Ideological Encounters: China’s Reception of George Orwell’s 1984

Western narratives tend to presuppose China’s reception of George Orwell’ 1984 as an instance of political suppression, yet the novel’s circulation and publishing record shows a more complex trajectory. Drawing on translation and circulation data, digital reception, and the academic histories through which the novel has been canonized, this article reconstructs 1984’s metamorphosis from a text once condemned as “Western anti-Communist propaganda” into a canonical work upheld as a universal critique of authoritarianism. It argues that this canonization is better understood through ideological negotiation and cross-cultural transmission than through the binary of censorship and freedom. The article first debunks the persistent myth of the “banned 1984,” a myth that ignores the interpretive latitude of Chinese readers and reduces the novel to a passive vessel for ideological stereotypes. It then examines how Chinese scholars have depoliticized the novel and absorbed it into the canon, recasting it from a static object of geopolitical dichotomies into a transcultural site of inclusive ideological resonance. Such resonance demonstrates that its canonicity is generated in the friction of asymmetrical dialogs between global literary traditions and local sociopolitical urgencies.