The New Censorship, the New Academic Freedom : Commercial Publishers and the Chinese Market

Summary, in English

Since 2017 the international Chinese Studies community has been shocked to discover that many of the major commercial academic publishers have been actively working with the Chinese censors to limit access to ‘politically sensitive’ books and articles within the country in order to maintain access to the lucrative Chinese market. This essay examines these incidents and the responses of the publishers upon being discovered—arguing that the convergence of China’s increasingly assertive information control regime and the commercial academic publishers’ thirst for ever more profits has resulted in a new form of institutionalised commercial censorship.