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If you’re a scholar whose specialty is China, you learn to be careful about criticizing the leaders of the world’s second major power.

Yet such self-censorship has grown worse in the past year. Some China scholars are deciding to keep their mouths more or less entirely shut. Others are avoiding travelling to China.

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Most China experts have grown cautious because, naturally enough, they want to maintain access to the halls of power and universities in the planet’s most populous country – while some fear direct reprisal or arrest.

Photo by Paul Joseph / PNG

For all the faults of America and Donald Trump, few academics are afraid to criticize him or virtually any aspect of U.S. society. The dictates of political correctness might be strong on North American campuses, but compared to China, free speech is still fairly well protected in the U.S. and the democratic West.

But the detention in Vancouver of a senior executive of Huawei, at the request of the U.S., has exacerbated a censoring trend in China that had already grown tighter in early 2018, when Chinese President Xi Jinping changed the constitution so he could rule for life.