Born to Censor

Scholars say they thought a China studies journal was run on Western standards of free expression, but they found Chinese government control instead.
By Elizabeth Redden

Yet another account of censorship involving a China studies journal has come to light. 

And the scholars involved say this case involves an insidious “blurring of boundaries” where they were misled into thinking Western publishing standards would apply when in fact the journal in question was subject to Chinese government censorship.
Lorraine Wong and Jacob Edmond, both professors at the University of Otago, in New Zealand, have written an account of the censorship they encountered when they edited a planned special issue of the journal Frontiers of Literary Studies in China. 

The journal is published by the Netherlands-based publishing company Brill in association with the China-based Higher Education Press, an entity that describes itself on its website (in Chinese) as affiliated with China’s Ministry of Education. 

The journal's editorial board lists scholars from major American and international universities -- including Cornell University, Duke University, Harvard University, the University of California, Davis, and the University of Washington -- and its editor in chief is based at New York University. The journal’s editorial office is located in Beijing.
Wong and Edmond wrote that the association with Brill, along with the involvement of leading scholars in the field on the editorial board, led them to mistakenly assume the publication standards would be akin to those of other journals in the field published in the U.S. 

What they found, however, was that the affiliation with the Higher Education Press and the location of the editorial office in Beijing means “the journal is subject to the full range of Chinese government censorship.”
Wong and Edmond encountered this censorship in editing the planned special issue on the topic of “how diverse understandings and uses of the Chinese script have shaped not only Chinese literature and culture but also representations of China in the wider world.” 

They oversaw a peer-review process and accepted four essays.
But they wrote that when they received the proofs for the issue shortly before the publication date, one of the four essays, by Jin Liu, of the Georgia Institute of Technology, was entirely missing. 

Their introductory essay had also been “crudely edited” to remove references to Liu’s essay, which focused on an artist who uses invented characters to satirize the Chinese Communist Party.
“When we wrote to the FLSC editor, Xudong Zhang, to question this censorship, we were told that the removal of Liu’s essay should come as no surprise, since FLSC has its editorial office in Beijing and so must abide by normal Chinese censorship,” Wong and Edmond wrote. 

“However, Zhang went further. He went on to say that Liu’s essay should never have been accepted and that he was now using his editorial prerogative to reject it.” 

Email correspondence with Zhang shared with Inside Higher Ed verifies this general account.
Zhang, a professor of comparative literature and East Asian studies at New York University, declined to comment via email, saying he would like to confer with the editorial board before issuing a statement. 

He did say there were "misrepresentations in the article about the editorial process and decision making, but those may appear to be academic niceties compared with the larger issue of censorship in China and U.S. academic response to it."
One listed member of the editorial board, Nick Admussen, an assistant professor of Chinese literature and culture at Cornell University, said on Twitter that he had asked to be de-listed from the editorial board and that he had never agreed to join in the first place. 

“There is something fake about the journal, it shouldn't be on Brill, and while it has published useful and meaningful research, it's not for me,” he wrote.
Brill’s chief publishing officer, Jasmin Lange, issued a written statement saying Brill's cooperation with Higher Education Press in China is under review.
“Since 2012 Brill has had an agreement with Higher Education Press (HEP) in China to distribute the journal Frontiers of Literary Studies in China,” Lange said. 

“HEP is responsible for the editorial process and production of the journal. Brill distributes the journal in print and online to customers outside China. We are very concerned about the developments that were described in the recent blog post by Lorraine Wong and Jacob Edmond. Brill, founded in 1683, has a long-standing tradition of being an international and independent publisher of scholarly works of high quality. We are committed to the furthering of knowledge and the concepts of independent scholarship and freedom of press. The cooperation with HEP is currently under review and Brill will not hesitate to take any necessary action to uphold our publishing ethics.”

Brill is the latest international scholarly publisher to find itself embroiled in issues related to the exportation of Chinese censorship. 

In 2017, Cambridge University Press briefly blocked access in mainland China to more than 1,000 journal articles in the prestigious journal The China Quarterly before reversing course and restoring access to the articles, which dealt with sensitive topics in China like the Cultural Revolution, Tibet, Tiananmen Square and the pro-democracy movement, and the East Turkestan colony. 

The German publisher Springer Nature has stood by its decision to block access to journal articles in China on the grounds that limiting access to certain content in China is necessary to preserve access to its wider catalog. 

More recently it’s come to light that Chinese importers have stopped buying whole journals in China or area studies.
International scholarly publishers interested in maintaining access to the massive Chinese market are coming under pressure to comply with Chinese government censorship demands, in effect helping spread the Chinese censorship regime beyond China's borders and tainting scholarly publishing standards worldwide. 

In reflecting on what happened in their specific case, Wong and Edmond wrote that scholars are used to different sets of rules applying to publication inside mainland China and outside China, but that the details of the Frontiers case suggest that distinction is breaking down.
They wrote, “We were naïve to assume that the association with Brill and the international editorial board indicated that the journal operated according to the normal standards for non-Mainland publications and would not be subject to censorship -- a mistaken belief shared by us as editors and our contributor, Liu. In subsequent correspondence, we have discovered from senior colleagues that others, particularly colleagues in junior and vulnerable positions, have also been caught in the unexpected application of censorship to a journal that, at a casual glance, might appear to sit outside the boundaries of Chinese government control. The journal Frontiers of History in China, which is likewise jointly published by Brill and the Higher Education Press, may have misled others in a similar way.
“It is precisely the blurring of boundaries between publication inside and outside Mainland China that makes the precedent of FLSC particularly worrying and insidious,” they continued. 

“We have trained ourselves to read between the lines of work published on the Mainland, noting and compensating for the telling absences. But what happens when it is no longer obvious where something was published and according to which rules? Moreover, in these straitened times, dependence on editorial and financial support may well lead other editors, academics and publishing houses outside China to add their stamp of legitimacy to such censorship.”
Wong and Edmond wrote that they withdrew the entire issue of Frontiers in solidarity with Liu and that three of the four essays, including Liu's, have just been published in another journal, Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (their essay on the censorship they experienced serves as a preface to the three essays, and was also published Thursday on the Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Center website).
“I admire the two special editors, their courage for speaking out and letting the broader academic community know about this,” said Liu, an associate professor of Chinese language and culture at Georgia Tech. 

“I think scholars will be more careful to submit their articles to this journal later on.”
In an interview, Edmond, an associate professor of English at Otago, said he and Wong decided to go public with what happened "because of our belief in academic freedom, also a desire for the Chinese studies community to at least have a proper conversation about the potential through such joint publication deals and other forms of partnership for Chinese government censorship to be extended beyond the borders of China. We consider these really serious issues."
Charlene Makley, a professor of anthropology at Reed College who has tracked issues related to censorship in China studies journals, said that "many of the previous examples that have come to light have been more about Chinese importers choosing not to buy whole journals or trying to pressure publishers to get rid of certain articles just due to key terms. We haven’t [previously] seen cases come to light where you actually see editors stepping in and going after content.
"This might be a tip of an iceberg or it might be an anomaly," Makley said. 

"What’s happening I think is as they say the boundaries are blurring: there’s no easy distinction between China publication and outside China publication because of these behind-the-scene connections between Chinese publications and non-Chinese distributors and publishers. We need somebody to be trying to unpack some of those behind-the-scene relationships. There’s a lot more going on behind the scenes than authors and peer reviewers know and maybe even editors -- in this case, they were invited editors."

China's Trojan Horses

U.S. Universities Shut Down Confucius Institutes

https://chinadigitaltimes.net

Amid rising concerns of curtailed academic freedoms, U.S. universities are increasingly closing down Confucius Institutes, which are Chinese government-funded centers offering Mandarin-language and "cultural" courses that at one point numbered over 100 in North America alone.
Samuel Brazys and Alexander Dukalskis, authors of a new AidData working paper on the topic, write in the Washington Post that the institutes have had limited success in improving China’s image abroad as part of a broader soft power campaign.
A year ago, a group of UMass Boston students, alumni, and professors asked to meet with the chancellor to discuss concerns that the campus’ Confucius Institute was promoting censorship and curtailing academic freedom.
Today, interim chancellor Katherine Newman cited nationwide concerns when announcing the university would be ending its 12 year relationship with the Institute. 
Instead, the university will pursue a partnership with Renmin University.
This closely follows closures at North Carolina State University and the University of Michigan.
At Commonwealth Magazine, Colman M. Herman reports:
The Chinese government says it promotes the Confucius Institutes throughout the US as tools for "cultural" exchange. 
The institute at UMass offered non-credit classes in Chinese language and culture, programs for UMass students to study in China, professional development programs for Chinese language teachers, and Chinese proficiency testing. 
UMass Boston paid the director’s $100,000 salary and provided office space, while China provided $250,000 and paid the salaries of four or five teachers.
[…] Others have expressed concern that the Confucius institutes are used by the Chinese government as outposts for espionage. 
The FBI has said that it monitors the activities of the institutes.
US Rep. Seth Moulton has also raised concerns publicly about the institutes and in a private discussion with Newman. 
On his Facebook page, Moulton said the intent of the Confucius Institutes is to “distort academic discourse on China, threaten and silence defenders of human rights, and create a climate intolerant of dissent or open discussion.”
Twelve other academic institutions, including the University of Chicago, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Michigan, the University of Rhode Island, and Texas A&M, have severed ties with Confucius Institutes. 
Tufts University in Medford has said it will soon decide on whether to renew the school’s agreement with its Confucius Institute. [Source]
Cornell suspended exchange and research programs with Renmin University after it blacklisted and monitored over a dozen Renmin student labor activists.
The University of South Florida closed its 10-year old Confucius Institute on New Year’s Eve, citing declining enrollment in Chinese studies rather than national security concerns.
At The Tampa Bay Times, Howard Altman and Megan Reeves report:
USF said only 65 students total were enrolled in its four Chinese courses this fall, compared to 191 in spring 2014.
[…] However, university officials did concede that the national security concerns of U.S. government officials played a role in the decision — specifically when it comes to federal funding. 
In August, President Donald Trump signed the $717 billion 2019 National Defense Authorization Act. 
Inside is a provision that limits federal funding to colleges and universities with Chinese ties, and the provost said USF was unwilling to pass on those funds.
[…] USF World vice president Roger Brindley, whose division manages the university’s global partnerships, led the inquiry. 
It was started soon after U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio wrote letters to USF and four other Florida schools with Confucius Institutes in February, urging leaders to end their relationships with the Chinese government.
[…] The institutes are “cogs in a larger wheel” of effort by China to increase its global influence through the acquisition of science and technology, Giordano said. 
Having such a physical presence on campuses provides the Chinese government with the potential to gather data and intelligence “that can be leveraged for other agendas, whether economic and market or … national security.”
[…] “But there is no direct history of that,” Giordano said, adding that calls to close the institutes is more of a preventative measure than a response to any specific threat. [Source]
At Inside Higher Ed, Elizabeth Redden details the changing reasons as to why American universities are increasingly closing down the institutes:
[University of Chicago professor] Marshall Sahlins said he thinks the main reason for the closures is “pressure from the American right, including the National Association of Scholars [which issued a critical report of CIs in 2017], as well as lawmakers, and from security agencies of the U.S., notably the FBI: a coalition of political forces responding distantly to the developing Cold War with China — raising even older terrors such as Communism and the Yellow Peril — and proximately to drumbeat rumors that CIs are centers of espionage. 
Those that give other, face-saving reasons are probably protecting their academic cum financial relations to China, such their intake of tuition-paying mainland students.”
“Apparently the tide is beginning to turn, though for the wrong reasons,” Sahlins said. 
“As I said in my Inside Higher Ed op-ed last year, we are now in a pick-your-poison, lose-lose situation: either keep the CIs or allow the U.S. government to interfere in the curriculum — mimicking the Chinese [Communist] Party-State.”
[…] Other institutions that have announced closures of Confucius Institutes within the last 12 months include the Universities of Iowa, Michigan at Ann Arbor and Minnesota at Twin Cities and North Carolina State University. 
In addition to these institutions, Tufts University has charged a committee with reviewing its CI, and a decision on whether to renew the CI agreement when it expires in June has not been made yet pending receipt of the committee’s recommendations.
The recently announced closures follow on closures of the CIs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in 2017; Pennsylvania State University, in 2014; and the University of Chicago, where more than 100 faculty members had signed a petition calling for the closure in 2014. 
North of the border, in Ontario, McMaster University closed its CI in 2013 after a visiting instructor from China claimed the university was “giving legitimization to discrimination” because her contract with Hanban — the Chinese government entity that sponsors the institutes — prohibited her participation in the religious organization Falun Gong. [Source]
Concerns over China’s curtailing of academic freedoms have also been prevalent within China. 
In December, British academic publisher Taylor and Francis acquiesced to Chinese government requests and dropped over 80 journals from its China offerings due to “inappropriate” content. 
This followed the August 2017 saga of Cambridge University Press reversing its decision to hide from Chinese users 315 journal articles and 1,000 e-books covering the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, policies toward Tibetans and Uyghurs, Taiwan, and the Cultural Revolution.
This also coincided with the Association of Asian Studies receiving—and refusing to honor—similar censorship requests for articles also largely focused on Tibet and the Cultural Revolution.
Meanwhile in Africa, whose Confucius Institutes have been questioned for their ability to adequately train China-bound African scholars, Kenya will start teaching Mandarin to elementary school students in 2020, with the primary goal of increasing job competitiveness and deepening trade ties with China.
Additionally, the Chinese government is providing Uganda with textbooks and tutors for its new compulsory Mandarin courses, which are currently mandatory for the first two years of secondary school at 35 schools.
This follows South Africa’s decision to offer Mandarin in early 2016—despite strong resistance from teachers’ unions.

Rogue Nation

Scholars Are Being Punished Amid Growing Squeeze On Public Expression
By ANTHONY KUHN

Staff wait at the Cambridge University Press stand at the Beijing International Book Fair in August. An international outcry ensued when the publisher agreed to block certain articles from one of its journals after pressure from Beijing. The press later reversed its decision.

When students returned to Beijing Normal University for classes last month, there was a notable absence in the classical Chinese class taught by Shi Jiepeng: Shi himself.
University authorities fired the assistant professor in late July, citing a number of offenses, including "expressing views outside the mainstream of society."
The charges still puzzle the lanky teacher, as he sits speaking to me in a café just outside the university's main gate.
"Sure, my views are a bit different from the mainstream and from official views," he concedes. 

"But an open society should be able to tolerate them."

China apparently can't. 

In the past five years, space for public expression has been tightening in media, the arts and civil society. 

Education hasn't been spared: The ruling Communist Party and congress have ordered the country's institutions of higher learning to build themselves into bastions of socialist and Marxist ideology, while purging campuses of liberal thought and subversive foreign ideas.
The drive could have an impact on one of China's stated ambitions, to boost its colleges and universities into the world's finest. 

It seems sure to affect the millions of Chinese students who seek education in the U.S. and other countries, as well as foreign scholars studying China.
Spearheading the drive is the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), the party's internal control apparatus, which, besides rooting out corruption, appears to have taken on the additional duty of enforcing political loyalty and ideological conformity in academia.
This year, the CCDI sent inspection teams to around 30 of China's top universities. 

Roughly half were named and criticized for their "weak political work."
When CCDI inspectors arrived at Beijing Normal University in February, conservatives who objected to Shi Jiepeng's ideas reported him to the team.
"The party secretary of my institute told me that the inspectors had criticized me by name," Shi says.

Clashing with the party line
Shi was not fired for his teaching or academic work. 

He says his students never complained about his classes. 

Instead, the inspectors appear to have targeted him because of columns he wrote for a newspaper and his postings on social media.
Oddly, Shi points out, university administrators seem to have overlooked the fact that the CCDI is supposed to enforce Communist Party rules — but since he isn't a party member, it should have no jurisdiction over him. (China has roughly 88 million Communist Party members, or less than 7 percent of the population).
Beijing Normal University didn't respond to NPR requests for comment. 

Nor did China's Ministry of Education.
In his social media postings, Shi criticized Mao Zedong, the leader of China's Communist revolution, as a "demon" for his role in political mass movements including the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, which cost millions of lives due to political violence and famine.
Shi points out that the party itself admits that Mao made mistakes, so he feels this shouldn't have gotten him fired. 

But if such statements were not grounds for substantial punishment a few years ago, they apparently are now: Another scholar was fired by an architectural university in Shandong Province in January after he criticized Mao.
Shi Jiepeng's criticism of another Chinese ruler — an ancient one — also ticked off many conservatives.
Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty ruled China a few decades before Julius Caesar ruled ancient Rome. 

Wu's wars of conquest against nomadic tribes on China's borders expanded the Chinese empire in all directions, but an estimated one-fifth of the empire's population perished in military adventures, forced labor on huge infrastructure projects and mass executions of anyone suspected of plotting rebellion.
Shi says he criticized Wu "because I believe the welfare of the individual is more important than any ruler's political or military achievements."
Shi has also expressed the opinion that individual welfare is more important than the form or structure of any nation. 

So he sympathizes with Hong Kong and Taiwan residents who do not identify with China and might advocate independence. 

He sees local identity as an important kind of freedom.
All of these ideas clash with the official Chinese line that a unitary state, rather than a collection or federation of smaller states, is the only acceptable form for China. 

Discussion of alternative forms of statehood is forbidden.

An ideological purge

Shi has never been prosecuted for breaking any law. 

But the Communist Party made clear in a 2013 internal document what ideas it considers taboo and does not want taught on college campuses: constitutional democracy, judicial independence, freedom of the press and an independent civil society – in other words, liberalism.
After being fired, Shi turned for advice to a prominent liberal historian named Zhang Ming, who recently retired from the People's University in Beijing.
Zhang says he thought Shi's firing was unprecedented, and believes it was entirely Beijing Normal University's decision.
"No doubt, politics are veering to the left, and there's an ideological purge going on," he says. 

"But I don't think there's a comprehensive official plan for it all."
For decades, university administrators have been able to ignore or deflect government political campaigns, letting offending academics off with a slap on the wrist. 

But now it appears the political pressure is too intense, and administrators "are afraid of losing their official jobs," says Zhang.
Zhang defended Shi on Weibo, the country's main micro-blogging platform. 

His Weibo account was suspended for three months, apparently as punishment.
Zhang says he advised Shi to protest his treatment and not suffer in silence. 

Zhang's own conservative critics repeatedly called for him to be fired, but his university ignored them.
"If they fire me, then they fire me, it's not like I'm going to starve to death," Zhang sniffs. 

Unlike under Mao, unemployed academics these days can always find work elsewhere, he says.
Indeed, the current campaign pales in comparison to the biggest purge of intellectuals under Communist rule. 

The so-called "anti-rightist movement" launched by Mao in 1957 handed many workplaces quotas of rightists (who, in the Chinese context are generally political liberals) to be identified and punished. An estimated half-million people were persecuted.
Mao distrusted intellectuals because of their independent thought. 

During the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, they were denounced and persecuted as a "stinking ninth caste," and students were encouraged to beat and humiliate their teachers. 

From the 1960s through 1990s, college professors were often paid less than manual laborers.

Attempts at censorship
The effect of China's ideological tightening on international scholarship became clear in August, when Chinese censors succeeded briefly in getting the Cambridge University Press to censor articles from an online edition of its influential scholarly journal, the China Quarterly.
The 315 articles were about subjects China's government considers politically sensitive, including Taiwan, Tibet and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
The publisher's explanation of why it at first complied was "to ensure that other academic and educational materials we publish remain available to researchers and educators in this market." 

But the move triggered an intense outcry from international scholars concerned about academic freedoms, and the material was restored.
Cambridge University Press' decision to pull the material "was bad not just because it meant that academics in China were deprived of access to state-of-the art scholarship from another part of the world," says University of California, Irvine historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom. 

Worse, he says, it misled people in China "into imagining that a journal was not publishing what it in fact was. So it violated the integrity of the journal."
Chinese authorities also tried to censor another Cambridge University Press publication that Wasserstrom edits, the Journal of Asian Studies. 

But after the outcry over the China Quarterly, the authorities dropped their request.
The current ideological purge and the attempted censorship is a worrisome step backward, says Wasserstrom, after years in which foreign scholars were "more able to have true collaborations" with their Chinese counterparts.
"There's a tendency to think that since Mao's death in 1976, that with some occasional slips back, there's been at least a two-steps-forward, one-step-back pattern, in a kind of lessening of controls on campuses," he says. 

But for the past seven or eight years, things have been moving in the wrong direction, he says.
Beijing Normal University's Shi Jiepeng consoles himself by taking the long view. 

During China's imperial dynasties, he says, intellectuals were often persecuted for what they wrote. That form of persecution is known as a "literary inquisition."
"Back in those days, people's whole families were executed," he says. 

"Me, I only lost my job. So things are much better now."

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

Tech companies automate Chinese censorship around the world
By Nick Monaco and Samuel Woolley 

A troubling trend is sweeping Silicon Valley—big tech acquiescing to digital authoritarianism to gain access to the Chinese market.
In July, Apple removed VPNs from its Chinese app store and announced plans to build a data center in Guizhou to comply with China’s new draconian cybersecurity laws.
This follows Facebook’s decision months earlier to build a tool that allowed third-parties in China to suppress controversial content on its network. 

While these moves can be rationalized from most business perspectives, acquiescing to China’s digitally authoritarian policies for market access will have harrowing political consequences in the long term.
Apple and Facebook, two of the most powerful companies in the world, have set dangerous precedents in these decisions that risk being followed both in and outside of the tech industry. 

When big tech bends its principles to limbo into Chinese markets, it encourages other Western companies and institutions to do so as well.
The latest example is Cambridge University Press. 

The prominent publishing house recently removed hundreds of academic articles from the website of its publications China Quarterly and the Journal of Asian Studies, in response to Chinese authorities deeming them controversial. 

After outcry from academics and researchers, Cambridge University Press reversed its decision – but the fact remains that they were willing to censor peer-reviewed academic research.
At best, such decisions risk entrenching the status quo – China has already ranked as the lowest in the world in Internet freedom for two years running. 

 At worst, these moves encourage the omnipotent aspirations of the Chinese government to build a digital dictatorship.
Chinese AI research and production is set to supersede the US in the next few decades, especially given Trump and the GOP’s refusal to recognize the importance of scientific R&D and blue-sky research. 

Given this outlook, Western tech companies must consider the social ramifications of their involvement in China.
It’s undeniable that the Party may be on the brink of unprecedented automated repression – extremely few companies control the most popular apps in China, and – as experts like Richard McGregor have shown – the Chinese Communist Party always has its hands in the country’s most successful businesses. 

The possibilities that would exist – such as automated mining of publicly and privately available data coupled with mass sentiment analysis to predict and quell dissent in advance – have horrifying implications for human rights. 

Repressive governance could, to a large extent, become an automated affair.
China has already implemented a frightening citizenship score pilot program, which gives each citizen a “social credit score”. 

It is also known that markedly more scrupulous governments, from Mexico to Ecuador, have deployed surveillance and intelligence systems against political opposition. 

The possibility of AI autocracy in the People’s Republic is real, and it is one that Western tech companies are tacitly endorsing when they choose to forfeit digital rights in favor of market access.
It would also be naïve to assume this form AI autocracy will stay put in the Middle Kingdom. Authoritarians have a way of sharing repressive technology – which is why one of Egypt’s biggest telecoms companies, Orascom, owns 75% of North Korea’s only official mobile network, Koryolink. It is also why China’s cellphone company Huawei helped Iranian security forces to stifle dissent at home.
Two-thirds of all internet users worldwide live in countries where criticism of the authorities is subject to censorship. 

It would be reasonable, with this in mind, to assume that China’s AI authoritarian model—if successful—could become the soft-power the country has lacked on the world stage up to now.
The Economist rightfully pointed out in July: “Western companies are at least engaged in an open debate about the ethical implications of AI; and intelligence agencies are constrained by democratic institutions. Neither is true of China. [..] If China ends up having most influence over its future, then the state, not citizens, may be the biggest beneficiary”.

In an era where the leader of the free world is emboldening authoritarians on everything from reneging on human rights to slanderously impugning the press, the onus falls on civil society and the private sector to maintain and promote liberal democratic values at home and abroad. 

Western tech companies are one of the most powerful actors in the latter sphere, and also fund many in the former. 

This puts them in a unique position to promote privacy, security and digital rights around the world.
The social and political consequences of technology are externalities that must be accounted for. 

It is impossible to decouple business decisions in the tech community from responsibility for the consequences that result from them, especially as technology continues to play an ever more crucial role in individuals’ daily lives.

China rewrites history with new censorship drive

Whitewashing of archives part of wider ideological crackdown by Xi Jinping 
By Ben Bland in Hong Kong

First it put the squeeze on ideologically impure academics.
Then it tried to censor foreign publishers such as Cambridge University Press.
Now Xi Jinping’s government is intensifying its drive to rewrite Chinese history by amending the archival record itself.
New research by a legal scholar reveals that Chinese authorities have been taking advantage of the digitalisation of historical documents by systematically deleting Chinese journal articles from the 1950s that challenge the orthodoxy promoted by Xi.
Glenn Tiffert, a research fellow at the University of Michigan, found that two of China’s main online databases for scholarly articles had removed dozens of articles that questioned the Communist party’s commitment to the rule of law at the time. 
Academics say his findings are significant because many scholars in China and beyond rely on these online databases and the removal of such seemingly obscure material supports the belief that the regime is conducting a much deeper rewriting of history. 
“In the past if someone wanted to censor, they had to go to the bookshelves and remove copies or pages but today, with a few keystrokes, you can wipe out content everywhere instantaneously,” said Mr Tiffert.
“The result is that anyone who does research will come away misinformed or with a distorted view.” 
The two databases in question did not respond to requests for comment.
Cambridge University Press, the world’s oldest publisher, was recently asked by Chinese censors to block access to hundreds of academic articles by some of the world’s leading Sinologists. LexisNexis, which runs a database of historical news cuttings from the world’s main media companies, withdrew some of its products from the China market in March after authorities asked it to remove some stories about China.
Mr Tiffert said that digitalisation has become an enabling tool for authoritarian regimes such as China, which has taken the lesson from the collapse of the Soviet Union that Communist governments “may not survive critical scrutiny”. 
Zhang Lifan, a Beijing-based historian who has been blocked from using social media because of his criticisms of Mao Zedong, argues that the drive to curb critical historical research and block access to or alter archives will backfire.
“If government officials don’t know the real history, it will lead to stupid decisions and stupid policies,” he said.
But, in the meantime, life is getting more difficult for Chinese academics, many of whom are subject to ideological monitoring in class and banned from talking to foreign media.
“Many of those who teach the real history have been sacked or punished,” said Mr Zhang.
“No one dares to do research on social movements and most spend their time researching Xi’s ideas and Marxism-Leninism.”
Although the Communist party has always tried to keep a tight grip on the historical narrative, Zhang Qianfan, a professor of constitutional law at Peking University, said it was getting worse, making “society and particularly the younger generations more ignorant about modern history”.
The case of Cambridge University Press, which initially complied with the censors’ requests for fear of losing access to the lucrative Chinese market, also highlights how the Communist party is attempting to export its political control, with some success. 
“Given how many cash-strapped universities are looking to attract Chinese money and Chinese students, I would not touch research on sensitive subjects like Xinjiang, Tibet or human rights now, in terms of career prospects or my ability to get visas for China,” said one leading China academic at a European university, who did not want to be named.

Western Academic Prostitution

China Bullies Western Universities Because They Let It
BY CHRISTOPHER BALDING 

Cambridge University Press’s announcement that it had removed 300 articles of the China Quarterly from its Chinese website at the request of regulators reignited the debate on academic freedom in China. 

Following massive pushback, the publisher announced that it would not censor the requested articles and even went so far as to make them available for free. 

But the incident should be a warning to Western universities, academics, and publishing houses that they must reconsider how to engage with a China intent on censoring ideas both at home and abroad.
It’s not the China Quarterly articles themselves — a ragtag bunch going back to the 1960s, which seem to have been arbitrarily chosen using keywords like “Tiananmen” and “Xinjiang” — that mattered for the hundreds of scholars who immediately protested the decision. 

It was the fact that a respected publication was bending the knee to censorship and what this represented about the broader complicity of Western organizations, universities, and academics in helping China export its academic censorship around the world.
Over the past decade, the number of Chinese students studying abroad has increased rapidly. 

In 2000, there were fewer than 50,000 students, but by 2015 more than 500,000 were heading overseas every year. 

Many Chinese students welcome the escape from an education system that values rote memorization over critical thinking and requires multiple classes, usually slept through, on communist ideology.
Western universities rushed to meet demand. 

They sent recruiters and negotiated agreements with third parties to sell Chinese students on the idea of studying abroad. 

Elite universities hurried to open campuses or sign partnership agreements with Chinese universities. Twelve universities — including Carnegie Mellon, Duke, and Johns Hopkins — have established degree-granting partnerships with Chinese universities to meet demand for their educational services.
Some critics within academia raised concerns about cooperating with China’s notoriously illiberal universities, where censorship and self-censorship is the norm. 

This has deepened since Xi Jinping took office in 2012; Chinese professors avoid giving interviews to any media even on uncontroversial topics, with one well-known Chinese professor noting, “In the last 40 years, freedom of speech for intellectuals has never been constricted as severely as it is now.” 

The crackdown on academic speech has strengthened sharply in the last few years, with Western textbooks being removed from classrooms and academics silenced. 

The central government recently has also begun to restrain online media and entertainment in order to demonstrate ideological loyalty in the lead-up to the 19th Chinese Communist Party Congress, planned for October.
Little effort is made to hide the restrictions at Chinese universities, which openly publish censorship guidelines for faculty that forbid criticizing the Chinese constitution, party leaders, and discussing religion. 

Other informal prohibitions include discussion of specific topics such as Taiwan, Tibet, and Tiananmen Square. 

According to a recent report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) on U.S. universities in China, Chinese students respond with self-censorship, avoiding any taboo topics for fear classmates may “report on whatever the students say.”
Meanwhile, professors in Chinese universities expect to have party monitors report on how closely their lectures conform to approved ideology, and ambitious faculty who want to move into leadership roles at any university must be party members. 

Recent audits carried out by the all-powerful Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, which leads the ongoing anti-corruption campaign that has also functioned as an ideological purge, critiqued elite Chinese universities like Peking and Tsinghua, known for their relative openness to Western ideas, for weak “ideological and political work.”
Western universities’ traditional response to criticisms on China’s restrictions on free inquiry was to claim that they could help liberalize their Chinese counterparts by establishing contact with them. 

What has happened instead is that they’ve ended up importing Chinese academic censorship into their own institutions. 

Cambridge University Press censoring on behalf of Beijing is not the first time elite British universities have opted for the bottom line over principle in accepting Chinese censorship contributions.
A recent study by the U.S. National Association of Scholars found widespread evidence that the Confucius Institutes, Beijing-funded centers for “Chinese culture and language” in foreign campuses, limit what can be taught and discussed not just in their courses but throughout universities. Confucius teachers are paid by the Chinese Ministry of Education and are required to adhere to Chinese laws on speech even when teaching overseas. 

As the report noted, “Some reported an outright ban on discussing subjects that are censored in China.… [U]niversities have made improper concessions that jeopardize academic freedom and institutional autonomy.” 

Western universities are not just accepting censorship; they are signing up for it.
Western universities that have established partnerships with Chinese universities for degree-granting programs have faced similar problems. 

While publicly stating their support for academic freedom, Western universities have accepted the reality that they must impose a censorship regime to exist in China. 

The GAO report noted that one Western institution’s faculty handbook includes “language that protects academic freedom but also encourages self-censorship to prevent externally imposed discipline.”
Even foreign students now have to take propaganda classes mandated by the government.
China even has its embassies and consulates direct Chinese student groups, coordinate protests, and gather information abroad on reluctant participants. 

The University of California San Diego considered canceling a speaking engagement with the Dalai Lama after pressure by Chinese student groups that work with the Chinese government, and some universities, like North Carolina State, have even rescinded their invitations to the Tibetan leader. Many students and scholars have encountered Beijing-directed pressure and censorship at events around the world.
The latest fiasco from Cambridge University Press is a business decision. 

Cambridge University Press claimed that it risked being blocked in all of China unless it complied with the censors’ demands. 

Given China’s decision to block the articles after they were restored, the publisher’s fears were well-founded. 

But either way Cambridge University Press should have made a stand, instead of folding at the first chance. 

Worryingly, Cambridge University Press is not alone in its dereliction of duty. 

Many other well-known institutions and professors regularly acquiesce to Chinese authorities or their counterparts on a range of issues bearing on academic freedom. 

Cambridge University Press’s sudden discovery of its spine is admirable, but the publisher’s initial unwillingness to refuse the request underscores how reluctant institutions are to risk their Chinese cash cows.
Aiming for a diverse student body or announcing opposition to Donald Trump’s immigration ban is a low-cost form of opposition that helps a university establish liberal credentials at home. 

No foreign university, however, has demonstrated willingness to show the same level of opposition to demands made by the Chinese government that it would deem unacceptable at home. 

The opportunities are too big, and their principles turn out to be surprisingly pliable.
Western universities, academics, and publishing houses face a stark choice. 

If they continue to obey Beijing, they make themselves complicit in promoting censorship and human rights violations. 

If they walk away, they turn their backs on large revenue streams and potential donors.
Yet good intermediate steps can be taken in dealing with Communist Party demands to impose censorship on Chinese research abroad. 

First, university libraries should consider unsubscribing from publishing houses or journals that promote censorship by their complicity. 

Markets that do not promote censorship are ultimately much more important to Cambridge University Press than China. 

Second, professors should refuse to submit, review, or cite journals that promote censorship by complicity.
Universities need to change the entire way they think about China.
Universities selling their brand to China are much too willing to sell their principles as part of the package. 

The idea that U.S. universities in China operate with any real academic freedom is delusional; if they are to engage, they must accept that they are part of the party machinery.
Domestically, Western universities with strong privacy and freedom of speech protections should not be afraid to stand up for those values. 

Whether it is inviting a scholar to speak on Hong Kong’s Umbrella Revolution or the Dalai Lama, universities should not cave to insecure demands by Beijing on what is and is not acceptable discussion about China. 

Chinese students who harass teachers or fellow students over nationalistic issues, as just happened at the University of Sydney in Australia, should be censured by university authorities, not pandered to.
Additionally, Western democracies should take action against Beijing-directed intelligence efforts on university campuses and the direct running of student groups from Chinese embassies. 

If universities value freedom of thought and assembly, they will need to promote these ideals by making students feel secure that they are not being monitored and reported on in China. 

Western governments and universities, which often protest U.S. military recruitment efforts, seem much more sanguine about Beijing intelligence efforts and direction.
Finally, punitive measures by Western universities and academics need to be considered. 

Children of Chinese senior party officials who, on paper, make less than $20,000 a year are attending elite U.S. universities and enjoying the benefits while their parents rail against the dangers. 

(The usual course is to claim that a “foundation” or “sponsor” has sent them, as happened with Bo Guagua, the son of the now-fallen leader Bo Xilai. Bo Guagua was also suspended from Oxford University for his poor performance, only to find himself unusually and fortunately restored the next year, at a time when his father still seemed like a useful contact for the university.) 

These schools would be justified to at least consider a moratorium on the acceptance of the children of senior Chinese officials. 

Furthermore, academics who go to China on consulting contracts or as honored persons need to consider limiting the public kudos they give to a system that goes against the values they claim to hold dear.
The naive hope that simple interaction would yield a liberal turn in China has done nothing to stop one of the biggest crackdowns on independent voices in Chinese academia since the Cultural Revolution. 

Western universities face an actual test of their commitment to free speech, rather than the cheap rhetoric they’re keen to offer at home.

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

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?