When retired spy Peter Wright announced the existence of Spycatcher, his astoundingly indiscreet MI5 expose, in 1985, Margaret Thatcher’s government tried to block its publication in Australia. When that failed, it banned English newspapers from reporting on Wright’s allegations, including that MI5 had “bugged and burgled” the embassies of hostile countries and allies alike across London. But, eventually — as is often the case in liberal societies — the story came out. And once it did, there was no putting it back in the bottle.
In the West, information has a habit of wanting to be free. Every so often, government documents are recalled, or a court order prevents an issue from being discussed — but once the material is out in the public sphere, especially online, it is generally very hard to retract it. Since this is the norm for liberal societies, we sometimes underestimate how important it is to keep bodies of knowledge free and accessible to the public.
In today’s illiberal China, by contrast, we see what happens when the preservation of information for the public is less important than protecting the ruling system. The Chinese government is determined to prove it can be made to disappear at the snap of its fingers. In March, it was announced that large parts of CNKI, the major Chinese research and academic database, were being closed to overseas readers. The Chinese insist that this is just tit for tat, as it’s harder for their own researchers to get access to Western research databases. But that’s disingenuous. It’s true that there are now security-linked restrictions on some researchers from China getting access to Western hi-tech labs. Yet Chinese historians, political scientists and sociologists still have easy and convenient access to sources in the West, such as the UK National Archives.
Foreign academics studying China aren’t nearly so lucky. Overseas access to China’s historical materials — particularly those from the turbulent years of Mao Zedong’s rule — is now off-limits. This wasn’t always the case: a number of key archives including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were open to foreign and domestic scholars during the first decade of this century, allowing for astonishing insights into the formation of Mao’s foreign policy (and, as it happens, helping China to make its current foreign policy more legible to the world). Then, in 2012, most of the collection was closed off again. No single explanation was given other than a cryptic “zhengli” (reordering or tidying up), but in retrospect, it marked the start of a decade of narrowing boundaries for academic and political discussion as Xi Jinping tightened his control over China.
The closing of archives might seem like a rather specialist complaint. But the wider issue — the illusion that once information is out in the open, it remains there — is more fundamental to the behaviour of writers, thinkers, and societies as a whole than the liberal world sometimes realises. China’s intellectuals have to reckon not just with the battle to get material out in the open, but the reality that any victory may be temporary, and the door may narrow or close again.
Consider the writing of Wang Xiaobo, a well-known Chinese novelist in the Eighties and Nineties. Unsure what to make of his wry and ironic fiction, the authorities first banned his work, then allowed it to be published in the relatively more liberal atmosphere of the mid-Nineties (though it has been only sporadically available in China since then). Wang’s story is neither unique nor particularly tragic: it is often the case in China that the same artist is both feted and censored. But his story is illustrative of the way that information and access come and go in China, a phenomenon that shapes attitudes towards reality.
In China, collective knowledge and memory are fragile. To give them more substance and staying power, Chinese intellectuals have come up with two different techniques. The first is to embrace the ironies surrounding the ephemerality of the written word. Wang’s most widely-known novel, Golden Age, now in a new translation for Penguin Classics by Yan Yan, is an account of the Cultural Revolution: the decade from 1966 to 1976 when China was racked by an internal civil war instigated by Mao in an act of purgative revenge against his own Communist Party, which he believed was sidelining him.
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