This talk will look at how Orwell’s most influential book has been received in the People’s Republic of China, focusing on that Communist Party-run country’s capital city, as the title suggests, but with sideways glances at some other cities as well. Not surprisingly, it will deal with issues of censorship and surveillance, but there will be unexpected sides to the story, too. The PRC is the rare case of a Big Brother state in which for decades now there has been no problems with bookstores stocking the novel that features Big Brother. The first copy of the novel that reached China was ripped in two, but this had nothing to do with it being seen as a taboo work. And Shanghai was, until recently, the unlikely home to the only ’1984 Bookshop’ in the world.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine and has been part of several China Centre events in the past, most recently one on politics and memory with Patricia Thornton and Margaret Hillenbrand in 2023, while he was spending time as a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College in London. His most recent book is the just-published Vigil: The Struggle for Hong Kong (Brixton Ink, 2025), a UK-only updated edition of his 2020 Columbia Global Reports book Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink.