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 Digital Silk Road Is Looking More Like an Iron Curtain

The funding of tech projects in dozens of countries may well divide the world.
By Sheridan Prasso

Ads for China’s telecommunications and tech-infrastructure companies appear prominently in developing countries such as Zambia.

The first billboard that greets passengers arriving at the airport in Lusaka, before Pepsi’s “Welcome to Zambia,” is an advertisement for Bank of China. 

Nearby, a Chinese company is building a sleek terminal. 

On the road into the capital city, near the office of Chinese telecom company ZTE Corp., another billboard features surveillance cameras made by Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co. 

At the national data center built by Huawei Technologies Co., a Chinese man in a bright orange vest walks toward a building that houses government servers.
This southern African nation, a former British colony rich in copper and cobalt, is spending $1 billion on Chinese-made telecommunications, broadcasting, and surveillance technology. 

It’s all part of China’s “Digital Silk Road,” a subset of its “Belt and Road” initiative that contributes an estimated $79 billion in projects around the world, according to RWR Advisory Group, a Washington consulting firm that tracks Chinese investment. 

That funding has boosted development in Zambia and many other countries, but it comes at a price.
Most of the digital infrastructure projects in Zambia, like the more visible airport terminals and highways, are being built and financed by China, putting the country at what the International Monetary Fund calls a high risk of debt distress. 

It’s also given rise to fears that what has long been a thriving and stable multiparty democracy is veering toward a Chinese model of repression.
“We have sold ourselves to the Chinese,” says Gregory Chifire, the director of an anticorruption organization who fled the country after being sentenced in November to six years in prison on what Amnesty International calls trumped-up charges. 

“People’s freedom to express themselves—their freedom of thought, their freedom of speech—is shrinking by the day.”
Zambian government officials defend their reliance on Chinese technology and deny it’s being used for political purposes. 

“The government has the responsibility to invest in infrastructure,” says Dora Siliya, the information minister. 

“Zambia’s model for development is neither the West’s nor China’s but an attempt to take the best from both. We have a Zambia model.” 

The Chinese Embassy in Lusaka didn’t respond to requests for an interview.
What’s playing out in Zambia is part of a larger contest between the U.S. and China for dominance over the future of technology and global influence. 

Companies from both countries sell tech products around the world, but Chinese businesses are offering a wide range of gear and relatively cheap financing in countries from Zimbabwe to Vietnam. They have an advantage in developing nations such as Zambia, which are looking to modernize their technology infrastructure.
The rivalry risks dividing the world with a digital iron curtain. 

The potential for bifurcation is already noticeable, as U.S. allies including Australia and New Zealand have banned Huawei and ZTE from providing equipment for 5G wireless technology on national security grounds and Canada arrested Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou in December on allegations she defrauded banks to violate Iranian sanctions.  

China is exporting to at least 18 countries sophisticated surveillance systems capable of identifying threats to public order and has made it easier to repress free speech in 36 others, according to an October report published by Washington watchdog Freedom House. 

“They are passing on their norms for how technology should govern society,” says Adrian Shahbaz, the author of the report, which found that Zambia had slipped in the group’s ranking of national internet and media freedoms for the past two years. 

Nadège Rolland, a senior fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research, a Washington think tank, says, “There’s a 1984 component to it that’s kind of scary.”
Discussions with government officials in Lusaka often begin with a history lesson. 

First comes the what-did-the-West-ever-do-besides-exploit-us part, followed by a version of the China-has-always-been-our-friend speech. 

It’s a convenient way to defend the growing reliance on Chinese projects that’s raised Zambia’s debt to that country to $3.1 billion, about one-third of its total foreign debt, according to government estimates.
That’s the way it plays during a December interview with Brian Mushimba, Zambia’s minister in charge of transport and communications. 

He’s from Zambia’s Copperbelt, one of 16 children. 

He studied engineering at the University of Arizona, worked at Pratt & Whitney in Hartford, and has an American wife. 

But he’s a firm defender of China’s development agenda, saying it’s lifted millions of people out of poverty and offers the same to Zambia. 

“China has not only done this but is willing to share and give cheap financing for us to also do it,” he says, sitting in his office in a one-story colonial-era building with peeling pale-peach paint. 

“Their model is very interesting, very different from how the Western world interacted with Africa. China serves as a model worth replicating.”

A Bank of China billboard greets travelers at the airport in Lusaka.
The 44-year-old minister has invoked the “China way” of dealing with the internet when threatening to ban Google and Facebook, which has provided a platform for disinformation campaigns in Myanmar and other countries. 

He’s called “fake news” a threat to national security and urged self-censorship, saying the government has the ability to monitor all digital devices in the country. 

A draft cyberlaw scheduled for debate in the National Assembly this year would create an agency with the power to determine whether information published online threatens national security, punishable by jail time, something free-press advocates say could be applied to news organizations that expose corruption. 

Criticizing President Edgar Lungu in social media posts has already landed several people in prison on charges of defamation.
While Mushimba acknowledges that the idea of governance “with less dissenting views” is in conflict with Zambia’s democracy and free press, he denies the government is trying to stifle expression and says it’s just enforcing the law. 

“The internet is a powerful tool that can’t be left to run wild,” he says. 

“The government has good intentions—the good intention to keep peace, order, and security in the country.”
Talk of restrictions doesn’t sit well with Richard Mulonga, the 39-year-old founder of Bloggers of Zambia, a group that’s been urging the government to follow European standards of cyberlaw. Mulonga, a photojournalist fired from his job at a state-run newspaper after he posted pictures on his blog that the paper wouldn’t publish, says free-speech advocates are fearful. 

“Citizens have the right to hold power to account,” Mulonga says, sipping coffee in a Lusaka hotel lobby, a Facebook pen clipped to the collar of his black T-shirt. 

“Only through free expression can we participate in democracy.”
In 2013 and 2014 the government blocked at least four websites by using a technique typically associated with censorship in China, according to the Open Observatory of Network Interference, a global network that collects data on internet tampering. 

It couldn’t prove Chinese equipment was involved, but its report cited information that Zambia had installed internet monitoring and blocking equipment from ZTE and Huawei. 

State-run Zambia Telecommunications Co.and its regulator declined to answer questions. 

A Huawei spokesman in Lusaka says he’s unaware of the company’s technology being used for such purposes.
Zambian Watchdog, which focuses on corruption, was one of the websites blocked. 

Today, its posts are regularly called “fake news” by government officials. 

Representatives of the group didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

But editors of the Mast, a newspaper often critical of the government, were willing to talk about the climate of fear engendered by new technologies.
“Being a newspaper, if you’re going to call a source, it means they know who you’re calling,” says editor Larry Moonze, sitting at a conference table in one bedroom of the two-bedroom house where the newspaper is produced. 

“Media institutions are working under fear of the government, with the help of the Chinese,” adds Chief Executive Officer Likezo Kayongo, whose brother founded a predecessor publication that was raided and shut down in 2016.
ZTE is also installing cameras in public spaces in Lusaka as part of a $210 million “Safe City” project. 

The contract was canceled in 2013, over irregularities in how it was awarded, then reinstated in 2015, government officials confirm. 

The project is designed to increase policing power in a city that’s already one of the safest in southern Africa.

Outside Huawei’s office in Lusaka.

In China, authorities use surveillance systems with facial recognition software to compare citizens against government databases, allowing them to track those with dissenting views as well as criminals. 

In Zambia, “there will be no political uses,” says Chileshe Mulenga, permanent secretary at the Ministry of Home Affairs, which is in charge of the project. 

“We are not passive. We are defending our interests.”
Representatives of ZTE in Zambia and China declined to talk about the company’s projects. 

Huawei spokesman Hansen He was more talkative. 

He says his company’s “Smart Zambia” initiative, which includes plans to bring mobile and broadband connectivity to rural villages without coverage and to put government functions online, is supplying technology for what Zambia wants to do and the support to make sure it works. 

“We just provide the solutions,” he says. 

“They are the operators to run it.”
Huawei also built Zambia’s national data center, which handles all government data and storage. Zeko Mbumwae, the center’s general manager, says officials have no concerns that the gear could be used for Chinese intelligence or data-gathering purposes. 

“Once someone’s built you a home, you change the locks,” he says. 

“That’s what we did.”
Another Chinese-funded project is the migration from analog to digital TV, which is being handled by TopStar Communications Co., a 60-40 venture between Beijing-based StarTimes Group and Zambia’s state-owned broadcaster, ZNBC. 

Chifire, the anticorruption activist, has called it “one of the biggest financial scandals in modern-day Zambia.”
The country of about 17 million people is spending $282 million on the switch, or about $16.60 a person. That’s 46 percent more on a per-person basis than South Africa is spending. 

Zambia borrowed almost all of the funding from the Export-Import Bank of China. 

Independent stations complained that they were being turned into content providers for the government’s network and protested the $72,000 in monthly fees for TopStar to carry their channels. They said the fees would put them out of business, leaving only a Chinese company and its state-run partner as the nation’s primary TV outlet. 

“We’re not refusing to pay,” says Costa Mwansa, CEO of Diamond TV. 

“What we are refusing is figures that will kick us out of business.”
The government says Zambia’s digital migration is expensive because the project includes eight new studios, broadcasting vans, and trips to China to train hundreds of ZNBC journalists. 

Anyone who criticizes the cost is comparing apples to oranges, says Siliya, the information minister. 

“The corruption assumption being perpetuated is wrong.”
Similar debates are going on across Africa and other continents as Chinese digital infrastructure spreads its roots. 

In neighboring Zimbabwe, where Hikvision surveillance cameras are being installed in the capital, Guangzhou-based CloudWalk Technology Co. won a contract last year for Africa’s first artificial intelligence project. 

It stalled when the government asked for a discount after learning that facial data would be transmitted to China to help the company perfect its technology, says Shingi Magada, a China-based Zimbabwean consultant who helped broker the deal. 

“We were just giving away our data,” he says. 

Hikvision has come in with a competing offer, and the Zimbabwean government is keen to go ahead at the right price, he adds. 

Neither Hikvision nor CloudWalk responded to requests for comment.
In Mauritius, off Africa’s east coast, Huawei is installing 4,000 cameras. 

Opposition politicians fear an increase in monitoring and surveillance. 

“It’s really Big Brother,” says Xavier-Luc Duval, a former deputy prime minister who now leads the opposition at the National Assembly. 

“They’ll be able to spy on all political opponents and control all the political activity. The potential for misuse is enormous.”

An ad in Lusaka for China’s Hikvision, the world’s largest surveillance-camera company.
Concerns that Chinese technology could be used for spying flared last year when Le Monde reported that data had been transmitted from the African Union’s headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to China nightly for years. 

The $200 million building was built by a Chinese company with Chinese funding. 

The organization, after accusing China of spying, backtracked.
In Vietnam, hackers took over screens and audio communications in the country’s two major airports in 2016 to broadcast propaganda supporting China’s claims in the South China Sea. 

The incident caused an alarmed Vietnamese government to warn its agencies and companies to reduce their reliance on Chinese equipment, which was believed to have played a role.
Potential threats to national security like these have prompted the U.S., Australia, and Japan to take countermeasures against the spread of Chinese technology. 

The three have opposed plans by Huawei to lay submarine cable connecting Australia to Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific. 

But a Huawei cable project within Papua New Guinea is going forward despite efforts by Western governments to supplant it.
The U.S. is having better success blocking the rollout of Huawei’s 5G telecommunications systems, with Australia, New Zealand, and Japan among countries going along with a ban. 

The U.S. recently moved to inject $60 billion into the Overseas Private Investment Corp. to increase funding for projects in the developing world to counter China’s spending. 

And on Dec. 13, U.S. national security adviser John Bolton announced a new strategy for Africa to fund infrastructure projects, saying that Chinese influence has put the continent at risk. 

The U.S. is the largest donor to Africa, but most of its money goes toward health, agriculture, and clean-water projects. 

Bolton said the U.S. will try to ramp up funding for other projects. 

He cited Zambia as being particularly at risk.
To activists like Chifire who have suffered or fled the country, the China model appears ascendant. “What is remaining about democracy in Zambia,” he says on a phone call from a location he wouldn’t disclose, “is the name.”

Google's plan to build a censored search engine in the country is a violation of human rights

• A former Google exec who worked in China has called Google's plan to build a censored search engine "stupid."
• Lokman Tsui, head of free expression for Asia, said he couldn't think of a scenario by which such a search engine didn't violate human-rights standards.
• Tsui said that Google no longer employs anyone with his former title, which was "head of free expression."
By Greg Sandoval

Lokman Tsui didn't mince words.
The Intercept on Friday published an interview with Tsui, Google's former head of free expression for Asia and the Pacific until 2014. 

The former Googler characterized Google's plan to build a censored search engine that complied with the demands of the Chinese government as "stupid."
Tsui also suggested that such a search engine would likely violate human-rights standards.
He was responding to the news last week that Google was building a search engine that would filter out search terms and web sites that the government of the People's Republic of China finds objectionable. 

Since then, Google has faced criticism from politicians, users and even its own employees.
"In these past few years things have been deteriorating so badly in China -- you cannot be there without compromising yourself," Tsui told The Intercept.
He added that a censored search engine in the China "would be a moral victory for Beijing...(which) has nothing to lose. So if Google wants to go back it would be under the terms and conditions that Beijing would lay out for them. I can't see how Google would be able to negotiate any kind of a deal that would be positive. I can't see a way to operate Google search in China without violating widely-held international human rights standards."

Google representatives did not immediately respond to questions about Tsui's comments.
A censored search platform represents a dramatic change of heart for Google, as the company pulled out of China in 2010 rather than help the Chinese government censor information.
This year, Google's managers have invited scrutiny into how committed they are to their long-stated values. 

The controversy over the proposed Chinese search engine comes after many Google employees protested the company's involvement in a military program, known as Project Maven.
Under Maven, Google provided artificial intelligence technology to help the Pentagon analyze video footage taken from drones. 

Employees as well as scholars and AI experts called for Google to end the relationship and pledge never to build AI-enhanced weapons. 

Management responded by publishing a list of AI principles that would government the company's future use of the technology and did promise never to build AI weapons.
Meanwhile, managers made a symbolic gesture earlier this year that might have hinted that they are, at minimum, re-evaluating some past ethical stances. 

The phrase that was supposed to be Google's main moral guidepost, "Don't be evil," was removed from the preface of the company's code of conduct and dropped to the bottom of the page.

America's Tech Quisling

Apple has a moral obligation to push back in China, says senator who probed the company's ties

• "Tech companies must continue to push back on Chinese suppression of free expression." -- Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy.
• Leahy, a Democrat, along with Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, probed Apple for details on Chinese ties

By Anita Balakrishnan

America's tech Quisling

Apple CEO Tim Cook's recent remarks at a conference in China are drawing criticism from U.S. senators, including one who worries that the tech giant is not fulfilling its "obligation to promote free expression and other basic human rights."
The comments have fanned the flames of a relationship that's already facing scrutiny in Congress.
Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, along with Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, previously criticized Apple in October after reports that that the company removed VPN apps from the China App Store to comply with Chinese regulators.

When asked to provide a statement condemning the Chinese government's censorship, Apple told the senators that "actions are our most powerful statement."
Then, Cook made a surprisingly high-profile appearance over the weekend at the World Internet Conference in China, where he reportedly said that Apple and China "share" a vision for a "digital economy for openness" and "a common future in cyberspace."
After Cook's remarks at the trade show, Leahy said in a statement to CNBC: "American tech companies have become leading champions of free expression. But that commitment should not end at our borders. ... Global leaders in innovation, like Apple, have both an opportunity and a moral obligation to promote free expression and other basic human rights in countries that routinely deny these rights."
Leahy maintained his call for Apple to challenge Chinese "suppression."
"Apple is clearly a force for good in China, but I also believe it and other tech companies must continue to push back on Chinese suppression of free expression," Leahy said.
Apple is one of the most influential American technology companies in China — Google and Facebook, for example, have limited services there, and Apple is one of the few consumer electronics brands that sells a lot of products during Chinese shopping holidays like Singles Day.
Apple was not available to comment on Leahy's response to the letter.

The Greedy Boche

A German research publisher gives in to China’s censorship
The Washington Post

Visitors browse vendor exhibits near a display from publisher Springer Nature at the Beijing International Book Fair in August. 

SPRINGER NATURE publishes books and prestigious journals, including Nature and Scientific American, and portrays itself as a champion of open access to reports of scientific research. 

Its website declares that “research is a global endeavor and the free flow of information and ideas is at the heart of advancing discovery.” 

Yet in China, the company has compromised this core principle.
The Financial Times disclosed Wednesday that Springer Nature has blocked access in China to at least 1,000 articles from the websites of the Journal of Chinese Political Science and International Politics, two of its journals, in response to Beijing’s censorship demands. 

The newspaper said all the articles in question “contained keywords deemed politically sensitive by the Chinese authorities,” including “Taiwan,” “Tibet” and “cultural revolution.” 

According to the FT, a search for “Tibet” on the Journal of Chinese Political Science website in China returned no results, whereas a search outside China showed 66 articles. 

No articles mentioning the “cultural revolution” could be found on the website in China, the newspaper said, whereas 110 were visible outside.
China’s Great Firewall, a gigantic digital cordon, attempts to keep out information that Chinese authorities find potentially threatening. 

Within China, the Internet is policed by a vast censorship regime backed by restrictive laws on what can be expressed. 

For foreigners wanting to do business in China with products that disseminate information, this poses a vexing problem: To obey Chinese law means to give in to censorship.
Western companies have responded variously. Apple, which sees China as a vital market, acquiesced to removing the New York Times app from its China App Store at the behest of the authorities. 

Google tried to work in China for a few years but eventually left. 

Cambridge University Press at first agreed to remove some 300 sensitive articles in the prestigious China Quarterly journal from its website for a Chinese audience but in August reversed course and refused to give in. 

Springer Nature said the China blockage was compelled by local laws, that the censored articles were “less than one percent” of its content in mainland China, and that the other 99 percent is “safeguarded for all our customers in China.”
It was once thought that Western intellectual and business engagement with China would promote liberalization and was preferable to isolation. 

But rather than show more tolerance, China is showing less. 

Xi Jinping has been on a crusade against free expression, from the press to universities to social media. 

Foreigners must be careful not to abet this repressive campaign. 

When it comes to the principle of free expression, there is no way to say that half or even 99 percent is good enough. 

A journal collection missing pieces of China’s history — the Cultural Revolution, or Tiananmen Square massacre — is absent truth. 

Springer Nature should reverse its censorship and insist that the Chinese people be exposed fully to the “free flow of information and ideas.”