Liz Tung reflects on how Western journalists working in China cope with the confines of state censorship – an apparatus that “remains murky even to those who deal with it every day”:
At a cultural magazine where I worked for a year, called The World of Chinese, we had a style guide that included an entire section dedicated to “political incorrectness.” It contained rules common among Chinese publications: “mainland China” had to always be written as “the Chinese mainland”; Taiwan, Hong Kong, and other disputed parts of China could not be implied to be separate countries (i.e. “the company has branches in Taiwan and Japan,” was prohibited); and we were never, ever to use the old name for Taiwan: Formosa.
Once, while I worked there, we had to strike a map of China from the travel section because there was too great a risk of it not including disputed territories, such as the Diaoyu Islands (known as the Senkakus in Japan). In another, we were forced to get rid of an image of a cupcake sporting the Chinese flag in honor of National Day because, we discovered, the Chinese flag must not be displayed so casually.
The Dish 