As we saw in the novel from Ha Jin, and her short story “Bad Joke”, free speech can be a difficult issue with the Chinese society. Simple jokes can land people in prison, and they can possibly not even have bad intent, but that doesn’t matter in many cases in China. Speaking out against the government is strictly prohibited, even online. For example, there was a story that came out a while back about the image of Whinny the Pooh’s face being banned in China, even on their internet servers because of a meme that president Xi Xinping found offensive. Some people compared Xi’s face to that of a cartoon bear and the entire country found that image banned. Speech is nothing to take lightly in China, and people can and have been put in prison, and worse for things they have said, or even put on the internet. Chinese society and America differ strongly on this front as free speech is seen in the first amendment of the Constitution. We place that much importance on it. China may pretend that they allow for free speech in their country, but the simple fact is that they restrict their people’s rights to speech in a great majority of cases.
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