On a November afternoon, some 750 people logged into a webinar by the Fairbank Centre for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, eager for answers to a perplexing question: how to study China when border controls prevent researchers from entering the country?, including tourists, some business visitors and those planning family get-togethers. But they have also had a sweeping impact on overseas professors, researchers and PhD candidates who have made understanding China their life’s work.
“This will impact our understanding of China at a time when it’s really needed because of the political climate and polarisation in the discussion,” said Ingrid d’Hooghe, a China strategy adviser and senior research associate at Clingendael Netherlands Institute of International Relations. “At this time more than ever, we need good knowledge about China and people who can put developments into perspective.
Sam Goldstein, a Brown University PhD candidate in religious studies, left China following the outbreak of Covid-19, but then was unable to re-enter. He lost access to funding for his research on the mainland after the Donald Trump administration“I can’t continue to collaborate with my Chinese colleagues and continue to intimately, on a daily basis, be privileged to the very latest [discussions],” said Goldstein, who now works from Taiwan, further from the historical texts he focuses on.
“One of the consequences of this interruption and the increasing challenges beyond the pandemic is that a cohort, and maybe a generation, of young scholars are not going to get the kind of exposure to China that people five years earlier got,” Fairbank Centre’s Szonyi said in an interview.
Xi Jinping’s regime is an absolute dictatorship, and Xi is living under illusion of being the CCP’s Gorbachev. The combination of Mao Zedong, Stalin, and Hitler is not even as crazy as Xi Please send your children's for red brainwashing😎