[zhdc1]

There was a good discussion on Reddit about it. I don’t have the link but it should be easy to find.

Annual meetings are apparently organized by local groups who lobby/compete with one another. China has a very large SciFi readership and the group from Chengdu was very active when it came to lobbying and gathering votes. It wasn’t until later that people started to realize this may not have been the best decision, e.g. with visa applications and so on.

As far as the actual scandal, there’s also discussion about whether there was any actual government intervention or if this was mainly the result of self-sensorship.

[themacguffinman]

The risk of government intervention (read: penalties for everyone involved) is what drives self-censorship. There's no meaningful distinction between the two.

[dkjaudyeqooe]

> read: penalties for everyone involved

Read: being denied an exit visa, arbitrary detention, torture, being disappeared, being executed.

These are all things that the Chinese government does as a matter of course.

For instance, this Australian woman spent 3 years in detention and was tortured for releasing a government report a few minutes early:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/oct/17/like-...

[seanmcdirmid]

> As far as the actual scandal, there’s also discussion about whether there was any actual government intervention or if this was mainly the result of self-sensorship.

China’s whole censorship legal framework is based on self censorship, so there would not be much difference.