for access to China’s massive box office. Even something as simple as listing Tibet, Taiwan, or Hong Kong in web forms can trigger retaliation by the Chinese government, a lesson learned by companies like Delta Air Lines, Marriott, and Zara, among others. Just last month, La Liga and soccer star Kylian Mbappé issued apologies after a casual remark referring to Mao Zedong as a dictator led to Chinese companies dropping sponsorships and the state broadcaster deciding to stop showing games in which he plays. It’s unsurprising (if still disappointing) that for multinational corporations, toeing China’s lines on sensitive topics is sometimes part of the cost of doing business in a lucrative market. What I hadn’t realized was the extent to which China’s censorship now reaches much smaller targets far from China’s borders, like our book, written in English from a cocktail bar in Portland, Oregon. But as I’d learn by searching for other recent examples, we aren’t alone. The World Coffee Championships are a much lower-profile event than the Olympics, but as of this year, the Taiwanese baristas competing in them are similarly required to do so as Chinese Taipei. In Strasbourg, France, the Chinese Consulate attempted unsuccessfully to pressure a local theater into canceling a performance of This Is Not an Embassy, a play about Taiwan’s complicated diplomatic status. Most alarmingly, pressure from the Chinese government resulted in the complete cancellation of a human rights conference in Zambia due to the inclusion of Taiwanese delegates. The circumstance most similar to my own involves the Victoria and Albert Museum, in England. The museum was printing catalogs in China for its exhibitions on such seemingly benign topics as Black British music and Fabergé eggs. Demands for censorship came as a last-minute surprise, with the printer flagging a map of trade routes from the 1930s that depicted China with borders that do not match current government standards and, in a separate instance, a photo of Vladimir Lenin deemed “sensitive” by China’s censorship body, the General Administration of Press and Publication. By the time the issues arose, it was too late to find another printer—especially at a competitive price—and the museum altered its catalogs to comply. Call it the high cost of cheaper printing. The challenge of getting a beautiful book into print and past the objections of China’s censors has afflicted everything from graphic novels to cookbooks. Producing a specialized book, such as a hardcover with full-color photos on specific paper stock, can’t be done just anywhere. The printers capable of doing the job at a reasonable price are often in China or other parts of Asia. In China specifically, this comes at a hidden cost of threats to free expression, even for those of us just writing about Fabergé eggs or fancy cocktails. To the credit of our own publisher, there was never any suggestion that we should comply with the censor’s demand that we refer to Taiwan as part of China. But we then faced the harder question of whether to delay publication while searching for an alternative printer or coming up with some less objectionable way around the censor’s demands. My co-author and I favored the first option. That was easy for us: Our advance checks had long ago been cashed, and we knew that it might be years before we saw additional royalties. Our publisher, on the other hand, had already borne the cost of paying us, the editors, the photographer, the designer, and everyone else involved in producing our book. Contracted for 50,000 words, we’d sent in 80,000, and were already publishing later than planned. We’d also just spent weeks negotiating a luxurious cover design. All of which is to say that our book had turned into a bigger and longer undertaking than our publisher had initially bargained for, and it’s understandable that it didn’t want the publication derailed over edits to three sentences of text. Changing printers would have delayed the book even further, causing us to miss our solicited sales date and the crucial holiday gifting season. It likely would have meant raising the cover price or eliminating some of the design touches we’d just spent so much time putting into place. For an author, one of the privileges of working with a traditional publishing house is benefiting from its expertise in design, production, and sales. Having made our case for switching printers, we ultimately had to defer to the publisher’s judgment on what was needed for the viability of the project, and that meant moving forward with printing in China. That meant altering the text, which entailed a somewhat frenzied back-and-forth between us, our publisher, and China over a rushed few days. In a paragraph discussing the effects of aging spirits in a tropical climate, we substituted the example of Jamaican rum for Taiwanese whiskey. More awkwardly, a line about Kavalan single malt now describes it as coming from the “Taiwan region,” a geographic descriptor sufficiently vague to satisfy the censor. (Region of what? Best not to ask!) One other mention in a list of whiskey-producing origins was changed from “Taiwan” to “and other countries.” In the end, we faced the same kinds of economic pressures as big multinational corporations. Making books is art, but it’s also a business, and we needed our books printed and put on a boat to the United States. To get the physical manifestation of our work out of China, we were forced to negotiate. It’s not a situation I expected to find myself in as a drinks writer, and I’m not happy that the economics of printing and the repressive politics of the Chinese Communist Party combined to force us into it. I can accept that we were backed into a corner, that our textual changes are minor, and—most important—that we did not back down by acknowledging the Chinese government’s claim of sovereignty over Taiwan. Even as I was negotiating, I knew that compromise didn’t have to be the end of the story. Though it would be easier to let this go, I’m choosing to publicize this act of censorship as widely as possible. The absurdity of our situation is that there would have been so little consequence to printing our original draft; the future of Taiwan in no way hinges on its mention on Page 166 of an American cocktail book. Aside from officials in China who may have retaliated against the printer, no one would have ascribed it any importance whatsoever. By writing about their insistence on removing it, I can call far more attention to China’s desperate attempt to control narratives about Taiwan than the matter would have received if the country had simply allowed us to print. Fortunately, we have other options going forward. It wasn’t the lower cost of printing in China that forced our hand so much as the last-minute timing of the censorship, the printer holding our book hostage when we needed it to imminently go to press. Future printings, assuming our book sells enough copies to need them, will not face the same timing constraint, and we’re working to get them printed as we intended. By bringing awareness to the issue, I hope I can also encourage American publishers to reconsider their reliance on printing in China, and to warn that Chinese censorship of books can no longer be thought of as something that stays within its borders. We’re not in 2016 anymore, when, in a comically blunt example, pages of Merriam-Webster’s English dictionary that mentioned Taiwan were ripped out before the volumes reached store shelves in China. The form of censorship that affected our book is in some ways more insidious, subtly altering the text in ways that most readers would never notice. If we don’t speak up, there’s no telling how many other authors have found—or will find—their work caught in this web. Writers, readers, and especially the people threatened and repressed by the Chinese government deserve to know that books published in the United States will not be altered to comply with the demands of the country’s censorship boards. The first printed copy of our book finally arrived in the mail more than two years after we started writing it. As with every book I’ve published, it’s a joy to see the lengthy text document transformed into a beautiful object out in the world, held in the hands of thousands of readers and displayed on bookshelves and bar carts. This book is the most lavishly produced of any I’ve ever written, from the gold-leaf title and dramatically lit cover photo to the subtle molding on the spine and—a favorite touch highlighted by early readers—library-inspired card for tasting notes affixed to the inner cover. The designer and photographer did an incredible job bringing our work to life, and I’m grateful to see it all come together. (As one of the authors, I’d like to think the words inside are pretty good too.) It’s genuinely lovely—and I also can’t stop thinking about the invisible fingerprints left by the unnamed censor on our slightly altered text. When preorders began arriving in October, a friend texted me a photo of the book. “It’s gorgeous,” he said. “Whatever the library card cost to add was worth it.” I’m still not so sure it was. Books China Politics Taiwan