BY SHU WAN
In the past few years, the Chinese government’s consistent interventions with—and suppression of—electronic resources in academic libraries in the nation have become an internationally controversial issue. One example of such censorship was a 2017 incident involving the China Quarterly. A statement by the journal’s publisher, Cambridge University Press, noted that “all international publishers face the challenge of censorship” and acknowledged having “received an instruction from a Chinese import agency to censor individual articles from The China Quarterly within China.” As a result, more than three hundred articles involving Chinese politics, history, and other issues became temporarily inaccessible for Chinese readers. In response to the censorship of online access to academic publications, a large number of experts in Chinese studies requested that Cambridge University Press (CUP) reverse its decision. For example, in an open letter, historian James A. Millward criticized the press’s decision and commented, “As it is viewed online in China, it is a craven, shameful and destructive concession to the PRC’s growing censorship regime.” Reacting to the intense, outraged voices of the China Quarterly‘s authors and readers, the academic publisher finally reversed its initial stance on the blockage of access to those articles in China. Journal editor Tim Pringle wrote an open letter to “express [his] support for CUP’s decision to repost the articles . . . after a justifiably intense reaction from the global academic community and beyond.” Ultimately, the journal’s editorial team publicized the list of the suppressed articles online.
However, this prestigious publishing house’s principled decision was not the end of the story. According to journalist Ben Bland’s report in Financial Times in 2017, “Springer Nature, the German group that bills itself the world’s largest academic book publisher, has blocked access in China to at least 1,000 articles, making it the latest international company to succumb to intensifying Chinese censorship demands.” In this case, the blocked articles are those published in the Journal of Chinese Political Science and International Politics. Likely because of the absence of bibliographic information for affected articles, their blockage in two journals has rarely been addressed in academic research.
A few years ago, I began preliminary comparisons of data related to access to International Politics by users of Chinese and American libraries. In summer 2019, I collected the online available lists of articles in International Politics in China’s Northeast Normal University Library and the University of Iowa Libraries. Comparing the “Chinese” and “American” available-article lists, I found the absence of a large number of articles—seventy-five—in the “China-only” edition, which provides evidence of the blockage reported by Bland.
Regarding the regulation of access to the China Quarterly, two Hong Kong–based political scientists, Mathew Y. H. Wong and Ying-ho Kwong, conducted a pioneering and perceptive examination in 2019. They identify some seemingly “politically sensitive” topics of blocked articles, including but not limited to “the Cultural Revolution, Falun Gong, Mao Zedong, Tibet, Tiananmen, and Taiwan.” These topics motivated the Chinese government to censor those articles. By analyzing the distribution of keywords appearing in censored articles in International Politics, I composed a word-cloud diagram to represent the findings.
As the diagram shows, the top five frequent keywords of those affected articles are “China” (a keyword for eighteen articles), “international” (fourteen articles), “policy” (thirteen articles), “foreign” (twelve articles), and “power” (twelve articles). The apparent political “neutrality” of these five words may cast light on the need for additional interpretation. Contrary to the agreement between Bland and Wong and Kwong, I contend that the authoritarian government could arbitrarily censor, without any specific reasons or concern for academic freedom, any journal articles that could annoy the arrogant rulers.
As the preliminary outcome of ongoing research concerning the access to electronic resources in different types of libraries, this essay could not answer at this moment questions such as, “What is the major factor impacting the regulation of online academic resources?” More importantly at this stage, I want to draw the attention of American scholars and students to the less-known aspects of censorship affecting their Chinese peers and constraining research and academic freedom in China.
Shu Wan is a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo.
