Cambridge UP caves to Chinese censorship

Cambridge University Press has caved to Chinese censorship demand by blocking hundreds of CUP publications in China, so as to be able to sell other “tame” content there. This has rightfully garnered quite a lot of attention today since it amounts to a new form of blatant political deletion of articles and books on China written by serious academics, and CUP deserves criticism for it.

–I myself wrote a comment in a thread on this over at H-Asia (https://networks.h-net.org/node/22055/discussions/191305/cambridge-accepting-censorship-academic-content-prc#reply-191354) where I addressed the naive defense CUP has mounted, including about how China has joined the IPA, the International Publishing Association, as if this would help change China for the better. On the contrary, it might change the IPA by eroding its commitment to freedom of publishing around the world. I mentioned one example of this, the incident last month in which the Chinese publisher’s association, supposedly independent of its government (which is a condition of IPA membership), blatantly tried to coerce the IPA to withdraw a nominee for consideration for the IPA’s main freedom of publishing award, the Voltaire Prize, thus breaking IPA rules. This attempt was uncovered by Swedish media in late July (and was not widely elsewhere, other than in Germany, as far as I know).

On the Cambridge University Press academic self-censorship issue, see too:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/19/cambridge-university-press-accused-of-selling-its-soul-over-chinese-censorship
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/world/asia/cambridge-university-press-academic-freedom.html
https://medium.com/@millwarj/open-letter-to-cambridge-university-press-about-its-censorship-of-the-journal-china-quarterly-c366f76dcdac
https://cpianalysis.org/2017/08/19/censorship-and-china-studies/
https://twitter.com/gregdistelhorst/status/898586072346615808

Sincerely,

Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *