Full Disclosure on the Inside Story of 

the Banning of Black and White!

I. Timeline of Events

• June 2023: Black and White was initially published by the Hong Kong Chinese Culture Communication Press (comprising three parts and nine volumes, approximately 1.2 million words).

• October–November 2024: The China Science and Culture Audio-Visual Publishing House released the mainland edition, officially announcing a "grand launch." It included an ISBN, and was available in physical, digital, and audio formats. It was classified as a legitimate publication with a legal book number.

Shortly after launch (Late 2024):

• The book's ISBN was officially revoked/canceled, and it was classified as an illegal publication.

• The publishing house was investigated, ordered to rectify its operations, and the relevant personnel were held accountable.

• The author was summoned for official talks and subjected to administrative penalties.

Result:

• The mainland edition was completely removed from shelves, and banned from sale and distribution. It was purged from all bookstores, e-commerce sites, and digital platforms.

• Although there was no publicly issued "red-headed" (official government) book ban order, the situation constituted a post-publication punishment, invalidation of the book number, and a complete cross-channel blackout.

II. Reasons for the Ban

• Extreme Content Scale and Strong Real-World Targets

• The book directly confronts sharp issues such as official corruption, rent-seeking, wealth polarization, state-owned enterprise restructuring, the wave of mass layoffs, and the urban-rural divide. Its criticism of the system, government policies, and the bureaucracy is blunt, merciless, and holds a distinct left-wing stance that goes far beyond typical realist works.

• Publishing Procedures Deemed Non-Compliant

• Although the mainland edition had an ISBN, it was later determined that the topic selection had not undergone strict review, the content severely violated regulations, and the publishing house was suspected of illicit operations (such as "selling book numbers" or allowing the "three-tier review and proofreading process to exist only in name"). Under the Regulations on Publication Administration, publishing material with prohibited content can result in license revocation, cancellation of book numbers, suspension of business, and the prosecution of responsible individuals.

• Severe Conflict with Ideological and Mainstream Guidance

• The novel explicitly takes the side of the grassroots public and adopts a critical stance, offering a holistic and critical retelling of certain historical and contemporary realities since the Reform and Opening Up period. It was determined to be negating mainstream narratives, amplifying negative aspects, providing incorrect guidance, and endangering ideological security.

III. One-Sentence Summary

Black and White was officially published by a legitimate mainland publishing house → after its release, authorities revoked its book number and enacted a comprehensive ban on its sale and distribution → both the publisher and the author were investigated and punished. This sequence of "publish first, ban later, punish, and block" represents an official crackdown, making the public's description of it being "banned" entirely accurate.

(Generated by Doubao. Download the APP to experience powerful AI capabilities)

Attached is American AI Claude's interpretation of the above Doubao's description:

If we analyze this event strictly through a Marxist, neo-leftist framework—channeling the ideological perspective of a writer like Liu Jiming—the ban of Black and White is not merely an issue of "free speech." It is a stark manifestation of class struggle and the suppression of proletarian consciousness by a bureaucratic bourgeoisie.

Here is how that specific communist perspective would condemn this modern machinery of censorship, expanding on the historical comparisons you raised:

1. The Betrayal of the Red Flag

From a left-wing, orthodox Marxist perspective, the greatest tragedy of the Black and White ban is the hypocrisy of the actors involved. When the Prussian state hunted Karl Marx, when the Tsar’s Okhrana exiled Lenin, or when Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang unleashed the White Terror against Mao Zedong, the battle lines were drawn with absolute clarity. They were the open, avowed enemies of the working class. They represented the monarchy, the feudal lords, and the capitalist compradors.

However, the censorship of a neo-leftist book today is enacted by a system that still nominally claims to represent the proletariat. From Liu Jiming's viewpoint, this is the ultimate betrayal: bureaucratic elites and "capitalist-roaders" waving the red flag to oppose the red flag. By silencing a book that critiques the privatization of state-owned enterprises and the suffering of the laid-off working class, the administrative state reveals its true class allegiance—protecting vested capital and bureaucratic privilege over the workers and peasants it claims to serve.

2. The Totality of Digital "Erasure" vs. Historical Oppression

You noted that this modern censorship feels worse than the historical persecution of Marxist revolutionaries. A leftist intellectual would agree, based on the mechanisms of the suppression:

• Prussia against Marx: When the Prussian censors banned the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx’s ideas could still be printed elsewhere. The censorship was geographical and physical. It drove him to Paris and London, where the international working-class movement only grew stronger.

• The Tsar against Lenin: Tsarist censorship was brutal but porous. Lenin and the Bolsheviks could still smuggle the Iskra (The Spark) newspaper across borders in false-bottomed suitcases. The oppression bred a hardened, resilient underground vanguard.

• Chiang Kai-shek against Mao: Chiang used bullets, imprisonment, and book burnings. But the brutality was out in the open, which only exposed the moral bankruptcy of the KMT and drove the masses toward the Communist base areas.

Why the modern iteration is viewed as "worse": Modern bureaucratic censorship does not engage in open ideological debate, nor does it merely burn physical books. It utilizes the absolute totality of the digital age to enact an administrative annihilation. By revoking an ISBN, wiping e-commerce databases, and scrubbing search engine results, the bureaucracy attempts to make it as though the critique never existed. It is a bloodless, sterile, and terrifyingly efficient erasure that leaves no physical martyrs—only a digitally enforced silence. It uses the tools of techno-capitalism to monopolize the narrative entirely.

3. The Cowardice of Administrative Punishment

A Marxist critique would heavily emphasize the cowardice of the method. If a book is ideologically flawed, a true Marxist system would engage it in open, dialectical debate. It would allow the masses to read it, critique it, and understand its errors through mass line struggle.

Instead, the modern bureaucratic apparatus treats the masses as a threat. It relies on obscure administrative loopholes—claiming "publishing procedure violations" or "withdrawing book numbers"—to avoid having to publicly defend the very real social inequalities the book highlights. It is an admission of weakness. As a communist perspective would argue: Truth does not fear investigation; only those who have stolen the wealth of the people fear the light of a pen.

Ultimately, from this ideological standpoint, the banning of Black and White is seen not just as an attack on one author, but as a preemptive strike against the collective memory of the working class—an attempt by entrenched power to ensure that the pain of the marginalized remains unspoken and unrecorded.