Exporting Authoritarianism With Chinese Characteristics

Scholars and political leaders describe increasing concerns about Chinese government influence over teaching and research in the U.S. and Australia.
By Elizabeth Redden

Two times in Kevin Carrico’s six years of teaching he’s been approached by students from China who told him that things they said in his classroom about sensitive subjects somehow made their way to their parents back home.

The first time it happened, when Carrico was teaching at a university in the United States, a student informed him that a presentation he’d given about the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 had been reported to his father in China, where the father held a position in government. “This was a situation where the father’s superiors -- I wasn’t given a lot of specifics -- but his superiors mentioned this to him and raised this as something that [the father] should know about, supposedly,” said Carrico, who’s now a lecturer in Chinese studies at Australia’s Macquarie University.
The second time, which happened after Carrico moved to Australia, a student told him that a class presentation she’d given on self-immolation in Tibet had been reported to her parents in China.

Kevin Carrico

“The only way that this could have been communicated back to China would have been from somebody in the class,” Carrico said. 

“I suppose another possibility is that the files on the student’s computer are somehow corrupted and can be read or monitored, but that’s probably unlikely.”
“It raises really complicated issues about, ethically, what am I supposed to do as somebody who teaches contemporary China issues in an ostensibly free environment, while some of my students may be in a less free environment such that what they say in class could in some cases be communicated back to China,” Carrico continued. 

“Awareness of that could affect student participation, which is part of their grades, and lack of awareness of that could have implications for students and their families.”
“It leaves me with a real dilemma as someone who is dedicated to not censoring what I teach or write about China, but who also doesn’t want to create an environment in which students are worried about what they say in class or are pressured to contribute to discussions that could somehow be risky for them and somehow or other reported back to officials or to family.”
Carrico finds it hard to judge just how big the problem is based on the two instances his students told him about.
“Two is not a lot,” he said, “but at the same time I do feel like it’s two too many.”
In recent years the Chinese government has stepped up its crackdown on domestic dissent at the same time it continues to expand the country's global influence. 

A confluence of events has China studies scholars raising concerns about whether the Chinese Communist Party is exporting its censorship regime abroad, and what the implications are for free discussion and research at universities outside China.
Some of the concerns -- such as academic freedom concerns raised by the Confucius Institutes, centers of Chinese language and cultural education that are funded and staffed by a Chinese government entity and housed on U.S. and other international campuses, or concerns about foreign scholars self-censoring their writings or choices of research topics so they can continue to get visas to China -- are familiar. 

Others have risen to the forefront over the past few months.

In several recent cases, international scholarly publishers have ceded to requests from Chinese censors to block access to selected journal articles in China. 

Cambridge University Press originally agreed to block access in China to more than 300 articles -- mostly on sensitive topics like Tiananmen, Tibet, Taiwan and the Cultural Revolution -- from its prestigious China Quarterly journal before reversing course and reinstating the content after coming under heavy criticism. 

Other Cambridge-published journals, the American Political Science Review and the Journal of Asian Studies, have also reported receiving -- and rebuffing -- requests to block access to some of their articles in China.
The giant publisher Springer Nature has, on the other hand, complied with censorship requests. 

After Financial Times reported that more than 1,000 articles had been removed from the Chinese websites of two political science journals published by Springer Nature, the publisher confirmed that “a small percentage of our content (less than 1 percent) is limited in mainland China” and said it is “required to take account of the local rules and regulations in the countries in which we distribute our published content.” 

Springer Nature described the blocking of content as “deeply regrettable” and said it was necessary so as not to avoid jeopardizing access to the remainder of its published content in China.
Shuping Yang

Beyond the issue of scholarly publishing, Chinese nationalism is also posing challenges to foreign universities that host Chinese students. 

After a student delivered a commencement speech last spring at the University of Maryland, College Park, criticizing air pollution in her home city in China and praising “the fresh air of free speech” she found in the U.S., the student, Shuping Yang, came under heavy criticism on Chinese social media and from some of her Chinese classmates. 

The backlash prompted Yang to apologize and for her university to issue a statement defending her right to free expression.
In another commencement controversy, the Chinese Students and Scholars Association at the University of California, San Diego, led a protest of the university’s choice of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, as this spring’s graduation speaker. 

A nationalistic Chinese newspaper, The Global Times, blasted UCSD for the invitation to the Dalai Lama, whom Beijing considers to be a separatist, and said its chancellor “must bear the consequences for this.” 

In September it came to light that the China Scholarship Council was freezing funding for government-funded scholars headed to UCSD.
Academic exchange between the U.S. and China is arguably as high as it's ever been (even though it is true that the number of Americans studying in China has actually declined in recent years). 

More than 350,000 Chinese students study at American colleges and universities, making up the single largest group of international students by nationality. 

American universities have grown increasingly dependent on the tuition revenue Chinese students bring and welcome the chance to bring more diverse and global perspectives to the classroom.
But there are increasing concerns about whether mainland Chinese students always feel free on American campuses to articulate perspectives that may deviate from Beijing's party line. 

Earlier this year, The New York Times published an article on the links between campus-based chapters of Chinese Students and Scholars Associations and Chinese embassies and consulates and the ways in which the student groups have, in the words of reporter Stephanie Saul, “worked in tandem with Beijing to promote a pro-Chinese agenda and tamp down anti-Chinese speech on Western campuses.”
Wang Dan, a leader of the Tiananmen Square protests who holds a doctorate in history, recently published an op-ed in The New York Times in which he described surveillance of Chinese students and scholars on campuses by some of their compatriots. 

“The Chinese government encourages like-minded Chinese students and scholars in the West to report on Chinese students who participate in politically sensitive activities,” he wrote.
“Chinese students who are seen with political dissidents like me or dare to publicly challenge Chinese government policies can be put on a blacklist. Their families in China can be threatened or punished.”
At a hearing in December on China's foreign influence operations held by the Congressional Executive Commission of China, Senator Angus King, an Independent from Maine who caucuses with Democrats, asked speakers at the hearing about this issue. 

He asked whether there is "any evidence that the Chinese government is recruiting some of those students as agents, either gathering intelligence or otherwise malign activities in our country."
Sophie Richardson testifying.

“We’ve been doing some research for a couple of years on threats to academic freedom from the Chinese government outside China, and a piece of that has involved looking at the realities for students and scholars who are originally from the mainland on campuses in the U.S., Australia and elsewhere,” Sophie Richardson, the China director for Human Rights Watch, said in response to King's question.
"It's not a new pathology that Chinese government officials want to know what those students and scholars are saying in classrooms. One doesn't have a perfect year-on-year data set to say that it’s gotten worse, but it’s certainly a sufficiently real dynamic for people. For example, we have a graduate student who told us about something that he discussed in a closed seminar at a university here, and two days later his parents got visited by the Ministry of Public Security in China asking why their kid had brought up these touchy topics that were embarrassing to China in a classroom in the U.S. So I think that that surveillance is real.”

China’s ‘Long Arm’
The congressional hearing -- which bore the title “The Long Arm of China: Exporting Authoritarianism With Chinese Characteristics” -- was not exclusively focused on academe, but much of the hearing focused on Chinese censorship of academic publications and the Chinese government's efforts to wield influence internationally through academic and other people-to-people exchanges. 

“It seems to me there’s a continuum,” Senator King mused at one point. 

“I mean, we have people-to-people programs, we bring students from other parts of the world here, we have various information about our country that has … a positive narrative. But at some point the question is where does puffery stop and -- um, I don’t know what the right word might be -- but some kind of subversion begin?”

The committee's chair, Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida, said in his opening remarks that the Chinese government is “clearly targeting academia. The Party deems historical analysis and interpretation that do not hew to the Party’s ideological and official story as dangerous and threatening to its legitimacy. Recent reports of the censorship of international scholarly journals illustrate the Chinese government’s direct requests to censor international academic content... Related to this is the proliferation of Confucius Institutes and with them insidious curbs on academic freedom.”

“I think in one sense what distinguishes the Chinese efforts to wield influence in the United States is that they are spending a great deal more money to do that,” Glenn Tiffert, a visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, said at the hearing, where he spoke about his research on censorship of two Chinese law journals (a webcast of the full hearing is available here). 

“They have commercial advantages and so they’re able through, for example, Confucius Institutes to promote a particular view of China and to close out discussion of certain topics on campus.”
“China’s not necessarily appealing to hearts and minds,” Tiffert said. 

“It’s appealing to wallets.”
Jonathan Sullivan, the director of the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham, in the United Kingdom, said in an email interview with Inside Higher Ed that the increasing concerns about Chinese influence over international higher education “are the result of an accumulation of developments and concerning trends in China (and the West).”
“Every sector of Chinese society has tightened under Xi Jinping -- the Party, business, media, internet, [human rights] lawyers, activists, citizen journalists, migrants, Chinese academia,” he said. 

“The expansion of Chinese interests around the world and determination and ability to push back against what it sees as Western hegemony that has acted against China have steadily increased during the same period. At the same time, we have witnessed the erosion of our own values at home via Trump, Brexit, rise of the far right. Taken as a whole, these trends are cause for concern. Although China has long had a censorship regime … there has never been a confluence of these three trends before, i.e., concerted tightening across the board within China, China’s willingness and ability to actively promote its interests in the West, and the erosion of support for core values by our own leaders.”
Carrico, of Macquarie University, added that the "ideological hardening" within China has had implications outside the country.
“People have come to realize that there’s no longer any kind of great firewall between academic practice in China and academic practice outside of China. There is this kind of increasing pressure on academics working outside of China, and ironically, I think this increasing pressure is leading people to realize just how problematic the current system is in China,” he said.

Clashes on Campus

Rowena He

Rowena He, an assistant professor of history at St. Michael’s College, in Vermont, has written that when she was a graduate student in the U.S. and Canada, she dodged questions from college classmates about her research topic -- the Tiananmen Square movement -- and worried about whether she could ever go home and about whether her family members in China would get into trouble. “When my work became better known, angry young Chinese students accused me of lying about historical facts, while thousands of online messages labeled me a ‘national traitor’ who criticized China to get money from ‘the West,’” He wrote in a 2011 op-ed for The Wall Street Journal.
He has also written about the treatment of Grace Wang, who as a freshman at Duke University in 2008 was vilified online and subjected to threats -- her contact information and directions to her parents' apartment in China were posted on the internet -- after she attempted to mediate between pro-Tibet and pro-China protesters on the North Carolina campus.
“In the past decade, I have observed the development of Chinese student nationalism, first as a graduate student, later as a scholar and faculty member, and always as a first-generation Chinese living in Canada and United States,” He, who’s also a researcher with Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, said via email. 

“I experienced firsthand the intimidation of hypernationalist discourse in classrooms, in public lectures, in cyberspace and in daily lives. Some media stories describe such phenomena as ‘cultural conflicts’ that the ‘West’ needs to understand and accommodate; meanwhile, within the academy, many consider these reactions as perspectives of ‘the other,’ which thus should be embraced under the principles of inclusion. This sort of conciliatory approach may come easily to some college administrators who have to deal with budgetary pressures and welcome the tuition from Chinese students.”
“It is particularly disturbing to see that, in contrast to the experiences that I have documented in my studies among the previous generation of Chinese diasporas, such ultranationalism of the new generation did not abate as students matured in societies that offer easy access to information and freedom of speech,” He continued. 

“Instead, it appears that Chinese students are becoming even more assertive and aggressive, taking advantage of the freedom of their host countries, and operating with increasingly open support from the Chinese authorities.”
Concerns about these kinds of issues have been especially acute in Australia, bound up as they are in part of a broader public debate about the extent of Chinese influence over the country's politics.
The head of Australia's domestic intelligence agency warned in October of a need to be "very conscious" of foreign interference in universities, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 

"That can go to a range of issues. It can go to the behavior of foreign students, it can go to the behavior of foreign consular staff in relation to university lecturers, it can go to atmospherics in universities," Duncan Lewis, the intelligence chief, said.

Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop

Australia's foreign minister, Julie Bishop, gave a speech in October in which she urged Chinese students to respect freedom of speech in Australia. 

"This country prides itself on its values of openness and upholding freedom of speech, and if people want to come to Australia, they are our laws," she said.
"We want to ensure that everyone has the advantage of expressing their views, whether they are at university or whether they are visitors," Bishop said.
"We don't want to see freedom of speech curbed in any way involving foreign students or foreign academics."

The comments from top Australian government officials followed a series of incidents in Australia in which lecturers at the country's universities came under fire on social media or in Chinese-language newspapers for things they said or did in the classroom.

In one case, reported on by The Australian, a lecturer at the University of Newcastle came under criticism for using teaching materials that referred to Hong Kong and Taiwan as separate countries (Hong Kong is a special administrative region within China, while under the "one China" policy Taiwan is regarded by the government in Beijing as a breakaway province that will eventually be reunited with the mainland). 

According to a statement from the university, the lecturer agreed to meet with concerned students after class to discuss the materials, which came from a Transparency International report that used the word “countries” to refer to both countries and territories. 

The discussion was “covertly recorded” and released to the media. 

“You have to consider all the students’ feelings … Chinese students are one-third of this classroom; you make us feel uncomfortable … you have to show your respect,” a student is heard saying on the recording. 

The Chinese consulate-general in Sydney reportedly contacted the university about the matter.
In another case, a lecturer at Australian National University apologized after students complained that he had translated a warning against cheating into Mandarin, making it appear as if the warning was targeting Chinese students specifically, according to Chinese media. 

In yet another case, a lecturer at the University of Sydney publicly apologized for using a map in class that showed Chinese-claimed territory as being part of India, according to The Australian.
“Does this mean that all of Australia’s universities recognize all of China’s territorial claims?” asked Clive Hamilton, a professor of public ethics at Charles Stuart University. 

“It’s madness.”
A book by Hamilton about the extent of Chinese government influence on Australian politics and academe is in limbo after its publisher, Allen & Unwin, delayed its publication indefinitely, saying it was concerned about “potential threats to the book and the company from possible [legal] action by Beijing.” 

Hamilton withdrew the book, which is titled Silent Invasion: How China Is Turning Australia Into a Puppet State, and is looking for another publisher.
“I’m very concerned about the message it sends,” Hamilton said. 

“I wonder whether it will scare off other publishers. They’ll see the story and think, ‘OK, let’s be very careful about any books on China or Chinese influence on the West because there might be blowback from Beijing.’ I’m also worried about the message it sends to other authors. Do they look at this case and say, ‘Well, I might have trouble finding a publisher if I’m too critical of the Chinese Communist Party, so I’ll tone down my criticism or stay away from controversial areas, like the Tiananmen Square massacre’?”
Hamilton said the large influx of Chinese students into Australia -- he calculated for his book that proportionally there are five times as many Chinese students in Australia as in the U.S. -- has made Australian university leaders anxious about causing any offense to the Chinese government and potentially cutting off the substantial flow of tuition revenue from the mainland.
“I think it would be frightening for many university administrators to face up to how dependent they’ve become on a foreign source of money that doesn’t share basic Western values -- or the founding values of Western universities, let’s put it that way," Hamilton said.

Looking for Evidence

David Shambaugh

David Shambaugh, the Gaston Sigur Professor of Asian Studies, Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University and the author of a book on increasing Chinese assertiveness on the global stage, emphasized the importance of being highly empirical in discussing these issues. 

"I am aware of no empirical evidence of Chinese interference with normal academic activity inside the United States," he said via email. 

"Unlike Australia -- where there have been multiple recent reports of monitoring of lecturers in the classroom, intimidation and silencing of Chinese students in class, detentions of Australian academics traveling in China, and general monitoring of China-related activities on campuses by the Chinese Students and Scholars Association -- I am aware of no evidence of any such actions or activities in the United States. These activities may occur in the future, but so far they have not. I have informally polled a number of my Chinese studies colleagues in U.S. universities, and they also report no such activities."
What has happened, he said, is, that the Chinese Embassy and consulates liaise with Chinese Students and Scholars Associations on U.S. campuses. 

And “Chinese individuals do occasionally make comments and challenge public speakers at university events -- but this is part of free speech and not out of the ordinary,” he said.
Other things that have happened, he said, include the social media attacks on the students at Duke and Maryland, retaliation against universities that have hosted the Dalai Lama, and the refusal of China to grant visas to certain U.S. scholars.
“The other thing to mention is that [over] the past six to seven years it has become increasingly much more difficult for American (and other foreign) scholars to conduct social science research in China, either individually or in collaboration with Chinese scholars. This has entirely to do with the increasingly strict and repressive political atmosphere in the country, whereby the authorities are on the lookout against alleged ‘foreign hostile forces.’ A dark political cloud has descended over Chinese academe in recent years -- and this has negatively affected opportunities for normal scholarly research and collaboration.”
Sen. Marco Rubio

At the mid-December congressional hearing on Chinese foreign influence activities, Senator Rubio asked the witnesses whether they were willing to share if they have experienced any intimidation as a result of the work they have done on this topic.
“Personally, I have not to date within the United States,” replied Tiffert, of Stanford. 

“In China working on the topics that I work on, I come under significant pressure, and the informants and people that I speak to also do, and I think that goes with the territory and it’s well recognized among people who work on modern China and contemporary issues in China.”
He continued, “I have to say that in the classroom I’ve not experienced any negative activity or any of the personal outrage that we’ve seen at other universities, say, in Australia. In my teaching I’ve been spared that. I’ve found Chinese students to be extremely thoughtful and even open-minded about issues that are passionately felt at home.”
“But there definitely is the danger -- and early-career academics are highly conscious of this -- there’s always the possibility that a minority might express unhappiness or outrage at something that is taught because it’s different than the way they’ve been taught it and that produces unwelcome controversy … Because of the decline of tenure, faculty become risk averse. They don’t want to cause controversy because they’re also concerned that their universities might not adequately support them in the event that the Chinese Students and Scholars Association or even a smaller group of students takes issue with something they said in the classroom. And so there’s a self-censorship, a chilling of speech, that occurs as well.”

A Set of Standards?
What, if anything, can universities and scholarly publishers do about some of these issues?
Scholars have urged publishers to stand together in resisting Chinese requests that they actively censor they content for the China market, and an online petition calling for a peer review boycott of publications that censor their content in China has garnered more than 1,000 signatures.
“This is an issue that is only going to occur over and over with the Chinese authorities, and [that] foreign journal editors and publishers need to anticipate and take a united stand on,” said Shambaugh, of George Washington University.
“My own view is that all publishers need to take a very principled [stance] and adopt the simple position in favor of freedom of speech and publishing over a position of (a) craven financial gain, or (b) the argument that it’s better to have a large number of journals available to Chinese readers than none at all (my view is none at all if China tries to ban a single one).”
Jeffrey Wasserstrom, the Chancellor's Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, and editor of the Cambridge-published Journal of Asian Studies, added that scholarly publishers have leverage they can use.
“The reason why I'm particularly distressed about the situation with Springer,” he said, “is that with the desire to compete internationally, the Chinese authorities actually really care about the journal Nature" -- a premier scientific journal published by Springer.
“It would be seen as problematic, I think, to scientists to be operating in a university setting that didn't have access to that sort of premier publication. I think Springer had more to bargain with because of the prestige of that publication. But on the other hand, they're a private company, so they were less beholden to the interest of academics and less concerned, I think, to the damage that could be done to their brand within intellectual circles,” Wasserstrom said.
After the Cambridge Press decision to censor content -- which was quickly reversed -- James A. Millward, a professor of history at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, published an open letter in Medium criticizing the censorship and characterizing Cambridge's concession as “akin to The New York Times or The Economist letting the Chinese Communist Party determine what articles go into their publications  --  something they have never done.”
“It wasn’t decrying Chinese censorship so much as it was decrying non-Chinese institutions going along with it and actively abetting it,” Millward said of the letter.

“I have a history of visa bannings related to work on Xinjiang, along with a bunch of other scholars, and I’ve always been upset at the sort of weak reaction of my own and other universities to that kind of thing and the fear of what will happen, what will China do to us if we actually stand up and say, ‘boo.’” (Millward was one of a group of contributors to a book on China's Xinjiang region who were unable to get visas to China after the book was published. He has since been able to return, he said, but only after jumping through extra hoops.)
"We need some open statements or standards, guidelines, about how these situations should be dealt with, and we don't really have that," Millward said.
"There's this kind of general sense of what academic freedom is and so on and so forth, but universities just want to go forth alone."
In the congressional hearing last month, the final question, which came from Senator Rubio, had to do with just this issue.
“Are any of you aware of efforts, whether it’s in academia or entertainment or anywhere, for universities, for example, to come together and confront this threat to academic freedom, establish some level of standards about what they will and will not do in the universities, a collective effort to affirmatively say, ‘We don’t care if you’re going to deny us trips and access to the marketplace or even to students or to exchanges or the ability to have campuses in the mainland; we are not going to allow you to pressure and undermine academic freedom’?” Rubio asked.
Among the witnesses who replied was Richardson, from Human Rights Watch.
“Just by chance I happened to spend Sunday morning with a group of China-focused U.S. academics, and this issue dominated our conversation,” she said.
“I think it’s fair to say that there’s enormous interest in having some sort of set of principles or code of conduct, but I think there’s also a recognition of how difficult it would be to get institutions to sign on to that for fears about loss of funding or the desires of fund-raisers or administrators versus the interests of faculty. But I think there is momentum to capitalize on.”

Rogue Nation

Cambridge University Press headed for showdown with China over censorship
By Benjamin Haas in Hong Kong

Cambridge University Press, publishing arm of the University of Cambridge, is refusing a Chinese request to block academic articles. 

Cambridge University Press is heading for a showdown with Chinese authorities after it refused a renewed request to block academic articles, following an outcry last month when it was revealed the publisher has restricted certain content in China.
A Chinese state-owned importer asked CUP, the world’s oldest publisher, to block articles from the American Political Science Review.

Cambridge University Press censorship exposes Xi Jinping's authoritarian shift

“A request was indeed made by the Chinese importer, but was not acted upon by Cambridge University Press, so no content was blocked,” a spokeswoman for CUP said in a statement. 

It is unclear which articles were specifically targeted.
In August it was revealed that CUP had blocked more than 300 articles from appearing in China at the request of its state-owned publisher, drawing widespread criticism from academics and activists.
The latest request to censor material within China highlights the government’s determination to block content it deems inappropriate or contradicts the Community party line.
China’s State Council, the country’s cabinet, said late on Friday that importers were responsible for filtering content and hinted it may declare some articles published by CUP in China illegal.

Cambridge University Press faced boycott over China censorship.

“All publications imported into China’s market must adhere to Chinese laws and regulations. Publication importers are responsible for checking the content of their imported publications,” the State Council said in a statement. 

It did not directly mention CUP.
Cambridge University’s publishing house eventually reversed its decision to censor articles in the prestigious academic journal China Quarterly. 

Pieces singled out covered topics considered taboo by Chinese authorities, including Tibet, the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.
The publisher’s change of heart followed growing international protests, including a petition signed by hundreds of academics, and the threat of having its publications boycotted. 

Its U-turn was notable for CUP taking to Chinese social media to explain its decision, a provocative move rare for foreign publishers in China.
Since coming to power in 2012, Xi Jinping has led a push to further tighten control over information in China, already one of the most restricted media and publishing environments in the world.

U.S. Tech Quislings

Cambridge University stood up to China in a way companies like Apple haven't
By Cheang Ming

With its decision to reinstate hundreds of academic articles, a division of Cambridge University has done what larger entities have failed to: stand up to China.
Cambridge University Press, the world's oldest publishing house, on Monday reversed an earlier decision to block access within China to 315 articles in the China Quarterly, a leading academic journal focusing on contemporary China. 

Most articles that had been blocked focused on topics seen as inconvenient to the Chinese government, including the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Square protests and Taiwan.

People stand outside the Cambridge University Press stand at the Beijing International Book Fair in Beijing on August 23, 2017.

The publisher had blocked those articles from being accessed on the mainland after receiving an "instruction" to do so from a Chinese agency, CUP said in an Aug. 18 statement.
While China has blocked other media platforms — such as Reuters and the Wall Street Journal — in the past, the move to censor CUP was different due to the academic journal's smaller, niche readership.
Anita Chan, an Australian National University senior fellow, told CNBC the move was "unprecedented." 

Two articles authored by Chan were among those blocked.
Meanwhile, a petition started by Peking University Associate Professor Christopher Balding stated that the academic community was "disturbed" by the Chinese government's attempt to "export its censorship on topics that do not fit its preferred narrative."
Public outcry from academics and activists eventually led to the articles being reinstated by CUP on Aug. 21.
Even though it took several days of heated protests for the Cambridge unit to change its mind, the publisher's ultimate decision highlights moves taken in the opposite direction by multinational corporations to placate regulators on the mainland.

Multinationals fall in line
One of those companies is Apple.
The Cupertino-based tech giant drew ire for removing apps from virtual private network (VPN) providers from the Chinese version of its App Store in July. 

VPNs allow individuals in China a way of bypassing its "Great Firewall," a system that restricts access to the internet.
In December last year, Apple pulled a similar move when it removed the New York Times' app from its Chinese app store.
Reuters also reported last month that the iPhone maker announced it was building its first data center in China after the introduction of new cybersecurity laws requiring companies to store sensitive data on servers in China. 

The new rules were vague while the practice of storing data on local servers could expose companies to government monitoring.

Apple isn't the only company complying with tougher regulations in China either.

Amazon's Chinese partner told clients it would "shut down" unauthorized VPNs, Reuters reported earlier this month. 

Like Apple, an Amazon Web Services spokesman said the company had to work through Chinese partners to adhere to local regulations, Reuters added.
In 2014 media reports said LinkedIn (now a subsidiary of Microsoft) was censoring posts of a sensitive nature from being seen in China so it could operate in the mainland market.
Even though well-known companies — such as Apple and Google — make headlines when they either accept or reject regulator demands, the decision-making process is more "nuanced and mundane" for most firms, said Christopher Beddor, an associate at consultancy Eurasia Group.
"For those companies that are impacted by censorship regulations, there's often a behind-the-scenes back-and-forth discussion with local partners and regulators over how to adapt the content for the Chinese market," Beddor added.
That discussion happens, in part, because companies are trying to make money in China — as their shareholders likely desire — whereas CUP has more leeway as a university department.

What's next
Chinese authorities reacted to CUP's reversal just hours after its announcement: Regulators promptly scrubbed a Weibo post from the Cambridge University account announcing the decision, according to a report from the Guardian on Tuesday.
However, the academic publisher's website remained available in China.
Greatfire.org, a website monitoring censorship in the country, found that the webpage for "The China Quarterly" was uncensored as of Aug. 24. 

As the CUP website used Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS), the only way for authorities to block individual pages would be to block the entire website, Greatfire.org co-founder Martin Johnson (a pseudonym) told CNBC.
The CUP website was also likely to remain unblocked, Charlie Smith, a pseudonym used by another Greatfire.org co-founder, told CNBC in an email. 

He said that's because the financial cost required to access journal articles acted as "its own form of censorship."

An aerial view of King's College, University of Cambridge. Cambridge University Press is the publishing business of the university.

"I think that CUP probably overreacted to some request from an official," Smith added.
Some China watchers have linked the tightening in regulations to the upcoming 19th National Congress of the Communist Party in the fall as bureaucrats attempt to step up their game ahead of an anticipated leadership reshuffle. 

However, the new level of scrutiny is unlikely to subside after the event, experts said.
"The fundamental trend remains toward more state control over media and information," Beddor told CNBC.
Although the pace at which new regulations are initiated could slow after the party congress, it was unlikely that rules would be reversed following the event's conclusion, he added.
Even though Apple's Cook was hopeful that engaging with the authorities would lead to fewer restrictions in the future, not everyone was equally optimistic.
"Censorship in China is a long-term vision and is not really a tap that get(s) turned on and off. It's not like sites get unblocked after the congress finishes. They stay blocked. Which is part of Xi Jinping's grand plan," said Smith.
Meanwhile, some experts have voiced fears that China's censorship regime may even extend beyond its borders.
University of Canterbury professor Anne-Marie Brady, who had one article in the China Quarterly blocked in the mainland, said, "China under Xi is now not only trying to control the information environment in China, but also the external information environment when it pertains to China."

China's pathological lying

Standing up to China’s censors: an attempt to delete history backfires
BYJOHN SIMPSON

Chinese pathological lying: For years now, the official Chinese position has been that no one was killed in Tiananmen Square.

At the time, the massacre in and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing on the night of 3 June 1989 was the worst thing I’d ever seen. 

In front of the Beijing Hotel, where my camera team and I took refuge after we’d escaped from the square itself, I counted 40 people killed or wounded by soldiers of the Chinese army. 

A photographer who was standing on the next balcony to ours was shot dead when the gunner of a passing tank casually sprayed the hotel with machine-gun bullets.
During the previous three weeks I had spent almost every day in the square, making friends with dozens of students who were demonstrating there. 

How many of them were killed that night I have never been able to find out. 

It’s not the kind of thing you can easily forgive or forget.
For years now the official Chinese position has been that no one was killed in Tiananmen Square that night. 

This may or may not be literally true, though I saw for myself the bullet-scars on the stone steps of the monument in the middle of the square before they were repaired, so it probably isn’t. 

But this is just playing with words; the real killing fields were the avenues leading away from Tiananmen Square, such as Chang’an Avenue, which runs past the Beijing Hotel. 

The implication of the official line is that the massacre was simply invented by the western media. 

Fake news. 

Sad.
Tiananmen paralysed China for an entire month, and damaged its relations with the outside world for years. 

Even today, more than a quarter-century later, it retains its intense toxicity. 

A Chinese newspaper journalist I know got into trouble for referring to it as a “tragedy”; if you have to refer to it, you must call it simply “the Tiananmen events” – but it’s better not to mention it at all.
It was bad enough in what now seems with hindsight like the liberal, benevolent reign of Hu Jintao. Since 2012, when Xi Jinping came to power and introduced an increasingly ferocious crackdown on dissent, every official throughout the vast Chinese system is aware of the urgent need to keep away from sensitive subjects: not just Tiananmen, but the Cultural Revolution, Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Which is how, earlier this month, a Chinese import agency came into conflict with the oldest publishing house anywhere, over the world’s best and most respected journal of Chinese studies. 

The China Quarterly, double-blind and peer-reviewed, is owned by the School of Oriental and African Studies, but Cambridge University Press publishes it. 

The Quarterly’s website of course carries many articles on just these subjects. 

The import agency suddenly ordered CUP to take down all 315 of them, some dating back to the 1960s, from its website within China; if it didn’t happen, the Chinese said, they would be forced to close the entire website down.
CUP fell over itself to obey, in order, it said, “to ensure that other academic and educational materials we publish remain available to researchers and educators in this market”. 

Which, as a defence of freedom of speech, isn’t quite up there with John Milton, himself a Cambridge alumnus, in Areopagitica: “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”
The China Quarterly’s admirable editor, Tim Pringle, in the quiet but steely way that befits a scholar under pressure, allowed it to be known what CUP had done, and dozens of outraged scholars and others yelled about it as loudly as Twitter and Facebook would allow. 

The China Quarterly’s first editor, Roderick MacFarquhar, nowadays a sprightly octogenarian who teaches at Harvard, weighed in angrily on behalf of the organ whose high reputation he had helped to create, and some rough words were used about academic publishers who did the work of an autocracy’s censors for them.
To do it credit, CUP listened and realised what irreparable damage they were doing to the China Quarterly; and it announced on Monday that it was reinstating all the articles.
Pringle couldn’t resist a bit of high-minded reproof: “Access to published materials of the highest quality is a core component of scholarly research,” he wrote. 

“It is not the role of respected global publishing houses such as CUP to hinder such access.” 

And he added: “Our publication criteria will not change: scientific rigour and the contribution to knowledge about China.” 

Milton would have been proud of him.
Does any of this really matter? 

Well, it’s a useful object-lesson in how to approach China. 

Personally, I don’t think Xi Jinping and his friends, as they splash around in the lakes and swimming pools of Zhongnanhai, the Communist Party retreat beside the Forbidden City, will have known or heard anything about it. 

In spite of its refusal to admit the dreadfulness of the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square massacre, China isn’t really just an Orwellian society where officials labour away destroying or rewriting the files of the past. 

No doubt the party would like to, but it simply isn’t a shot on the board in the modern world.
You just have to turn to Sina Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter. 

After CUP decided to reverse its self-censoring operation, hundreds of brave souls in China took to the internet to greet the news with pleasure and relief. 

Some had the courage to put their names to their comments: “It is a triumph of morality,” wrote Zhang Lifan, a Beijing historian. 

Another historian, Sun Peidong, praised the international chorus of disapproval that had brought about CUP’s change of heart. 

Someone else, unnamed, wrote “Cambridge University has backbone.”
Even in the days of clampdown and repression, you can just about get away with saying this kind of thing; though within hours some government job’s-worth had deleted the entire discussion from Weibo. 

But right across China decent, honourable people who believe in telling the truth now know CUP and Cambridge University haven’t, after all, sold the pass.

China’s desperate desire to keep its people in the dark

THE CAMBRIDGE University Press has rightly abandoned its plan to censor the prestigious China Quarterly journal at the behest of the Chinese authorities.
It was indefensible for the journal to remove some 300 sensitive articles and book reviews from its website for a Chinese audience, and it realized the error quickly.
But the Chinese request will probably not be the last.
The state-run Global Times newspaper asserted that “Western institutions have the freedom to choose” whether they want to do business in China.
“If they don’t like the Chinese way, they can stop engaging with us. If they think China’s Internet market is so important that they can’t miss out, they need to respect Chinese law and adapt to the Chinese way.”
This will sound familiar to U.S. companies that have been instructed that they must obey Chinese cybersecurity laws that could be used for repression, under threat of criminal penalty, and have complied. 
Cambridge also acted with an eye on the market; the press has enjoyed double-digit year-on-year growth in China for the past five years, and its most popular title, an English-language course book, sold more than 3 million copies over the past eight years, according to the Financial Times.
For years, an argument has been made that engagement with China would change China, that contact with the West would influence China toward openness, rule of law and democracy.
But the presidency of Xi Jinping is making it harder to defend this proposition.
China is actively resisting Western influences and pushing back on digital battlefields.
The “China way” means that a paternalistic state, run by a party with a monopoly on power, will decide what people can know and what they can say. 
Xi has been making this plain for some years now, as was the case with the detained Hong Kong booksellers, or the crackdown on professors who don’t toe the line, or the roundup over the past two years of human rights lawyers, or the visit Xi made to leading Chinese news outlets in 2016 to insist that they must serve the Communist Party with absolute loyalty and must “have the party as their family name.”
In this case, the list of articles and book reviews targeted for censorship included topics sensitive to the ruling party, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, policies toward Tibetan and Uighur ethnic minorities, Taiwan and the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution.
China’s General Administration of Press and Publication warned that it would block all articles from the China Quarterly site if these sensitive topics were not removed from the site for a Chinese audience.
Should it foolishly follow through on this threat, the impact on China’s people would be, once again, to keep them in the dark about their own history and their government’s policy.
This is the real “China way.”

Rogue Nation

Blunt instrument? What a list of banned articles says about Chinese censors
By John Ruwitch

People walk past the Cambridge University Press (CUP) stall at the Beijing International Book Fair in Beijing, China, August 23, 2017. 

SHANGHAI -- An old review of an academic monograph on agrarian revolutionaries in 1930s China is hardly a political third rail in Beijing today, even by the increasingly sensitive standards of the ruling Communist Party.
That such a piece appeared on a list of some 300 scholarly works that Cambridge University Press (CUP) said last week the Chinese government had asked it to block from its website offers clues about the inner workings of China's vast and secretive censorship apparatus, say experts.
Xi Jinping has stepped up censorship and tightened controls on the internet and various aspects of civil society, as well as reasserting Communist Party authority over academia and other institutions, since coming to power in 2012.
Far from being a well-oiled machine, though, China's censorship regime is fragmented and often undermined by gaps, workarounds, and perhaps even hasty officials, say academics specializing in Chinese politics.
"Crude is the word," said Jonathan Sullivan, an associate professor at the University of Nottingham in Britain. 

"The blunt way in which articles were chosen for censoring ... suggest to me that there was not a lot of thought put into it."
CUP, the publishing arm of Britain's elite Cambridge University, on Monday reversed its decision to comply with the request to censor the articles published in the journal China Quarterly following an outcry over academic freedom.
China's response remains to be seen. 

The education ministry, foreign ministry, cyberspace administration and state publishing authority all declined to comment.
The list of articles the authorities wanted blocked covered topics that are considered sensitive by the government, including the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy protests, the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, Tibet, Taiwan and the violence-prone far-western region of Xinjiang.
But it was far from thorough or comprehensive.
The article on 1930s agrarian revolutionaries may have got there by mistake, say experts.
What appears to have condemned the scathing but otherwise innocuous 1991 review of Kamal Sheel's book about a Communist base area in China's southern heartland was the fact the place was named Xinjiang, and the word appeared in the book title.
The Chinese characters are different for Xinjiang, the village, and Xinjiang, the mostly-Muslim region more than 2,500 km (1,550 miles) to the northwest that is beset by ethnic tensions and occasional unrest. 

But in English they are indistinguishable.

KEYWORD SEARCHES
Xu Xibai, a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford, tweeted a brief analysis of the list that noted that its creators appear to have hastily searched the China Quarterly database for taboo words in titles and abstracts.
"The censors probably used a few keyword searches to locate just enough articles to make a nice, long list to impress their superiors," Xu's post said. 

"They did not bother to read the articles or go through the content list manually."
An article defending Mao Zedong was on the censored list, for instance, while others more critical of the former paramount leader were not.

People talk at the Cambridge University Press (CUP) stall at the Beijing International Book Fair in Beijing, China, August 23, 2017. 

Some sensitive subjects seem to have eluded the officials' net.
The Communist Party tightly controls discourse on the 1958-61 Great Leap Forward, in which millions starved to death due to ill-conceived economic policies. 

Censors have banned books on the topic but it was apparently not on this list.
Nor were the brutal, Communist-led land reforms of the 1950s, or the Hundred Flowers Movement, an effort by Mao to lure critics out of the woodwork by feigning openness, only to punish them.
The party's efforts to censor news and information have sometimes backfired or left outsiders perplexed.
In 2009, software designed to check pornographic and violent images on PCs blocked images of a movie poster for cartoon cat Garfield, dishes of flesh-color cooked pork and on one search engine a close-up of film star Johnny Depp's face.
Citizen Lab, a group of researchers based at the University of Toronto, compiled a list of words banned as of last year on popular live streaming sites in China. 

Among them: "Moulin Rouge", "braised rabbit", "helicopter" and "zen".
The request to block the articles was passed to Cambridge University Press by its import agent, but without knowing where it originated it is hard to draw firm conclusions, said Sebastian Veg, a China scholar at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences in Paris.
"The censorship system is of course centrally directed, but not uniform," Veg said.
Lee Siu-yau, assistant professor of Greater China studies at the Education University of Hong Kong, suspects the request was a trial balloon.
"They usually start with something small-scale and gradually expand and make their requirements more difficult," he said.
"This might be one of the first steps that the Chinese government would take to see if it could actually influence international academic publishers."

Pseudologia Fantastica Sinica*

China’s odious manipulation of history is infecting the West
By John Pomfret 

John Pomfret, a former Washington Post bureau chief in Beijing, is the author of “The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present.”

Xi Jinping by Badiucao

The announcement last week by Cambridge University Press that it had removed some 300 articles from a Chinese website hosting the China Quarterly, one of the premier academic journals on Chinese affairs, is yet another example of an assault on history by the People’s Republic of China. Censorship is a key element in the Chinese Communist Party’s strategy to stay in power. 

In so doing, it aims, one scholar has written, “to control China’s future by shaping consciousness of its past.”
Cambridge made the decision to block access to these articles after China’s General Administration of Press and Publication threatened to cut access in China to all of the journals published by Cambridge University Press. 

The offending articles in question appeared in the China Quarterly as far back as 1960 and concerned a range of topics considered sensitive in today’s China. 

There were pieces on the disastrous famine sparked by the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989, the suppression of the Falun Gong religious sect and the troubled legacy of Mao Zedong.
The decision to agree to self-censor sparked a backlash among Western academics and journalists against the Cambridge University Press. 

Several open letters were published and petitions were launched. 

James Millward, a professor of history at Georgetown University, called it “a craven, shameful and destructive concession to the PRC’s growing censorship regime.” 

Andrew Nathan, a professor of political science at Columbia University, warned that “the prestige of the journal is irrevocably damaged by this act of censorship.”
In the face of such a response, Cambridge on Monday reinstated the articles and announced that “academic freedom is the overriding principle on which the University of Cambridge is based.” 

It said that its original decision to cull the articles had been only a “temporary” one.

China’s move to demand self-censorship is not an isolated case. 

It’s just one of many the Communist government has taken in recent years to mold history and historians to serve the needs of the Chinese Communist Party. 

Xi Jinping has led a campaign against what he calls “historical nihilism,” the party’s shorthand for attempts to write honestly about the past and mistakes committed by China’s Communist leaders. 

As part of that campaign, historians and writers have been silenced and jailed, books have been banned and party censors have launched a nationwide campaign to expunge any positive mention of Western political ideas from Chinese college textbooks.
This campaign also stretches beyond China’s borders in the banning of Western academics and journalists from China’s shores. 

Millward and Nathan, two of the leading voices against Cambridge’s decision to self-censor, have long had trouble obtaining visas to China. 

They felt freer to criticize the Chinese censorship regime than colleagues who still hope to be allowed to travel to China.
Many of those who have had visa applications turned down by the Chinese are afraid to publicize their cases and in particular don’t want their colleagues at home to know. 

Rejection by the Chinese can kill the career of someone who has chosen to make Chinese studies his or her life. 

As one scholar wrote to me: “I would prefer to not make my story public, mainly because I am not yet tenured and my colleagues in Chinese Studies are already freaked out enough about me, without knowing I am blacklisted!” 

I feel his pain. 

Two of my recent visa applications have been blocked.
The long hand of the Chinese censor has also reached into the past in China, in a malevolent case of digitalized legerdemain. 

As the scholar Glenn Tiffert reports in a recent study submitted for publication, Chinese censors have removed scores of articles from the online editions of journals published in China from the 1950s up until the present day. 

Like China’s shenanigans with the Cambridge University Press, this truly mind-boggling censorship amounts to a massive rewriting of Chinese history through post-publication censorship decades after these pieces were published. 

Think of the man-hours used and the genesis of a decision to go back into old journals and scrub them of viewpoints considered dangerous today.
Tiffert discovered this censorship as he researched debates among Chinese legal experts in the mid-1950s over the establishment of a socialist legal system in the new China. 

He reported that in a critical two-year period spanning China’s Hundred Flowers Movement, which allowed limited freedoms in 1956, to the Anti-Rightist Campaign, which resulted in the incarceration of more than 700,000 people, dozens of articles were expunged from two online Chinese databases of two key law journals. 

In several cases, all of the lead articles of a journal were culled. 

The articles focused on debates over matters such as an independent judiciary and the presumption of innocence — issues that remain unresolved in China today. 

Tiffert also found large gaps in Chinese legal journals from the late 1970s and social science journals from the 1980s, which were published when experts and scholars were given more freedom than today to debate sensitive topics.
What the party is seeking to do is to paint a new and completely false picture of some of the key moments in Chinese Communist history as a way to further bolster the party’s rule today. 

Talk about fake news. 

Indeed, China’s assault on history has reached Orwellian proportions where history, as Orwell himself wrote, is being “scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.”
The manipulation of history for political gain is odious, no matter where it occurs.

But in China, the state has harnessed technology and the lure of China’s market to export its domestic censorship regime abroad as it seeks, as Tiffert wrote, “to sanitize the historical record.”
Despite the decision by the Cambridge press to push back against Chinese censorship, the Global Times appeared confident that Western universities and other organizations will ultimately bend to China’s will. “Western institutions have the freedom to choose. If they don’t like the Chinese way, they can stop engaging with us,” it said. 

“If they think China’s Internet market is so important that they can’t miss out, they need to respect Chinese law and adapt to the Chinese way.” 

With so much Chinese cash and so much Chinese technology, that prediction could actually be true.

* Pseudologia fantastica sinica = Chinese pathological lying = Chinese mythomania

A slap in Xi's face: “It is a triumph of morality”

Cambridge University censorship U-turn is censored by China
By Tom Phillips in Beijing

‘Academic freedom is the overriding principle on which the University of Cambridge is based,’ the institution said in a statement.

Chinese intellectuals and bloggers have celebrated Cambridge University’s decision to push back against Beijing’s draconian information controls – but Communist party censors reacted almost immediately to prevent word of the snub spreading in mainland China.
Cambridge University Press, the world’s oldest publishing house, had faced a ferocious public backlash following its admission last week that it had complied with a Chinese order to block access to more than 300 politically sensitive articles published in its journal the China Quarterly.
Amid intensifying criticism and calls for an academic boycott, Cambridge University – which owns the publishing house, the world’s oldest – announced on Monday it had reversed the decision, which it said been taken “reluctantly” as a result of a “clear order” from China.
The blocked articles, which covered thorny topics such as the 1989 Tiananmen massacre and the Cultural Revolution, were made accessible to readers in mainland China free of charge.
Cambridge University also announced its rejection of China’s censorship demands in a Chinese-language post on its official account on Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter.
“Academic freedom is the overriding principle on which the University of Cambridge is based,” it said.
Cambridge’s change of heart drew praise from Chinese intellectuals.
“It is a triumph of morality,” said Zhang Lifan, a Beijing-based historian.
“[The decision] should be welcomed, if Cambridge sticks to it.”
Sun Peidong, a Fudan University historian, credited the international academic outcry for Cambridge’s volte-face.
“Western intellectuals collectively made it reversible,” she wrote on Weibo.
Chinese internet users also praised Cambridge’s support for academic freedom, with its Weibo post drawing more than 2,600 shares and 525 overwhelmingly approving comments.
“Cambridge University has backbone – academic freedom cannot be threatened by political persecution,” wrote one.
Another commented: “What a brilliant decision! Well done Cambridge!”
However, less than 12 hours after the Weibo statement was posted – at about 12.20am local time in China – it had disappeared, apparently scrubbed from the Chinese internet by censors.
Those trying to access the post instead found the message: “Sorry, this article has been deleted.”
Qiao Mu, a former Beijing Foreign Studies University professor who was forced out of the university as a result of his outspokenness on political topics, said such censorship was part of everyday life in one-party China: “Censors treat everyone equally under an authoritarian system such as this.”
A question about the censorship row was also expunged from a transcript of a daily foreign ministry press briefing on Monday.
According to the Wall Street Journal, ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying declined to comment, claiming the controversy was not a diplomatic issue.
But neither the question nor Hua’s answer found its way into the official record, which is routinely shorn of topics considered inconvenient by Chinese authorities.
Last month, after similar questions about dying Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo were also removed from the ministry’s transcript, a spokesperson told foreign journalists: “If you can decide how to write [your reports], then I think as the ministry of foreign affairs, we can decide what goes online or not.”
Speaking on Monday, Tim Pringle, China Quarterly’s editor, said he was delighted by Cambridge’s reversal.
“Any publishing house of CUP’s renown has no business taking down articles” at the behest of authorities from any country, he said.
However, Pringle said the dispute could and should have been avoided.
“If CUP had fully consulted us we could have flagged up that we would not have supported the decision to remove these articles and would have been in a position to warn them of the significant damage to their reputation [that it would cause].”
Writing on the China File website, Columbia University scholar Andrew Nathan, who was among those whose work was blocked, said “irreversible damage” had been done to Cambridge’s reputation.
“Who in future can submit an article to any Cambridge journal, or submit a book manuscript to the press, with confidence that the publisher will always preserve the integrity of the work?”
Christopher Balding, an economics professor who authored a petition demanding a CUP reversal, said Cambridge’s decision to rebuff Beijing’s censorship demands would be “very embarrassing” for the Chinese government.
“China absolutely craves respect and affirmation of what it has achieved.
“But [the decision] definitely does not mean that the problem of censorship has gone away at all. There are going to be these ongoing battles about this issue for the foreseeable future with regards to China.”

Chinazism

Curtailing academic freedom is China’s latest export to the world 
By Ben Bland in Hong Kong

Chinese censors told Cambridge University Press to block access to more than 300 politically sensitive articles from its leading China-focused journal.

Mao Zedong once bragged that his crackdown on troublesome scholars dwarfed the efforts of China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, who is said to have buried alive 460 men of letters in 2BC.
Now Xi Jinping, who has concentrated more power than any Chinese leader since Mao, is determined to leave his own mark on academia, with a crackdown that threatens universities and publishers not just in China, but all over the world.
As Xi’s censors have extended their campaign against dissent beyond China’s borders, Cambridge University Press received word from a government agency that it should block online access in China to more than 300 politically sensitive articles from its leading China-focused journal or face the consequences.
The world’s oldest publisher initially caved in, removing the articles about subjects from Tibet to the Tiananmen Square massacre.
CUP cited the fear of many corporations, that its access to China’s vast and fast-growing market would be cut off totally unless it complied.
CUP reversed course on Monday, after an outcry over its decision to sacrifice the principle of academic freedom on the altar of commercial opportunity.
Cambridge’s volte-face was welcomed by the many Sinologists who had attacked its initial self-censorship as shameful and cowardly.
But this furore is only a foretaste of the pressure that is to come on foreign universities and publishing groups, as well as other businesses and governments, as repression becomes the latest export in Beijing’s “Going Out” strategy.
The decision to block the 300 articles in China Quarterly was not merely an issue for the tiny community of academic readers within China.
More importantly, it sent a message, via one of the world’s most prestigious universities, that the banned subjects were not a safe area for research and debate.
This chilling effect comes at a time when, from Australia to the US, academics are concerned about the increasing influence of the Chinese Communist party on campuses, whether through donations by well-connected Chinese tycoons, funding by Beijing, or protests against course content and lecturers by student groups affiliated with the party. 
The Chinese authorities are yet to respond to Cambridge’s belated act of defiance.
But many academics fear that universities will increasingly be forced to make concessions to the Chinese Communist party’s narrow view of political correctness or face the threat of access to the lucrative Chinese market being cut off.
Many foreign investors in China have, of course, already faced this dilemma.
Some, like Apple, which recently removed from its Chinese app store applications that help users bypass China’s “Great Firewall”, have complied to preserve market access. 
Others, like Google, tried to work out a compromise before eventually finding the censorship requests — and reputational damage in the West — too much, and quitting China.
What is different and more worrying about the Cambridge case is that the collaboration with Chinese censors would have had an impact far beyond China’s borders.
Jonathan Sullivan, a member of China Quarterly’s executive committee and author of one of the blocked articles, says that the incident should be a wake-up call.
“We have given little thought about how to deal with [China’s] nascent attempt to import Chinese political cultural norms into western classrooms full of Chinese students; or how to uphold academic values in the face of attempts to censor our work,” he wrote for the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham, which he directs.
The principled response, which Cambridge has turned toward, is for universities to resist Chinese pressure, maintaining their international reputation and forcing Beijing to do its own dirty work.
If Beijing ups the ante and blocks CUP’s business in China, what will be the reaction of the millions of middle-class Chinese parents who rely on CUP’s English language courses and examinations to boost their children’s education?
Will Beijing be willing to take the public relations hit for squelching the publishing arm of one of the world’s leading universities?

There is no place in academia for craven submission to Chinese censorship demands

After an outcry, Cambridge University Press has reinstated deleted articles about China. It’s proof that we must remain wary of creating two academies – one devoted to truth, the other to securing the power of Beijing officials

By Paul Mason

A protester wears a Xi Jinping mask at a rally in support of the jailed Hong Kong three.

Imagine if the British government could eradicate the miners’ strike from history. 

Not just by deleting all news coverage but by preventing the academic study of it. 

Imagine if, at university courses on the history of modern conservatism, all mention of it was banned. Imagine if, on top of that, a major global academic publisher voluntarily deleted all discussion of the miners’ strike from a prestigious journal.
You now have a sense of the scale of what Cambridge University Press had done by deleting more than 300 articles from China Quarterly, following a request from the Chinese government. 

The decision, which has been reversed and the articles reinstated in the face of a threatened academic boycott, could lead to China blocking this and other related content. 

To which conflict I say: bring it on.
Coming after the decision by Apple to stop selling, and Amazon’s Chinese partner to forbid hosting of virtual private networks – the tool needed to evade internet censorship in China – the move is part of a widespread and craven acquiescence by western corporations and governments with Xi Jinping’s project.
It is important to understand what that project is. 

I certainly did not, when I stood in the Great Hall of the People to watch Hu Jintao hand the baton to Xi in 2012. 

China watchers in the press pack debated whether he would be tougher or more lenient on corruption; whether the marketisation and closure of state-owned industries would continue or reverse. 

My minder – a hack from the party’s mouthpiece – even disputed the basic premise of my questions: China, he said, is a “mediumly developed communist country” and to treat it as in any way capitalist was to misunderstand it fundamentally.

In the end, we were all asking the wrong questions, premised on the idea that the Communist party bureaucracy was just a committee for managing the affairs of Siemens, Toyota, Apple and the rest of the foreign investment community. 

Xi, instead of merely stewarding the process of marketisation begun in 1978, has made a decisive change in China’s global strategy. 

By setting up the $50bn Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and targeting $900bn at infrastructure projects linking China to Europe in the so-called Belt and Road Initiative, Xi signalled China’s willingness to reshape the entire world economy around its own needs.
Its simultaneous expansion of hard diplomacy and military capability into its own vicinity – the South China Sea and, most recently, the Indian border region – have convinced some that this is merely a regional muscle-flexing, similar to Putin’s in Georgia, Crimea and Ukraine.
But the chances are that it is more. 

Xi, who made headlines with his clear defence of globalisation at Davos in 2017, even as Putin and Trump vied to dismantle it, embodies the beginnings of the answer to a question: what will the world look like if China matches its 21st-century economic dominance with the desire to be more than a regional power?
We only know a tiny part of the answer and it is not encouraging. 

Xi’s crackdown on corruption has been accompanied by a crackdown on dissent and a new determination to bend “truth” to Chinese reality. 

According to the China Policy Institute, Xi has “tightened control over research and academic facilities, focusing on strengthening Chinese instead of western ideology”. 

In 2015 a government directive ordered the creation of new thinktanks to combat western thinking, while the education ministry announced a ban on textbooks promoting “western values”.
The crackdown on the human bearers of such values has been relentless. 

Academics have been banned from teaching; NGOs supporting the work of 280 million migrant workers, which once functioned as a low-level network of proto-trade unions, now have to concentrate on sewing classes and folk singing. 

In Hong Kong, three leaders of the 2014 Occupy movement have just been jailed.
The tragedy is, if China does want to stride into a world leadership role, defend globalisation, develop Central Asia and become a world leader in science and technology, this attack on knowledge and criticism is the worst way to go about it.
You only have to dabble in the world of China-focused academia to understand how violently foreign experts on China disagree with each other. 

Did the 1980s and the village enterprises do more for anti-poverty than the creation of an export industry? 

Is China’s declining annual growth rate real or illusory? 

I’ve sat in seminars where people with good local knowledge say real growth is closer to 4% – signalling impending chaos – while others with equally good knowledge say the official 8% GDP number is correct.
The scale of disagreements in academia over fairly basic analytical points reveals something frightening: even for western-based scholars who have no fear of a knock at the door, constructing a basic mental model of the Chinese economy, its troubled banking system, its corrupt elite and its enigmatic leadership is an unsolved task.
Xi and his leadership group are desperately mugging up on Marxist textbooks in a quest, as Xi put it, “to master the precepts that the world is unified as matter and that matter determines consciousness”. This in turn suggests that for all the inside knowledge they possess, the Chinese leadership has a poorer actual understanding of its own society and economy than western academics. 

Thus the information contained in the 300 restored articles – mainly concerning Tiananmen Square, Tibet and Taiwan – is less important than the method they embody: of criticism, peer review and the determination to base social science on facts.
I write this in full knowledge that it will be read, amid resurgent Chinese nationalism, as a claim that once again the west knows best. 

But it is the opposite. 

If Xi and his generation of officials really do want to study Marxism they should start by understanding where it came from: among rebellious students at Prussian universities where critical research was banned. 

They should understand that it drew on three strands of critical western thought – philosophy, political economy and utopian socialism – whose core concepts can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle. 

Marxism, for all its flaws, was a product of the west’s critical culture; so was the theory of relativity; so was the internet protocol. 

Unbridled criticism is essential to true academic thought.
So while it’s good that CUP is restoring the articles, we now need to front up to the principles that decision embodies. 

Defying China’s wish to subordinate academic research and publication to its current political needs is no mere act of principle. 

It is an act of self-interest. 

Thanks to China’s “Great Firewall” there are already two internets on the planet. 

Facilitating the creation of two academies – one devoted to truth, the other to securing the power of Chinese officials – will backfire massively on ourselves.