First it put the squeeze on ideologically impure academics. Then it tried to censor foreign publishers such as Cambridge University Press. Now President Xi Jinping’s government is intensifying its drive to rewrite Chinese history by amending the archival record itself, the Financial Times reports. New research by a legal scholar reveals that Chinese authorities have been taking advantage of the digitalization of historical documents by systematically deleting Chinese journal articles from the 1950s that challenge the orthodoxy promoted by Xi. Glenn Tiffert, a research fellow at the University of Michigan, found that two of China’s main online databases for scholarly articles had removed dozens of articles that questioned the Communist party’s commitment to the rule of law at the time. Academics say his findings are significant because many scholars in China and beyond rely on these online databases and the removal of such seemingly obscure material supports the belief that the regime is conducting a much deeper rewriting of history.
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