Beijing, Sept 24: The translation of Hillary Codham Clinton's autobiography, one of China's hottest-selling books, has been censored and revised for mainland Chinese audiences to gloss over sensitive topics. The senator and former first lady said today she was ``amazed and outraged.'' Clinton's memoir, ``Living History,'' runs 466 pages in Chinese and contains at least 10 segments where politically charged topics have been changed or deleted. They include material on Harry WU, a Chinese-American human rights activist, and the 1989 Tiananmen square pro-democracy protests. Such retooling is a common practice by Beijing's authoritarian communist government, which tightly controls all media and the internet despite promises of growing openness in an increasingly free-market economy. ``We have made technical changes to the content in some parts of the book in order to win more Chinese readers,'' said Liu Feng, deputy editor-in-chief of Yilin publishing house, the publisher of the Chinese version. ``But,'' Liu insisted, ``The changes do not hurt the integrity of the book.''


He didn't specify exactly what was altered. Since the memoir was released in China on Aug. 3, more than 200,000 copies have been printed in at least four editions.

``Unbelievable! I was amazed and outraged that they would censor me again,'' the senator told a news agency outside an unrelated senate hearing in Washington on Wednesday morning.

Clinton said the publisher is putting up an English and mandarin web site so people in china can access censored portions.


Bureau Report