Reflections | Book bans, burnings in ancient China were a loss for all. Is history repeating itself?
When Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang banned, then burned books it caused a loss of knowledge for all of humanity. Now book bans are back
Officials in conservative communities in the United States have been removing books from schools and libraries, to the outrage and dismay of liberal-minded Americans. This process has reportedly been accelerated since Donald Trump became president in January 2025.
Detractors counter that the purpose of libraries is to preserve and provide a diversity of ideas that may not be easily or equally available to everyone.
Besides, they charge that books addressing racism, gender and revisionist American history – which “anti-woke” right-wing Americans find objectionable – have been disproportionately targeted.
The West is no stranger to book bans. D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer were banned in multiple countries, including Australia, Britain, Canada and the United States until the second half of the 20th century. The red scare of the 1950s saw the US censoring books and publications that were deemed to be sympathetic to communism.
One of the most dramatic, and terrifying, demonstration of the intolerance of ideas in recent times was the Nazi book burnings of the 1930s, when ceremonial bonfires of books representing ideologies opposed to Nazism were lit across Germany and Austria.