Sadallah Wannous (1941-1997), a leading Syrian playwright, was concerned in his political theater with preaching democracy and raising the awareness of the masses in order to have more involvement in the public arena. His drama was hurdled with censorship and he had to find indirect ways in his plays to instigate opposition. This article investigates whether the lack of freedom of expression curbs the creativity of the dramatist. My aim is to study and evaluate the dramatic techniques Wannous used in his attempt to circumvent censorship. This is mainly done through a critique of his plays in the light of my textual analysis, Wannous’s statements in his non dramatic writing and available literary criticism. Wannous’s polemical play An Evening for the fifth of June (1967-8) was banned after the first performance. Two later plays were chosen for this study; The King’s Elephant (1969) and The King is King (1977). In both plays, Wannous analyzed the nature of authoritarianism and the psyche of the repressed majority, and urged for dissent in far fetched plots that do not directly reflect the status quo. To do so, he made extensive use of fables, folk tales, allegory and symbolism. By exploring new theatrical modes, Wannous was able, not only to politicize the masses, but also to produce high quality art that is thought-provoking and entertaining at the same time. For the purpose of economy I limited my article to two plays. However The Adventure of the Slave Jaber’s Head (1970) is very pertinent to the main question herein and can be added later in a more extended book-length study.

As King, Pan, and Roberts write in their 2013 study on Chinese social media; research into the dynamics of internet censorship in China, “exposes an extraordinarily rich source of information about the Chinese government’s interests, intentions, and goals”. This paper seeks to use the dynamics of internet censorship by China’s most important social media site, Sina Weibo, to achieve a better understanding of the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in November 2012. To this end, searches were performed daily on the names of all 2,270 delegates to the Party Congress on Sina Weibo for five weeks before and after the event. Data recorded included information on the number of results reported and whether the keywords were reported to be blocked or not.

As a complement to work by researchers including Gary King, David Bamman, King-wa Fu, and Tao Zhu into Chinese social media censorship, our study concludes that Sina Weibo actively manipulated and filtered the search results of Communist Party delegates — particularly higher-ranked and incumbent officials — during the observation period, with an apparent decrease in search blocks after the Party Congress. This study offers evidence that the Party, through proxies like Sina Weibo, proactively attempts to shape public opinion online, just as they do in traditional media. The decrease in search blocks perhaps indicates that the Party is possibly still seeking to find a balance between utilizing the internet as a check on officials and suppressing the internet to prevent dissent; or perhaps it is a short-term effect due to a new wave of leaders taking office.