I'm feeling so bad for the Chinese fans who just wanted to run a WorldCon and now, because of decisions made by a bunch of long-term insiders from the US and Canada that so far as we can tell none of them had anything to do with, they're in the middle of an angry firestorm with international press coverage. Which is, among other things, seems far more worrisome for them.

It's not clear anyone in the Chinese government would have cared about any of the things McCarty and his pals thought they cared about (see, for instance, the treatment of danmei inside China, which is way more complicated than simple censorship). Babel was published in China, after all. But in the name of supposedly "helping," now the people who don't even live in China have created an international incident and put the local fans in the middle of it. Way to go, guys.