China’s Academic Blacklist, Part II

I wrote about this last month based on a piece by Paul Mooney in The National, but this week Inside Higher Education has a longer take on the denial of visas by the Chinese government for scholars and historians working in areas deemed sensitive by the manpurse-toting narrow-minded intellectual gerbils who staff Zhongnanhai Glorious All-Wise and Harmonious Chinese Communist Party.

At issue is pressure for self-censorship (see above) by academics and writers working in the China field, lest they be denied the access needed to finish their research.

To be fair, the article does note that the list of PNG’d academics is short, but the possibility is always out there, and the salient point is that whether the list is 18 or 80 or 800, if it includes your name, it can be–at the very least–a major hassle.  Just ask Peter “China Marches West” Perdue whose Fulbright year will be spent in Taiwan rather than the PRC.  When Professor Perdue asked why, he was reportedly told by Chinese officials: “You should know why.”  Love it.

Then again, as my colleague Wu Ming is fond of saying: just work on really obscure stuff that nobody cares about and they’ll always let

July 15th, 2008

Kerry Brown on China’s annus horribilis

Author Kerry Brown has an essay up at OpenDemocracy looking at China’s tumultuous 2008 and the cycles and contingencies of history.  Brown reminds us that despite China’s rise, the unity of the modern PRC nation-state is something which can’t be taken for granted, as China’s leaders are all too well aware: the PRC, as heir to the territorial conquests of the Manchus, is not immune to the problems of the post-colonial age.

The modern China that came into existence in 1949 is overshadowed by a host of previous “Chinas”, which together are radically different to the current one in size, ethnic mixture and stability. These Chinas have left profound memory-traces. Tibet is only the most prominent; Xinjiang, inner Mongolia, even Yunnan – as well as other more profoundly Sinified provinces – also contain echoes of that diverse and disunited history. The events in Tibetan-populated areas are a sharp reminder that many people – inside and outside China – take the modern country’s unity too lightly at their peril. Chinese dynastic history over the last two millennia has been a cycle of fragmentation and disunity followed by centralisation and strength. This history may grow silent, but it never goes away; the

July 15th, 2008

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