Greetings and Happy New Year. We write to bring to your attention a recent article on Tibetan children and “racial empathy bias” that was published in the US psychology journal, Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology (the journal of the American Psychological Association’s Society for the study of Culture, Ethnicity and Race), by a pair of Han Chinese psychology scholars (Jing Sheng and Li Wang) and their graduate students at South China Normal University. In their article, they claimed that their research in the TAR among Tibetan “primary school” students received the approval of their university’s “human ethics” board, but we and others think the scholarship is deeply suspect both ethically and theoretically, in that they make racist claims about Tibetan children’s alleged “racial empathy bias” toward Han Chinese.

The scholars’ claims were so explicitly racist that the journal received complaints after it was published. To their credit, the editors published an apology, and required the authors to strike the most egregious statements (see below). However, the article was NOT retracted, and remains published in the journal. Given recent Chinese state efforts to shape scholarly discourse on Tibet abroad, we feel strongly that this article needs to be completely retracted and that the continued presence of this article and others like it in US academic journals threatens the credibility of these journals and the well-known scholars on their editorial boards (this journal seems to have a huge editorial board, as well as a large list of “editorial consultants,” scholars from major colleges and universities across the U.S.).

Please support our call to the journal editors to retract this article by signing the open letter (see below) to the editors through the Google Form link at the top of the letter. Your name and affiliation will be automatically added to the letter. Continue reading Call for article retraction →

Source: China Media Project (5/6/24)
Red Renaissance
China’s leadership is actively pushing culture throughout the country’s vast rural hinterland, including through hundreds of thousands of “rural bookrooms.” But the overriding goal is to push the Party’s continued dominance at China’s grassroots — to the detriment of real cultural development.
By David Bandurski and Dalia Parete

Rural Bookroom.

In early February, Chinese media teemed with stories of cultural festivities in rural villages countrywide. In a “rural bookroom” in Xinjiang’s Ha’ermodun Village, a series of events “enriched the spiritual lives of villagers,” according to a local news release. More than 4,000 kilometers away, in Fujian’s Shuqiao Village, residents held a “Rural Spring Festival Gala” featuring song and dance performances. Down south, in a remote corner of Hunan province, more than 50 residents gathered for a “village lecture.”

These and thousands of similar events across China’s vast rural hinterland are part of a concerted push to achieve what the Chinese Communist Party leadership has called the “revitalization of rural culture” — and at first glance, the ambitious policy seems to offer an unprecedented level of cultural access at the grassroots.

Take, for example, the country’s growing network of rural bookrooms (农家书屋). First introduced as a pilot project in 2005, rural bookroom growth boomed through the 2010s, their numbers soaring past 580,000 nationwide by the end of 2021. For perspective, those numbers translate to 428 rural bookrooms on average in each of China’s 1,355 counties. Given these astonishing numbers, one might assume the rapid development of rural bookrooms has put literature in the hands of millions. Continue reading Red Renaissance →

The new announcement described below, of the retraction of multiple articles involving scientist’s abuse of ethnic minority people in China, comes right after Nature published a damning review of how slow the retraction process has often been, despite some scientists’ and editors’ recent awakening to the abuse:

“Unethical studies on Chinese minority groups are being retracted — but not fast enough, critics say. Campaigners who want scrutiny of biometrics research on Uyghurs, Tibetans and other groups are frustrated by slow progress.” By Dyani Lewis. Nature 625, 650-654 (2024). [24 January 2024 ]. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00170-0

See below for the latest batch of retractments of such abusive studies, mostly by scientists targeting Tibetans and Uyghurs; the scientists themselves being mostly Chinese and sometimes joined by Western collaborators, all of whom are now waking up to the absence of ethics in Chinese science in the era of China’s genocidal policies against Tibetans and Uyghurs.

Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>

Source: The Guardian (2/14/24)
Genetics journal retracts 18 papers from China due to human rights concerns
Researchers used samples from populations deemed by experts and campaigners to be vulnerable to exploitation, including Uyghurs and Tibetans
By Amy Hawkins, Senior China correspondent

A genetics journal from a leading scientific publisher has retracted 18 papers from China, in what is thought to be the biggest mass retraction of academic research due to concerns about human rights.

The articles were published in Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine (MGGM), a genetics journal published by the US academic publishing company Wiley. The papers were retracted this week after an agreement between the journal’s editor in chief, Suzanne Hart, and the publishing company. In a review process that took over two years, investigators found “inconsistencies” between the research and the consent documentation provided by researchers. Continue reading Genetics journal retracts 19 papers from China →