China is exporting censorship to shape global knowledge

China shapes global knowledge not just by blocking information at home, but by exporting censorship through economic coercion and diplomatic pressure. It is increasingly influencing what the rest of the world knows about its internal repression and territorial revisionism and even about China itself.

Its strategy rests on three pillars. The first is corporate compliance. Beijing leverages access to its vast domestic market to make Western companies — from Hollywood studios to the National Basketball Association — self-censor topics such as Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang and Hong Kong in order to protect their commercial interests.

The second is platform-control. Chinese-owned apps such as WeChat enforce domestic censorship rules on overseas users. TikTok has faced sustained international scrutiny over its algorithms that tend to deprioritize or shadow-ban content critical of the Chinese government.

The third is the suppression of independent scholarship. Beijing employs economic leverage while threatening to withhold visas from Western researchers, suspend funding for overseas Confucius Institutes or curtail tuition revenue from Chinese international students. Foreign universities, think tanks, nonprofits and academic publishers have all faced targeted pressure intended to shape research on modern Chinese history and politics, including Beijing’s claims over Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang and the South China Sea.

Few cases better illustrate China’s campaign against academic freedom abroad than the world’s premier conference on Tibetan studies, scheduled to open on Aug. 23 in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital. Even before the first panel begins, one group of scholars has already been silenced.

Following Chinese pressure on Nepal’s government, the Tibetan Policy Institute — the think tank of the Tibetan government-in-exile — has been compelled to withdraw from the International Association for Tibetan Studies conference. Yet about 100 officials and supposed scholars from Chinese state........

© The Hill