August 21, 2017
A screen grab of The China Quarterly search page.
BEIJING — One of the world’s oldest and most respected publishing houses, Cambridge University Press, has bowed to pressure from Beijing and removed sensitive content on its site in China.
The content is published in China Quarterly, an academic journal run by the press. In a letter made public on social media on Friday, the editor of the journal, Tim Pringle, said Cambridge University Press had informed him that the authorities had ordered it to censor more than 300 articles related to issues like the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and the Cultural Revolution. The publishing house’s site risked being shut down if it did not comply with the request, the letter said.
In response to the government’s actions, the journal issued a statement expressing its “deep concern and disappointment.”
“We note, too, that this restriction of academic freedom is not an isolated move but a further reflection of policies that have narrowed the space for public engagement and discussion across Chinese society,” the statement said.
Dr. Pringle said in a telephone interview that Chinese academics, who had been publishing in the journal in increasing numbers, would suffer the most. “It’s not only a retrograde step in principle, but it affects Chinese scholars in particular” he said, because they will not have access to global scholarship on the country.
“It’s a real pity that as China goes out to the world, it is accompanied by restrictions on academic freedom,” he added.
Cambridge University Press confirmed the deletions in a statement, saying it had done so to safeguard its other publications. It also vowed to raise censorship with the authorities at meetings next week. “We will not change the nature of our publishing to make content acceptable in China, and we remain committed to ensuring that access to a wide variety of publishing is possible for academics, researchers, students and teachers in this market,” the publishing house said.
Some of the censored articles date from the journal’s founding in the 1960s. They are available to subscribers outside China, but searches in China omit them.
In addition, the press voluntarily removed more than 1,000 e-books from its site, according to Dr. Pringle’s letter.
Until now, foreign academic presses were largely immune to this sort of censorship. In recent years, the websites of most foreign news organizations have been blocked in China, as have social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and the search engine Google.
But because of their small readership, and high subscription costs (one China Quarterly article costs more than $20), academic journals were not targeted.
The new measures seem in line with announcements made by President Xi Jinping in February 2016 that all media content on any platform must come under the Communist Party’s “guidance.”
“The same rules apply to any foreign content, academic or otherwise, that is accessible within China,” said David Bandurski, the co-director of the China Media Project and a fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin. “Given Xi Jinping’s determination to rein in dissenting views in the information space, foreign publishers are misleading themselves if they believe they can escape pressure like that facing China Quarterly.”
Searching for the word “Tiananmen” at the journal’s main page yields 50 results, with the top two relating to the “Tiananmen Papers,” a 2001 compilation of secret documents that is widely considered essential for understanding the events of 1989. Other top hits include an assessment of China’s universities in the aftermath of the student-led movement, and the effect of the crackdown on relations with Taiwan.
Performing the same search within China, however, yields only five hits, either tangential mentions or urban-planning articles about the square.
The block appears to go beyond Cambridge University Press’s website to include searches through third-party databases, including JSTOR, a digital library that academics around the world use to perform full-text searches of nearly 2,000 journals, including China Quarterly.
As of Friday night, it was unclear whether all JSTOR access was now blocked in China.
After news of the censorship spread, academics inside and outside China expressed alarm.
“This is unprecedented that the censorship has reached out to the academic sphere,” said Zhan Jiang, a professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University, adding that for Chinese scholars, “This means that there will be limits and more hardships on their research.”
The block can be bypassed by using software known as a virtual private network, or VPN, which makes it seem as if the user is in a different location. VPNs are commonly used by foreigners and a small minority of Chinese internet users to reach blocked sites.
But the vast number of Chinese internet users, including academics, do not have access to reliable VPNs, which require some sort of foreign payment method, like a credit card.
In addition, the government has recently vowed to crack down on VPN use in China. Last month, for example, Apple removed VPNs from its app store in compliance with a government order.
Such decisions underline the difficulties of doing business in China while offering any sort of delicate content. Already, foreign media companies including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times have had to ratchet back business plans in China because the government has blocked access to their services, making it hard to attract Chinese readers and slowing advertising revenue.
