genuinely incredible writeup here https://www.patreon.com/posts/98498779
And includes a TON of emails that were intentionally leaked by a staff member. The frankness with which they go about seeking to secretly bar from the awards basically any author who's ever tweeted about china or any political issue related to china, uses china for inspiration in any way (up to and including diaspora authors), or is just plain LGBT at all - and it's not clear AT ALL whether they were pressured or just decided do to this on their own initiative! - is wild and incredibly chilling. I can't imagine this isn't going to lead to a reckoning.
this isn't an original thought, someone pointed it out to me but it definitely applies here
i'm not pretending the western committee did no wrong; they are 100% complicit and part of the problem if they did this in fear of state censorship... but also them doing so is the intended effect of those self censorship laws and it's important to remember that when discussing what led to emails like the above and the outright disqualification of novels like Babel
