The recent publication of James Leibold’s paper “Surveillance in China’s Xinjiang region: Ethnic sorting, coercion, and inducement” warrants revisiting the act of outsourced censorship that delayed it.
The paper was once expected to appear in a special issue of China Quarterly, a Cambridge University Press (CUP) journal. That didn’t happen: in 2018, the Hong Kong media organ affectionately known as the Alipaper (阿里报报) reported that “two fellow academics from European universities” had objected to their papers sharing a venue with Leibold’s, being “concerned they wouldn’t be granted visas to China”. The issue was never published.
To the best of my knowledge, the names of the “two fellow academics” were not made public at the time. Personal communications with various relevant parties and an examination of the programme of an academic event have led me to conclude that they were Matthew Erie (Oxford) and Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi (currently at Zürich).
The papers were first presented at a 2016 symposium at La Trobe University (where Leibold works). According to attendees I consulted, the participants decided to publish their papers in special issues of two journals. The programme lists only four persons “from European universities” (one of whom was highly unlikely to self-censor for a visa in 2018). People with knowledge of the matter confirmed Erie and Joniak-Lüthi were the ones who didn’t want their papers published alongside Leibold’s. Last year I emailed both to ask if this was correct; neither replied.
It’s hard to say if Erie and Joniak-Lüthi’s fears of visa refusal were justified. Their subsequent achievements, however, suggest they might continue to see self-censorship as beneficial to their careers.
In 2018, the year of Leiboldgate, Erie received a €1.5m grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for a project titled “Illiberal Law & Development: China and the World”. Unless he obtained a second ERC grant for the same amount, the project now appears to have evolved into the more harmonious “China, Law and Development”. The new title is perhaps more conducive to the exchanges Erie and his colleagues are now discussing with Tsinghua University. The Silk Road Legal Exchange and Research Network, promoted on the project’s website and presumably also funded by the grant, is even less compatible with the lack of positive energy in papers such as Leibold’s. This component of the project joins the collection of BRI-themed ‘networks’ through which the propaganda and cooption work central to Xi’s geopolitical initiative is outsourced to foreign institutions.
Joniak-Lüthi’s current project (“Roadwork: An Anthropology of Infrastructure at China’s Inner Asian Borders”), under a Swiss grant, is also BRI-themed, if less intelligibly so. At any rate, the deconstruction and connectivity it appears to involve will require Joniak-Lüthi to obtain a valid China visa. If her views haven’t changed since 2018, the project can thus be expected to meet her standards of self-censorship. Conceivably, the journal she edits enforces similar standards.
China Quarterly (affectionately known as 拆哪: Quartered) and its publisher CUP (“Censor U Poshly”) were mentioned on this blog in 2017 (“CUPped: Relevant Organs, Tudor zombies join forces, attack”). That year, CUP’s censorship of hundreds of articles its PRC partners had impugned was undone after a major scandal. (That temporary setback has not, of course, stopped the outsourcing of censorship and propaganda to Western academic publishers.) The success stories in this post illustrate mechanisms at play at a more basic level: that of individual academics and their institutions. Were CCP-coopted businesses like Springer, CUP or Brill to go bankrupt, or to discover a more profitable niche than collaboration with totalitarian propaganda, the patterns of behaviour exhibited by academics like the heroes of Leiboldgate would remain available for the CCP to exploit.
I recently wrote about the CCP’s weaponisation of mediocrity as instantiated in the cooption of think-tankers who enjoy junkets and eschew serious research. Such cooption work can reach decision-makers quickly, in obvious ways. The cooption of the field, or fields, of “China studies” likewise relies on the habits of key members of the target group. The effects achieved may be less evident, but should be irreversible within a generation or two: China experts trained in the climate of conformism and collaboration illustrated in this post can be expected to dominate the teaching and research of everything China-related by then. Just like the Gleichschaltung of Springer was remarkably easier in this century than in the last, innocuous “roadwork”, BRI networks, CASS junkets, Hanban appointments, PLA apiculture, Ronnieshop fun, the peculiar goings-on at Notts and a self-censorship omertà now dominate academia at little cost to today’s totalitarian power.
jichang lulu 
Named and shamed. Bravo! 😊
Dear Madam/Sir,
I have been forwarded the link to your post. Although engaging with an article that spreads unverified opinions can be tricky, I feel obliged to do so because your post seems to be suggesting that my research project and, by association, my team are academically compromised.
With regard to your opinions as expressed in the article: Do I censor myself? Yes I do. Some of the research material that I have collected during ethnographic fieldwork in Xinjiang – which has been my research site since 2011 – has not been published yet and will not be in the coming years. I write at length about those constraints in one of my articles: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26384582?seq=1.
Why do I censor myself? Because I have become part of the social network in my fieldsite, hence I care about the people that I know in Xinjiang: my Uyghur hosts, my Uyghur and Han research partners, and other colleagues and friends who could be negatively affected by my writing. Still, I publish and lecture as much as I can, using various strategies which, I hope, help protect my research partners’ anonymity. These are a few examples:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.102122
https://doi.org/10.1080/14631369.2014.1001162
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X1500013X
I certainly do not censor myself because of my – as you imply – concerns about obtaining a Chinese visa. I have been publishing critically on Xinjiang and China for a longer time and, rather ironically, some of my articles have in fact been censored in China (e.g. 新疆的流动性话语与身份协商 censored by 西南民族研究).
The cancellation of the special issue of China Quarterly that you wrongly consider a major manifestation of self-censorship was motivated by a number of reasons but it had nothing specifically to do with James Leibold’s article. One of the reasons for my withdrawal were the resonances across the articles; the other was my own particular publishing strategy: I avoid publishing articles based on my research in Xinjiang – and the article for the special issue was one of these – in international journals that have ‘China’ in their title.
I am unsure what the motivation of your post is and feel very uncomfortable reading your opinions on how I reportedly act and think as an academic. Sir/Madam, we do not know each other, we have never worked together or even conversed. Thus, there is no way you can understand my motivations or my methods. I would be grateful if you would kindly stop professing speculative opinions about my person and my work.
Best regards,
Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi
P.S. You mention in your article than neither I nor my colleague Matthew Erie replied to your email. Indeed, we did not. Because of the penname jichang lulu with which you signed your cryptic message, I took you for a Chinese troll trying to foment discord in the academic community of scholars conducting research on Xinjiang and the Muslims in China. Thus, I deleted your email the minute I read it and advised Matthew to do the same. My apologies.
Dear Madam/Sir,
Thanks for your comment — if that is what I should call a text that looks more like a letter. Perhaps you meant to send me an email, e.g. responding to the one from last year whose receipt you just acknowledged.
Whatever genre it aims at, let me address the intelligible bits of your confused message.
I must thank you for confirming the hypothesis I stated, based on some cursory reading about these grant projects, that you “might continue to see self-censorship as beneficial to [your career]”. As you say, you do censor yourself, and see that as a necessary aspect of your work. On that much, we agree.
As for this statement —
it is, I’m afraid, misaddressed. I literally quoted Jack Ma’s paper, which quoted Leibold. If you believe the original is misleading, may I suggest you take that up with the relevant editor. If an erroneous portrayal of one’s work has been presented by a major newspaper, then repeatedly echoed elsewhere, it would seem a peculiar reaction to ignore the source for nearly two years, then rant at a post on an obscure blog that goes silent for months at a time.
But before you call the SCUMP to demand a prompt correction, allow me to point out that your argument below still needs some work —
It seems unusual to only realise that one’s work risks appearing in CQ when publication is imminent. Your confirmation that you withdrew a paper, instead of, as one may well do after a workshop, simply opting not to contribute, suggests you went along with the special issue idea before remembering that rare journal-name taboo. For a group of China scholars who attended a China studies symposium to publish in a China studies journal whose title contains the word ‘China’ (you will find a few in the Jay-Store you link to) was hardly unforeseeable. If you pardon the analogy, this is like “withdrawing” from a vegetarian restaurant where you made a reservation after looking at the menu and discovering that they don’t serve meat. If your journal-title tastes, and some “resonances”, were the concern, you should perhaps have notified your colleagues in advance — it can take a while to get a big journal to run your special issue.
In a further sign that name taboo and resonance are a weak explanation, you failed, while writing at a rate of five self-citations to the blog comment, to note in which non-China-titled journal your paper, which was written (and withdrawn) by April 2018, has appeared or is forthcoming.
While you work on an argument that makes more sense than the above, let me turn to this brief internal monologue you shared —
and conclude that you do, after all, find your self-censoring habits relevant to the post you commented on. As your project’s page states and your response implicitly confirms, your “roadwork” project involves, as of 2020, activities for which a valid PRC visa is required. You cannot cogently explain why what the media called an avowed self-censor’s self-censorship was not, on that particular occasion, self-censorship. You conflate self-censorship with anonymising sources. You publish “as much as [you] can”, but withdraw an article about China from a well-known journal after discovering its title contains the word ‘China’.
While you look for a venue more receptive to your incoherent ramblings, let me recapitulate the facts: like your colleague, you censor yourself, you helped scuttle that CQ issue, and you got a grant for a BRI-themed project that depends on the precise kind of “access” the Alipaper and others have been saying was to be preserved by your withdrawal. That’s all my post states about you and your work; all your comment has managed to refute is itself.
As for the “speculative”, “unverified opinions” on your “motivations”, “methods”, “work” or “person” you allude to, I’m afraid you’ve imagined them, which is perhaps why you couldn’t point to a single one. My views on anyone’s personal or professional qualities are not discussed on this blog. If you inferred any such views from the post, please rest assured that your inference is invalid. Individual “motivations”, psychology or morality are not things I like to write about. I will not, however, “stop” writing about my topics of interest, as you seem to order me to do. Feel free to impose your standards of censorship, and your style of argument, on that journal of yours. On this Madam/Sir’s humble blog, one such incoherent intervention is more than enough.
Best regards,
Lulu
For any discerning readers who might have followed this exchange, I would like to note that my post did not discuss which of the many reasons one might have not to publish on a politically sensitive topic on a specific occasion I or others may or may not consider valid. Nor is an analysis of moral or psychological traits of academics in general, or any in particular, possible here. I simply confirmed the involvement of two persons in one incident of self-censorship, and used easily available information on grant-funded projects they lead to illustrate a more general phenomenon: a totalitarian power’s actions drive the emergence of a system that rewards “conformism and collaboration” (including self-censorship) and (when given a chance) punishes dissent.
What I called “habits” and “patterns of behaviour” of (in this case) academics (but also administrators, officials, donors) are the combined effect of decisions by individuals whose motivations I have no knowledge of, or interest in. I do, however, assert that the field’s ongoing descent into servility to totalitarianism is partly due to the party’s exploitation of that combined effect.
More attentive readers than my esteemed self-censored correspondent might have noticed that censoring for visas is only one of the behaviours I claimed belong under a gentler process of Gleichschaltung than the first so named. Out of ten listed types of activity in the last paragraph, only two are obviously relevant to the case discussed in the post; that should establish that the topic is more general than the careers of two CQ non-authors.
If most people in the field, rightly or wrongly, cared less about “access”, eschewed cooperation with CCP proxies, defended free speech against censorship or refused to humour exoprop (e.g., BRIpaganda) narratives, the power the party exerts over academics in, and from, places it doesn’t govern would be somewhat reduced. The fact that so many in “China studies” abhor being reminded of their role in this new Gleichschaltung doesn’t make the phenomenon less real; counting the exchange above, I have probably witnessed offence being taken at fact-based discussion of all ten examples on that list. More articulate voices than the one who calls me “Madam/Sir” and mocks my chosen name have deflected scrutiny of self-censorship; e.g., one tactic of denial appears to be a form of collective introspection in which academics simply ask each other whether they censor themselves. The choice of a case like this one, where most of the information is publicly available, or easily obtained by exchanging a few emails, allows discussion based on more solid material than hearsay, self-reporting or introspection.