Researching China in Hard Times

In the spring of 2018, Sheena Greitens and I conducted the China Scholar Research Experience Survey, a survey of 562 China scholars in the social sciences.1 The goal of the survey was to understand the incidence rate of different repressive experiences in the conduct of research. We found that at the time, such incidents were a “rare but real” phenomenon. Approximately 9% of respondents stated that they had been “invited to tea” by authorities within the past 10 years; 26% of scholars who conduct archival research reported having had issues with access; and 5% of researchers cited some difficulty obtaining a visa (Greitens and Truex 2020).