Why are America's elite universities censoring themselves on China? | Hacker News Reader

Why are America's elite universities censoring themselves on China?

newrepublic.com

78 pointsilamont12 comments

There is a similar censoring of Saudi Arabia that also contributes to various scholarships and conferences. So there is no discussion of this fascist state.

Probably for the same reason they have been censoring themselves on israel and saudi arabia. Probably for the same reason social media has been censoring content about china. $$$.

Why does hollywood censor themselves when it comes to israel, saudi arabia and china? Money.

Money talks.

This is a recent phenomenon btw. In the 90s and well into the 2000s, you could severely criticize china in elite universities, hollywood and online. Professors and college students were calling them "the butchers of beijing" for the tianamen square massacre. It's really been the last few years where china has been off limits.

Israel and saudi arabia have been off limits since I was born, so maybe someone older can shed some light on when they became off limits.

I thought it would simply be a case of not biting the hand that feeds you (mainland students) but according to the article academics are afraid to offend and consequently come off as meek resulting in not getting access to Chinese resources (research, data, etc.)

Between this, the recent Google thing, and the Apollo movie flag thing... it's interesting how "Chinese influence of American entities" is a recent news trend.

Apollo movie flag thing?

Upcoming film "First Man" [on the moon] will not have Armstrong planting the flag on the moon, and many online have floated "because overt displays of American nationalism w.r.t. Apollo etc. would make the film do worse in China" as an alternative theory to "because the director and/or studio have specific distaste for American nationalism even though it was unarguably historically relevant to the Apollo story"

China is Hollywood's primary market now. If you want to not go bankrupt as a major film studio, appeasing the Chinese is paramount.

Weird. This article about self-censorship seems to be getting censored itself: there are other older articles with fewer votes on the front page, but this one is hovering around the second page.

That's unfortunate, it's a rather good article that I found insightful in many ways.