Respected British publisher Cambridge University Press (CUP) is to repost articles which were removed from its website in China at the request of authorities there, sparking anger, an editor said Monday.
The China Quarterly journal will publish hundreds of articles on Chinese democracy that were censored last week, causing outrage in the academic community.
The respected journal's publisher CUP "intends to repost immediately the articles removed from its website in China," the editor Tim Pringle said in a statement on Twitter.
Pringle added that the decision to remove the articles had been taken by the CUP "without the consent of The China Quarterly".
CUP, the world's oldest publishing house, came under intense international pressure on Friday after it confirmed that it had complied with "instruction from a Chinese import agency to block individual articles".
The company argued it had done so in order "to ensure that other academic and educational materials we publish remain available to researchers and educators in this market".
However, CUP also said it was "troubled by the recent increase in requests of this nature" and that it was planning to address the issue in meetings with Chinese officials at the Beijing Book Fair later this week.
According to Pringle, access to 315 articles and reviews had been blocked, including many about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, the status of Tibet and the Chinese democracy movement.
– Academic freedom principle –
Cambridge University said in a statement that CUP "reluctantly" took the decision following a "clear order" from its Chinese importer, as a "temporary measure" pending discussion with the university's academic leadership and the importer.
"The academic leadership of the university has now reviewed this action in advance of the meeting in China later this week," it said in a statement.
"Academic freedom is the overriding principle on which the University of Cambridge is based.
"Therefore… the university's academic leadership and the Press have agreed to reinstate the blocked content, with immediate effect, so as to uphold the principle of academic freedom on which the university's work is founded."
The censorship of the digital version of a respected scholarly journal outraged international academics, who saw it as a curb on academic freedom and an attempt to censor history.
Christopher Balding, economics professor at Peking University in Shenzhen, China, had swiftly launched a Change.org petition calling on the CUP to "refuse the censorship request".
"I am somewhat surprised about the complete about-face and the speed in which it came about," he told AFP.
"I'm very sympathetic to the position that they found themselves in. There's a good chance they will suffer business repercussions.
"The bigger issue is China trying to export its censorship around the world."
While there had been "too much acquiescence" by western universities when dealing with China, he said it would be a "tragedy if this just ended the conversation" on how Western universities valuing free speech engaged with China.
"The most likely scenario is that China is just going to block The China Quarterly website in China.
"However I don't think we can rule out that China is just going to back down entirely. China responds at times when they get seriously embarrassed and this is seriously embarrassing to a country that says it wants to build a knowledge-based economy", which requires access to academic journals.
– CUP will 'certainly suffer' –
Jonathan Sullivan, director of the China Policy Institute at Nottingham University, said CUP had made the right decision but would "certainly suffer" both "a blow to its prestige and diminished trust among academics".
He said the Chinese authorities had the right and the means to censor material but Western academic institutions "should not be helping them".
"If colleagues did not stand up in this scenario, I don't think we ever would," he told AFP.
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