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e Attempts to control the agendas, participant name lists, what is written, and what is said at joint scholarly conferences held in China, and now sometimes even in the United States. (A recent technique is to require that a talk or paper by an American participant in a Chinese organized event be handed over to the organizing group for vetting well before the event itself, so a participant can be disinvited, if necessary.)
e Restriction of internet and email communications when in China.
e¢ Monitoring, even following, some American scholars by security services while in China.
e Demands for censorship by foreign publishers of their digital content as a condition for allowing it to be made available online in China.
e Insistence on censorship of Chinese-language editions of foreign books by the State Press & Publishing Administration. This places foreign authors in the difficult position of having to acquiesce to such censorship in order to have translations of their books published in China.
e Censorship of online archives of PRC journals and publications, such as the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database. American universities each pay tens of thousands of dollars annually for access to these electronic databases. However, recent research has shown that CNKI in particular is now “curating” its catalogs and holdings by deleting articles the current government appears not to wish to see remaining in the historical record.” Since American universities have started to dispose of paper copies of many of the journals carried in CNKI (China National Knowledge Information) periodical index, this amounts to PRC distorting the historical record, not just for China but for the entire world.
In addition to these specific restrictions affecting American scholars, the PRC government also influences the field of Chinese studies in the United States (and elsewhere) via controls over key regions of their country (especially minority areas such as Tibet and Xinjiang) and by putting no-go zones around a wide variety of research subjects within the broader areas of politics, religion, ethnography, and civil society that cannot be researched in-country. As a result, American professors cannot themselves work in these areas, nor can they in good conscience advise their graduate students to work on these subjects either because of risk to the researcher’s career, as well as to the human subjects whom researchers would be observing or interviewing. Such restrictions have real consequences for the open future of Chinese studies around the world.
Section 4
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