Western institutions working in China and the Chinese government have profoundly different attitudes. Usually, the two rub along uneasily. But sometimes the gap yawns too wide. This is what happened in the case of Cambridge University Press (CUP) versus the censors.
CUP is the world’s oldest publishing house. It prints China Quarterly, a respected academic journal. On August 18, the press said that it was removing over 300 articles from its Chinese website, including ones about the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. It did not consult the journal’s board beforehand but took the action at the behest of its importer in China, a local distributor which foreign publishers must have. Tim Pringle, the quarterly’s editor, said the articles had anyway been made inaccessible in China by the state’s online censorship tools, and that CUP was acting to protect the rest of the journal’s output.
CUP’s decision to kowtow sparked a storm of academic protest. An online petition launched by an American academic at Peking University gathered hundreds of signatures. A former member of China Quarterly’s board, Andrew Nathan of Columbia University, said the journal should find another publisher. Under fire from all sides, CUP reversed its position. It said it would repost the offending articles, in effect daring China’s authorities to censor its whole output.
This is not the only recent case. Censors have demanded the removal of about 100 articles in the Journal of Asian Studies, also published by CUP. The Communist Party used to allow scholars modest latitude in their fields of research, permitting, for example, access to foreign academic publications that would be banned from general circulation. But in March the customs authorities tightened rules on importing books. Chinese academics complain that risk-averse librarians will now not order even innocuous scholarly works for fear of offending the customs service. Between 2013 and 2016, an average of 15 weekly issues of The Economist were distributed in China each year without censorship (which usually involves the ripping out of articles by a state-owned distributor). So far this year, just one issue has passed the censors unscathed.
The big question is whether this is a blip or permanent change. Every five years, the party holds a big congress. Censors always go into overdrive before these events — the next one is due by the end of the year. On the other hand, the crackdown on universities for teaching Western values and on human-rights lawyers began long before the threats against CUP. Xi Jinping, China’s president, seems less willing than his predecessors to let Chinese and Western values quietly coexist.