UK publisher pulls scholarly articles from China website at Beijing’s request

SHANGHAI/LONDON: Cambridge University Press, one of Britain’s most respected academic publishers, has blocked online access in China to hundreds of scholarly articles and book reviews on Chinese affairs after coming under pressure from Beijing.

The articles were published in the China Quarterly, a leading academic journal on Chinese affairs that has been in print since the 1960s, and covered a range of topics deemed politically sensitive by the Chinese government.

The publisher said in a statement it had complied with an instruction to remove the content so that its other academic and educational materials would remain available in China.

The list of articles the Chinese government requested be removed covered an array of topics including the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy protests, the 1960s Cultural Revolution, Tibet, Xinjiang and Taiwan, Cambridge University Press (CUP) said.

President Xi Jinping has tightened China’s already strict censorship since coming to power in 2012 as he seeks to cement the Communist Party’s grip on power.

Foreign news is regularly censored or blocked in China, but it is unusual for academic journals, which have relatively limited readership, to face such scrutiny.

China Quarterly editor Tim Pringle wrote in a letter sent to the journal’s academic board that China’s General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) had sent CUP, via its importer, a list of more than 300 China Quarterly articles ‘to be pulled’ from its website in China.

The letter said a similar request was made of CUP a few months ago regarding ‘over a thousand’ e-books.

Pringle, an academic at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies, said the journal would strive to ensure that its articles reach as wide an audience as possible, and would work to safeguard academic standards. — Reuters