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At last week’s meeting of the Historical Society for Twentieth-Century China in Taipei, roughly 200 historians from Asia, the United States and Europe gathered to share their latest research. But during lunch hours and coffee breaks, the one question that kept popping up wasn’t about any given paper or project. Instead it was: “How’s your archival access been lately?”
This wasn’t just idle conference chitchat.
Over the past few years, historians of China have grown increasingly worried about changes they’ve seen at Chinese archives that threaten to impede understanding of China at a time when such understanding is taking on a growing importance. Many archives in mainland China have been tightening access and imposing new restrictions on scholars, which can make conducting academic research in China a time-consuming and frustrating experience.
At the Dissertation Reviews website, which provides information about archival access in countries around the world, students of Chinese history have written in to warn fellow scholars about new regulations that make navigating the archives trickier than before. The Shanghai Municipal Archives (SMA) is now enforcing a long-ignored requirement that foreign researchers affiliate with and present a letter of introduction from a Chinese university or research institute when registering at the archives. While that may seem like a reasonable and minor bureaucratic requirement, securing such an affiliation can be both onerous and expensive (the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, where I’ve been a visiting scholar for nearly two years, charges me a hefty “administrative fee” every month for this affiliation).
The SMA has also stopped allowing researchers to photocopy paper documents. It still permits the printing of files that are digitized or on microfilm, but archivists have discretion in approving printing requests.
At H-PRC, a listserv for scholars of post-1949 China, group members have been writing in with stories of their own recent experiences in the archives. Most of the new restrictions seem to revolve around photocopying: Requests to copy sensitive materials (such as those dealing with Mao-era political movements or foreign relations) are increasingly denied, they say. Researchers can still transcribe the documents into notebooks or laptops. Transcription, however, is a laborious task for those of us who aren’t native users of Chinese, and these new regulations make quick archival trips over semester breaks increasingly unfeasible.
The changes in access coincide with a general political tightening that the Chinese government has imposed since Xi Jinping came to power in late 2012. In the past year alone, the country’s leadership has sought to exert increased control over online discussions and the media, arrested a number of activist lawyers involved in the “New Citizens’ Movement,” and demolished several Christian churches in southern Zhejiang province. Episodes of loosening and tightening control have been common in China since the reform era began in the late 1970s, but the current chill is one of the most severe since the immediate post-Tiananmen period in 1989–92.
The restricted access also comes at a time when the world is increasingly interested in understanding China, a country that now plays key roles in global affairs across the political and economic spectrums. And it suggests that, although Beijing routinely bemoans outsiders’ failure to grasp China’s history, it is not interested in giving the outside world full access to that history.
There is, in fact, one area in which archival access has expanded, rather than contracted. Last month, the Jilin Provincial Archives released Chinese translations of 450 documents related to atrocities committed by the Japanese during their occupation of Northeast China in the 1930s and ‘40s. In a similar move, the State Archives Administration has begun uploading Chinese translations of confessions by Japanese war criminals to its website.
Here, though, there’s a clear political motivation: With Sino-Japanese relations having cratered in recent years, in large part over historical disagreements, Beijing is eager to focus attention on that particular area.
By contrast, China’s Foreign Ministry Archives, which contain valuable (but sensitive) documents on foreign relations history, have all but shut down. In 2013, a Dissertation Reviews contributor reported, the FMA withdrew some 90 percent of its documents from circulation, and as of this May, the archive has been closed indefinitely. A sign on the door states that this is due to a “system malfunction,” the same explanation given by an archivist at the FMA when contacted for comment.
Similarly, the No. 2 Historical Archives in Nanjing, an important repository for documents related to the Republican era (1912–1949), has been virtually closed for the past several years, allegedly so the staff can digitize the entire collection—a project slated for 90 percent completion by 2017, according to an archive staffer who refused to give his name.
Whatever the technical explanations, the simultaneous tightening of access at so many important archives has the practical effect of restricting a wide-range of research into China’s history. At the same time, the release of the Japanese occupation documents shows China’s guardians of history can be open when they want to be.
China has long complained about an anti-Beijing bias among Western scholars of the country, and has a clear interest in encouraging narratives its sees as correctives to foreign historians who are critical of the Communist Party. As one commenter at H-PRC noted, the mandate of archives now seems to be “wei dang shou dang; wei guo shou shi” (为党守档，为国守史), or “Defend the archives for the Party; defend history for the nation.”
By restricting access, will China get the history it wants? That’s doubtful. Scholars might adjust their research projects to deal with the new conditions, but few will abandon them and pick up topics more likely to be acceptable to the Chinese government. That’s simply not how Western historians work. If anything, limiting archival access and offering vague explanations for why – particularly at a time when scholars and students around the world are more interested in China than ever – is likely to reinforce the cynicism toward Beijing that China’s leaders find so disagreeable.
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham is a historian and writer based in Shanghai. Follow her on Twitter @mauracunningham.
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发表于 2014-8-22 22:11:58