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Notes -
As I said, Chinese censorship - from the little I've learned about it - is odd. There's not really a strict "this is censorship worthy and this is not" list, as such, but on the other hand you do have government bodies monitoring TV, radio, pop culture and they can switch on and off as they feel necessary - see the pother over effeminacy - and that puts subtle but real pressure on the industry bodies that ostensibly are the ones in charge of running the stations etc.
Chinese fans of particular actors, singers, idols can also be - to use a technical term - batshit insane, they are very active online, and malicious actors have no problem getting stars into genuinely serious trouble, and that spreads even to those who worked with them in 'guilt by association', out of jealousy ("X is more popular than Y, whom I idolise, that is not right and I'm going to get X!") and other motives.
So I'm not at all surprised that Worldcon held in China might have background interference, not even directly from the Chinese government, but from those who think that certain subjects or writers or how the topics are written may be 'problematic' and they act in advance to 'maintain harmony and not insult national emotion', as it were.
As I said, I'm laughing over the allegations because this is what the whole Purge of the Puppies was about - getting rid of wrongthink and wrongthinkers. So the outrage over this is very ironic, and the defence seems to be "but what we did wasn't censorship because it was we who did it, and besides we did it all out in the open!"
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