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Bob Dylan didn’t mention Ai Weiwei or gripe about not being allowed to play two of his songs in Beijing. But then, he was never really political, was he? On 12 May, 1963, less than a fortnight shy of his 22nd birthday, a little-known singer-songwriter named Bob Dylan staged a walkout from The Ed Sullivan Show , America’s top entertainment programme. The host and his producers demanded that he replace the song he had been planning to perform with something more innocuous. Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues was an uproarious satire on red-baiting and commie-hunting and it fell foul of Sullivan’s notorious aversion to songs dealing with politics, sex or drugs. Sullivan and his people wouldn’t budge, so the young Dylan told them, “No, this is what I want to do. If I can’t play my song, I’d rather not appear on the show”, and promptly took a hike. No one was going to censor him. Almost half a century later, Dylan – now about to turn 70 – faced a similar dilemma. His Far Eastern tour had finally brought him to China after several years of negotiation (he played Beijing last Wednesday), but he had submitted his set list to the Chinese authorities – and some of his most famous songs were deemed unacceptable by the Chinese culture ministry. What’s more, Dylan was also under fire for not speaking out in favour of the imprisonment of celebrated Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (who was taken away by authorities last Sunday as he waited to board a flight at Beijing airport). “Back in the day, if he had been in Ai’s shoes, he [Dylan] would have expected someone to speak up for him,” said a spokesman for Human Rights Watch. “What does he have to lose?” It was not just any two songs to which Beijing objected, either. Blowin’ in the Wind was the civil rights anthem that had established Dylan’s reputation when it first appeared on his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan , back in 1962, and Desolation Row was the marathon poetic masterpiece that had climaxed Highway 61 Revisited three years later. Unlike other far more lyrically explicit works from Dylan’s brief but cataclysmically influential “protest song” period – a term that he always hated – such as The Times They Are A-Changin’, Masters Of War or With God On Our Side, both songs are oblique and allusive, dealing in metaphor, imagery and allegory rather than any issue-based topical specifics. Nevertheless, metaphor, imagery and allegory are the philosophical and linguistic meat and drink of the culture that gave the world Confucius, Lao Tzu and the I Ching, and the Chinese authorities understood exactly what subtexts those songs carried, even though they were written several decades ago as critiques of another society entirely. They also understood that they didn’t want those songs performed in Beijing and they said so. Dylan didn’t perform them. The times they have indeed a-changed, even though the songs haven’t. Two questions arise and the answers may or may not be blowin’ in the wind. Has the 69-year-old Dylan lost the bottle displayed by his younger self? And why is post-millennial China rattled by the same songs as 1960s America? To address the second question first: Dylan was not the only victim, either in the 60s or now. In 1967, both the Rolling Stones and the Doors fell foul of Ed Sullivan, over Let’s Spend the Night Together and Light My Fire, respectively. They coped in their different ways: Mick Jagger sang the substitute line (“Let’s spend some time together’) while pulling exaggerated faces of disgust. For his part, Jim Morrison defiantly delivered the contentious phrase (“girl, we couldn’t get much higher”) on the uncensorable live transmission at the price of having bookings for a further half-dozen appearances cancelled. More recently, in 2006, the Stones played the half-time show at the SuperBowl and had two of their three songs censored: Jagger’s microphone was muted for the lines “You make a dead man come” (from Start Me Up) and “Once upon a time I was your little rooster, am I just one of your cocks?” (from Rough Justice). Later the same year they made their own Chinese debut and Rough Justice was vetoed, alongside Let’s Spend the Night Together, Brown Sugar, Honky Tonk Women and Beast of Burden. Jagger may be one of rock’s veteran bad boys, but he’s also one of rock’s veteran businessman/performers, who has never been accused of not knowing on which side his bread is buttered. It must, however, be pleasing for these long-assimilated elderly rebels to know that someone, somewhere, is still scared of them and that their subversive potential has not yet been utterly absorbed and nullified. Which brings us back to Dylan. The notion of Dylan as a hardcore political activist and polemicist, or as a dyed-in-the-wool man of the left, is not only antiquated but was essentially erroneous even in the early 60s. His “protest period” lasted less than two years, and even then he was suspicious of leftie folkies who wanted him to be a singing placard: enter a cause, push a button, get a song. He paid a formal farewell to the Movement with My Back Pages (from Another Side Of Bob Dylan in 1964) and by 1966 was sufficiently irritated by his alleged ideological soulmates to hang a gigantic Stars and Stripes as a stage backdrop for his now infamous “electric” European tour. In the late 1970s he outraged his following by devoting an entire album, Slow Train Coming , to his conversion to born-again evangelical Christianity and, in the 1980s, by self-identifying as a hardcore Zionist with the song Neighborhood Bully. His priority is to follow his twinned muses as a poet and musician: indeed Robert Santelli, author of the invaluable The Bob Dylan Scrapbook 1956-1966 , doubts that Dylan was ever fundamentally interested in politics in the first place. And remember: he will turn 70 years old on 24 May. A 22-year-old with nothing much to lose will charge into battle at almost any provocation. A 70-year-old will choose his battles very carefully indeed, and the People’s Republic, as a nation, is eight years younger than Dylan himself. Our second question is that of China, its place in the world and the kind of society into which it is evolving. China, like Russia before it, was driven by historical circumstance to move directly from feudalism to communism without any intermediate phases, and both are now retracing their steps back to capitalism. In China’s case, this means a unique form of state capitalism that still retains many of the authoritarian practices common to both the feudal and communist stages of its history. Old-fashioned totalitarian societies control information by suppressing what they consider inconvenient for their people to hear, while the more sophisticated capitalist democracies control information by swamping the truth in a deluge of disinformation, through which it is virtually a full-time job to sift. China’s national narrative is veined with an ingrained distrust of the outside world: a lengthy period of utter isolation was followed by the opium wars (courtesy of Britain) and some nasty interactions with Japan, the reverberations of both still with us. Hence China’s battles with Google and the Great Firewalls the country’s techies erect around the internet; hence its fear of instability, whether generated internally or externally; hence the repression involved in the cases of Ai Weiwei, Liu Xiaobo and others less celebrated. These are not the manifestations of a secure or confident society, especially one considered in the west to be the coming masters of the new century and a phenomenon almost as terrifying as that of globalised Islamism. Ultimately, it all comes down to fear and paranoia. In the west, we’re scared of Islam and China; in China they’re still scared of Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, who are considered over here to be a bunch of eccentric pensioners who shot their respective bolts half a century back. Everybody concerned needs, essentially, to grow the hell up… and lighten the hell up. The times are always a-changin’, just neither as much as some of us hope, or as much as some of us fear. Charles Shaar Murray is an award- winning rock writer who started his career in 1970 at Oz magazine. His books include Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix And Post-War Pop Bob Dylan China Censorship Charles Shaar Murray guardian.co.uk