Cambridge University Press is sacrificing academic freedom

CUP is the publisher of China Quarterly, an academic journal that focuses on China. The Quarterly is an important forum of well-informed debate. CUP has recently blocked access to 300 articles of the online version, so users in the People’s Republic cannot access them anymore.

CUP is apparently trying to protect its business in China. According to the FT, the company has recorded double-digit annual growth in the past five years, with sales amounting to the equivalent of 300 million pounds. It is easy to understand why CUP would cave in to government wishes.

The decision is terrible. It does a disservice to science. CUP is sacrificing the quest for truth. This is unacceptable in principle, and particularly damaging at a time when fake news is thriving.

The fundamental mission of university research is to discover the truth. This is a tricky issue since it is well understood that it is beyond human abilities to reveal an absolute or ultimate truth. Mistakes are always possible, and some findings are inaccurate. For this reason, open debate among scholars is essential. Those who have a profound knowledge of an issue are best placed to judge the merits of an essay. Good essays drive the search for truth forward and are cited frequently. Flawed essays, however, are criticised and refuted by the scientific community.

Academic journals only publish what other scholars than the author consider worth publishing. This is tested in so called peer reviews. No other kind of publication is tested in such a systematic way. And still, mistakes can happen, so open debate is needed. 

Such debate is impossible if important essays are suppressed. In the social sciences, including economics, the quest for truth is badly harmed if scholars are forced to stay away from certain topics. If scholars from the country that is being studied are shielded off from such insights, moreover, the impacts is even worse: Chinese scholars are being blindfolded so they will neither be aware of their countries’ darker realities, nor of how those realities are being assessed by foreign scholars. They become unable to participate in necessary discourse.

China is an important country. Its success in reducing poverty is worth studying. There are probably lessons for other countries to learn. If issues like human rights are off limits, however, the Chinese model cannot be fully understood. Downsides are likely to be ignored.

In the past decade, the Chinese regime seemed to be opening up. Chinese academics interacted freely with western counterparts, but they have recently been becoming more careful about what they say. In the past decade, the Chinese regime showed interest in human rights, but insisted it had to ensure social and economic human rights in its comparatively poor country first, before turning to political human rights.

China has kept becoming more prosperous, but the regime now does not want to discuss human rights at all anymore. Western universities – and the publishing companies they run – must not do its bidding. If a university press of great and centuries-old reputation prioritises revenues over academic freedom, it is failing its core duty.

CUP is making the wrong choice.