Jottings from the Granite Studio

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 you in.

As for me, I always tell people I work on “the people’s glorious struggle against the capitalist-imperialist invaders and their vanguard, the religious missionaries.”  It helps too if I do the “Loyalty Dance” while reciting my spiel.

(h/t Frog in a Well)