China scholars: Whoring themselves to a mafia-style government?

The Far Eastern Economic Review occasionally gets on the wrong side of Chinese authorities, who sometimes suspend the magazine’s sales in that part of the world for a period of time.

That’s why it’s going to be very interesting to see what happens as a result of this article by Carsten A. Holz in the April issue, called, “Have China Scholars All Been Bought?”

To put it briefly and bluntly, Holz suggests that the scholars who study China are whoring themselves to a mafia-style regime.

Here’s how it starts:

Academics who study China, which includes the author, habitually please the Chinese Communist Party, sometimes consciously, and often unconsciously. Our incentives are to conform, and we do so in numerous ways: through the research questions we ask or don’t ask, through the facts we report or ignore, through our use of language, and through what and how we teach.

Here’s how it continues:

Our use of language to conform to the image the Party wishes to project is pervasive. Would the description “a secret society characterized by an attitude of popular hostility to law and government” not properly describe the secrecy of the Party’s operations, its supremacy above the law and its total control of government? In Webster’s New World College Dictionary, this is the definition of “mafia.”

And:

We speak of the Chinese “government” without further qualification when more than 95% of the “leadership cadres” are Party members…Does China’s government actually govern China, or is it merely an organ that implements Party decisions? By using the word “government,” is it correct to grant the Chinese “government” this association with other, in particular Western, governments, or would it not be more accurate to call it the “government with Chinese characteristics” or the “mafia’s front man”? Who questions the legitimacy of the Party leadership to rule China, and to rule it the way it does?

It’s worth reading every word.