Netherlands-based publishing house Brill recently ended its distribution agreement with a Chinese state-run publisher, after the latter was found to have censored out a paper submitted to one of its journals.
The Dutch publishing house didn’t provide an explanation for its decision.
Academic Censorship
Jacob Edmond, an associate professor in the department of English and linguistics at the University of Otago in New Zealand, was one of the academics who exposed an incident of censorship involving one of the Chinese publisher’s journals, Frontiers of Literary Studies in China (FLSC).“I feel saddened that we should have had to speak out publicly before Brill chose to take this step,” Edmond added.
He and his colleague Lorraine Wong, assistant professor at the university’s Chinese studies department, recounted in writing how they witnessed Chinese censorship for a planned special issue of FLSC that they were invited to co-edit.
Edmond and Wong wrote that while overseeing the peer-review process for the special issue, they accepted four essays. The issue was slated to be published in the first half of 2018. However, when they received proofs for the issue, shortly before the publication date, one of the essays, written by Liu Jin, associate professor of Chinese language and culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, was missing.
In addition, Edmond and Wong said that their introduction essay was “crudely edited to remove all mention of Liu’s article.”
Zhang told them “that the removal of Liu’s essay should come as no surprise, since FLSC has its editorial office in Beijing and so must abide by normal Chinese censorship,” Edmond and Wong wrote.
“However, Zhang went further. He went on to say that Liu’s essay should never have been accepted and that he was now using his editorial prerogative to reject it,” they continued.
State-Run Publisher
Higher Education Press, founded in May 1954, is directly under the leadership of China’s Ministry of Education, according to its website. It currently is headed by Su Yuehong, the publisher’s president and Party secretary.Higher Education Press has clearly stated its desire to toe the Party line. In September 2018, it called a meeting for the publisher’s top leaders and Party committee members, according to its website. The meeting concluded that it “must follow the educational and publishing policies of the [Chinese Communist] Party,” as well as agree with “the leading role of Marxism.”
Edmond and Wong wrote in their account that since their special issue was to be published outside China, they believed it would not be subject to censorship. “We were perhaps naive to assume that the association with Brill and the international editorial board indicated that the journal operated according to the normal standards for non-Mainland publications and would not be subject to censorship—a mistaken belief shared by us as editors and our contributor, Liu.”