Ruixue Jia, associate professor of economics, coauthored a study showing the resilience of ideas in China, even in the face of large-scale crackdowns on published works
A study coauthored by Ruixue Jia, an associate professor of economics at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy (GPS), illustrates how censorship can have profound economic and political consequences. This effect comes not just from explicitly censoring certain works but also because publishers and writers become reluctant to even publish on topics that they fear will be targeted.
But despite several decades of suppression, the study found that future writers and publishers adapted their behavior when state control over society loosened, venturing into previously sensitive topics and leading a revival of ideas.
Jia partnered with Ying Bai and Jiaojiao Yang — a professor and Ph.D. candidate, respectively, at the Chinese University of Hong Kong — in writing the discussion paper, titled “Knowledge Suppression and Resilience under Censorship: Three-century Book Publications in China.”
Together, they focused on the largest-scale book banning in Chinese history, triggered by the compilation of the “Siku Quanshu” (translated as “Complete Library in Four Sections”), an encyclopedic project undertaken by the Chinese Empire in the late 18th century that indexed over 10,000 books existing within the bounds of the empire. It was probably the largest such project to exist before the advent of Wikipedia, Jia said.
In the process of collating this list, the central government banned more than 3,000 books that potentially cast doubt on the state’s legitimacy.
The researchers analyzed the titles of over 160,000 books published in China between 1662 and 1949. They were able to carry out this monumental task by using text analysis, studying yearly book publications across 50 categories with different degrees of censorship. Heavily censored categories included history, imperial decrees and memorials, military strategy and conflicts and various religions — topics seen as threatening to the regime’s authority.
By examining books published over such a long timeframe, Jia and her colleagues could see how the censorship campaign didn’t just affect the 3,000 or so books that were banned as the Chinese state compiled the encyclopedia; it also stunted the number of books published on related topics in subsequent decades.
Ideas were suppressed in China from the 1770s to the 1830s — exactly the same period that the Industrial Revolution swept across Europe.
Jia came to this project because of her interest in what she calls the political economy of ideas — the production and diffusion of ideas and how they influence economic and political development.
“When I first started my career, all the scholarly focus was on how people were motivated and mobilized by power and interests, and the implications this has on economic development,” she said. “But now we are in an age where many people’s choices are often motivated by ideology rather than their calculations of material interests.”
Following the large-scale book banning, the suppression of ideas took place from the 1770s to the 1830s — which, Jia noted, is exactly the period that the Industrial Revolution swept across Europe.
She and her colleagues believe that by blacklisting certain works — which, as a side effect, pressured people to censor what they wrote in order to avoid punishment — the Chinese state may have prevented new knowledge about technological progress from taking root. While others had put forward the general notion that the large-scale book ban was costly, Jia said her team was the first to back it up with quantitative findings.
What had not been recognized previously, she added, was the revival of knowledge production around the 1840s – when state control over society eased and parts of the country were forcibly opened to the world. To the best of Jia’s knowledge, no prior research has offered a clear hypothesis about the dynamic patterns in how societies respond to censorship over time under drastically different political climates.
Their research also revealed that publishers played a major part in setting the agenda for which topics were avoided. Decades later, as the shadow of the censorship campaign receded, new publishers with different outlooks facilitated the resurgence of the formerly taboo subjects.
“Censorship is not only about readers and writers,” Jia said. “The intermediaries are also very important in the process.”
She said that this effect has echoes in today’s information environment, in which news outlets and social media companies determine what the public hears about.
“It’s not like ideas are permanently lost when they are censored. Future generations will still write about them.”
Ruixue Jia
The effects of self-censorship are also appearing again, she said. Perhaps now more than at any time in recent memory, people and organizations are wary of writing or saying anything that might draw the federal government’s ire.
“Obviously, we cannot study the future,” Jia said. “So one branch of my research is looking at economic history, because it often has parallels to today, and maybe even helps us think a little bit about the future.”
Even so, the study offers hope, as evidenced by the fact publishers and authors began to publish books on once-forbidden topics, and in such quantities that it was like backed-up water rushing through a dam.
“It’s not like ideas are permanently lost when they are censored,” she said. “Future generations will still write about them, which is a bit of an optimistic view about human nature, I would say.”
The authors of the paper wrote a synopsis of their findings, publicly available on VoxEU.
