Cici Yu

on October 12, 2023

Cici Yu is a senior studying Journalism and Public Policy Analysis at Boston University. She recently completed her summer internship at Bloomberg Law, where she wrote an investigative story on barriers for opioid victims accessing Purdue Pharma settlement funds as a top feature on Bloomberg platforms and multiple other daily stories about national health policy and litigations. She hopes to utilize her data and investigative skills to report on public health policy and health equity issues in the future. Her work has appeared on Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg News, USA Today, The Boston Globe, The Milford Daily News, The Maine Monitor, DigBoston, The Daily Free Press, and more.

The Global Times Translated My Op-Ed. Here’s What They Changed.

By Dan Murphy on October 10, 2023

On May 25, 2023, The New York Times published my guest essay “Like It or Not, America Needs Chinese Scientists,” on American higher education’s engagement with China in the STEM fields. The article was subsequently translated by the Chinese State-run Global Times newspaper without my prior knowledge or permission, appearing both in print and digital forms.

The Global Times omitted and altered key parts of the essay. While a few of the changes simply shorten the piece or cut passages that might not be as interesting to Chinese readers, most of the deletions and changes eliminate or blunt criticism of China, altering the tone of the essay. The Global Times also removed all of the links that appeared in my article, presumably because at least some of them led to sites that are generally inaccessible within China.

Fortunately, The New York Times also did a complete Chinese translation in both simplified and traditional characters.

I offer an annotated English version of the original essay with notes on the changes the Global Times made in its Chinese translation.

Presumably because of requests from The New York Times, the Global Times translation of the article was taken down from the Internet. However, documenting differences between the original and the Global Times translation can help us to understand what Chinese censors might find acceptable, although the standard of what can be published certainly changes over time and in different contexts.

Dan Murphy

on October 4, 2023

Dan Murphy is Executive Director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government (M-RCBG) at the Harvard Kennedy School. The Center, led by former Harvard President and Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers, works “to advance the state of knowledge and policy analysis concerning some of society’s most challenging problems at the interface of the public and private sectors.” Before joining M-RCBG, Murphy served for nearly five years as Executive Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and Harvard China Fund.

His writings on higher education and China have appeared in publications from Harvard University Press, The Wire China, the Policy Institute at Kings College London, the journal International Higher Education, and The New York Times.

Murphy is a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and serves on the advisory board of The China Project.

Then Suddenly It Was Gone

By Billy H.C. Kwok & Summer Sun on October 4, 2023

Hong Kong photographer Billy H.C. Kwok was eight years old when the United Kingdom handed over control of Hong Kong to China in 1997. Growing up, Kwok witnessed British influence wane and China’s control grow. He has also watched the freedoms promised to Hong Kong under the principle of “One Country, Two Systems” ground down before his eyes, “at first slowly and now all at once,” as he wrote for The Nation in the summer of 2020.

China’s Foreclosed Possibilities

By Howard W. French on October 4, 2023

Like other authors of recent Western histories of this period, Dikötter attributes most of the early initiative in the reestablishment of diplomatic ties between Washington and Beijing to the Chinese, not to Nixon. Beijing’s preoccupation with Moscow did not fade quickly, either. Dikötter quotes one senior Chinese foreign policy official who said of the Soviets in 1977, “They are more imperialist than the worst imperialists.” As this view helps illustrate, the story of China in the post-Mao period—which came to be known as the era of reform and opening after long stretches of autarky and violent upheaval brought about by experiments varyingly aimed at producing socioeconomic egalitarianism and rapid economic growth—is as given to mythmaking by Chinese propagandists as it was to Westerners.