China, CUP and ‘Academic Freedom’
Nick Holdstock
Last week, Cambridge University Press, the world’s oldest publisher, admitted it had blocked online access in China to 315 articles from China Quarterly, at the request of Chinese censors. The decision was taken without consulting the journal’s editor, Tim Pringle, who wrote an open letter expressing ‘deep concern and disappointment’ at the decision. The blocked articles are concerned with such politically sensitive subjects as the Cultural Revolution, Tibet, Xinjiang and the Tiananmen Square protests. The demand to remove them came from China’s General Administration of Press and Publications, which threatened to block the entire China Quarterly website if they weren’t.
CUP defended its decision to comply by reiterating its commitment to ‘freedom of thought and expression’ and arguing that the articles’ removal would ‘ensure that other academic and educational materials we publish remain available to researchers and educators in this market’. Few scholars were reassured; most regarded it as a capitulation. A petition called for a boycott of CUP if it continued to acquiesce to the censor.
Foreign websites and publications have long been censored in China, by both sophisticated and crude methods. Pages are often torn out of the Economist; at last year’s Beijing Book Fair, officials ripped the page about my book on Xinjiang from the publisher’s catalogue. This has led to self-censorship; it’s routine for foreign writers to remove material from popular books about China to get past the censors. They justify it on the same grounds as CUP: the cuts are an acceptable price for engaging with Chinese audiences.
Censorship in China has never approached a North Korean level; there’s generally been a degree of permissiveness regarding all but the most politically volatile subjects. But since Xi Jinping became president, almost five years ago, there’s been a tightening of control over all forms of expression, especially on social media, in which a number of Western companies have been complicit rather than lose access to the Chinese market. In July, Apple removed applications from its Chinese store that enable users to bypass China’s ‘Great Firewall’ by using proxy sites. Sales of CUP textbooks and language-learning materials in China have had double-digit growth over the last five years. The company is in excellent financial health, however, and the Chinese market, though considerable, is by no means essential to its bottom line.
CUP’s decision seems to have been not only ill-judged, but also inconsistent, given it failed to comply with a similar request to remove 100 articles from the Journal of Asian Studies. CUP announced yesterday that the China Quarterly articles would be reinstated, and that the measure had been only ‘temporary’.
Though already being hailed as a victory, the case is only a skirmish in a much larger academic debate about how best to engage with an authoritarian regime like China. Many British and American universities have been eager to accept Chinese funding for chairs and lectureships, or to partner with Chinese universities, despite their frequent impositions on academic freedom. China has also sought to exert influence on the topics studied by Western academics. Over the last few decades, the Chinese government has been increasingly assertive in its efforts to discourage foreign scholars from researching sensitive issues by denying them visas, to little protest from their universities.
Comments
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22 August 2017
at
10:42pm
Godfree Roberts
says:
I've only sampled one percent of the blocked articles–and then, only the abstracts–but my impression is that they should have been withdrawn long ago. They're based on falsities and misapprehensions to such an extent that today, they resemble propaganda rather than scholarship.
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23 August 2017
at
11:35am
SamGamgee
says:
@
Godfree Roberts
Does Godfree Roberts mean that the Chinese censors are in the right?
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23 August 2017
at
6:11pm
guido franzinetti
says:
@
Godfree Roberts
What exactly is Mr Roberts' qualification for assessing CQ articles? It makes a difference.
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23 August 2017
at
11:09pm
simonpawley
says:
@
guido franzinetti
Godfree Roberts admits that he lacks the minimum qualification for assessing China Quarterly articles -- which would be to read the articles in question (he says he has only looked at abstracts). Further, the comment lacks any specific content. (What are the alleged falsehoods or misapprehensions and in which articles did they appear?)
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5 September 2017
at
1:20pm
Godfree Roberts
says:
@
SamGamgee
I'm saying that they have a prima facie case.
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5 September 2017
at
1:23pm
Godfree Roberts
says:
@
guido franzinetti
My qualification for assessing them is a 50-year familiarity with Chinese politics and economics and a number of published articles, two of which are:
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23 August 2017
at
8:43pm
Michael Taylor
says:
One per cent of 315 articles is three, at most four articles.
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5 September 2017
at
1:26pm
Godfree Roberts
says:
@
Michael Taylor
"The point about freedom of information is to allow different versions to contend, which requires even doubtful stuff to be open to being tested".
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7 September 2017
at
3:54am
judgefloyd
says:
Godfree Roberts' opinions of the quality of these articles he has not read is beside the point, which is that the articles were published in CQ and should be allowed to be read in China along with the rest of the publication.
Read moreBogus research and falsified data are a serious problem in the hard sciences, as Dr. Marcia Angell, a physician and longtime Editor-in-Chief of The New England Medical Journal (NEMJ) said, “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgement of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine”.
The 'social' sciences have a much more severe problem which perhaps this incident can illuminate: it's simply not OK to make up or repeat falsities then claim 'freedom of information' as a defence.
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Whether deliberate or accidental, his comment is a distraction from the issues raised in the post -- nothing more.
China's Financial Debt: Everything You Know Is Wrong. https://www.unz.com/article/chinas-financial-debt-everything-you-know-is-wrong/
Selling Democracy to Chin: Still too soon to tell?
https://www.unz.com/article/selling-democracy-to-china/#new_comments
Assuming that there is a widespread problem with falsifying the results of clinical research, this has no bearing on the integrity of the 'soft' sciences.
I do not know on what basis GR says the problem is even worse in the social sciences and I reject the accusation that people are deliberately making stuff up.
The point about freedom of information is to allow different versions to contend, which requires even doubtful stuff to be open to being tested.
Do you feel that Merck's fraudulent Vioxx papers should be covered under 'freedom of information'?
Fraudulent, poorly researched articles shouldn't be published in a quality publication, but that has nothing to do with this blog post.
One wonders what Godree's opinion is of the rest of CQ - or does he only not read but comment on articles that come to the attention of Chinese censors?