As Snowflakes Melt, So Do Glaciers: China’s Censorship of Academia

Is climate change important to you? What about the Tiananmen Square Revolution—was that real or a hoax? Some people study these and other important matters very carefully, and after much thought and hard work, try to publish research to help advance our frontiers of knowledge.

Increasingly, autocratic leaders (soft dictators) use state power to attack research that undermines their political power.

Donald Trump is on this path … but running in first place is apparent dictator-for-life, China’s President  Xie Jinping.

Here’s the rub.

Cambridge University Press is among the world’s foremost academic publishing houses. The Chinese government threatened to block all access to all Cambridge publications— books and journal articles— unless the publisher removed 300 offensive publications. That’s less than one percent of Cambridge’s titles.

Here was Cambridge’s dilemma: Maintain academic integrity and miss out on a huge market—or throw a little truth overboard and cash in?

Cambridge took the money … until it later restored the publications on climate change, Tiananmen Square, and other delicate topics. The threat of leading academies withdrawing from Cambridge played a significant role.

Now China is playing bully with Springer Nature. This outfit publishes lots of scientific journals, including the Journal of Chinese Political Science. Studies published in that journal are now banned in China. The ban is sticking because Springer Nature doesn’t want to lose its huge market in China.

Trump and Xie are very different in style. In substance, they are making common cause to silence science and other forms of inquiry.  

As snowflakes melt, so do glaciers.