HONG KONG -- U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton was understandably angry that her memoir, "Living History," was censored by the Beijing publisher who put out the Chinese edition. Her comments on the military crackdown in Tiananmen Square in 1989, on her experience at the 1995 United Nations conference on women in Beijing and her account of the arrest of Chinese-American human rights activist Harry Wu were all excised or changed.
No doubt, the Chinese publisher, Yilin Publishing House, was right in saying that 99.9 percent of the book was not altered. After all, China accounts for a minuscule portion of the book's contents. But Chinese readers are likely to be especially interested in what Clinton had to say about their country.
Liu Feng, the deputy editor in chief of Yilin, said they had only made "technical changes to the content in some parts of the book in order to win more Chinese readers. The changes do not hurt the integrity of the book."