COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT

Happy history in China, the land of the politically repressed

A woman reads a book at the Cambridge University Press stand at the Beijing International Book Fair last month. The publisher quietly removed over 300 China Quarterly articles from its archive in the country at the government's request earlier this year. However, CUP bowed to pressure and reposted them last month after news of the withdrawal broke. | AFP-JIJI

By Jeff Kingston
Special To The Japan Times

Sep 2, 2017

Talk about negative nation branding! Chinese authorities have really outdone themselves in drawing attention to their fear of history.

I refer to the recent international furor over Cambridge University Press (CUP) bowing to Beijing's pressure to remove 315 articles from the archive of the China Quarterly available in China. After that became public knowledge, attracting scorn and brickbats, CUP did a volte-face and restored Chinese users' access in a desperate bid to salvage its blemished reputation. This decision drew considerable favorable online commentary in China that the authorities deleted from the internet within 12 hours of CUP's Weibo post announcing the decision.

So in this comedy of blunders, the censors censored Chinese views approving CUP's belated rejection of their censorship. In doing so, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) showed it fears public mockery. Denying access to academic articles about the unpleasant past is a matter of state policy because this damning information is a potent weapon, empowering the people and exposing the orgy of nightmares the party has inflicted on them.