Digital databases are vulnerable to authoritarian regimes. In fact, argues historian Glenn D. Tiffert, “no corner of the knowledge economy lies beyond their reach.”

“Digital platforms offer [censors] dynamic, fine-grained mastery over memory and identity,” writes Tiffert in his exploration of digital censorship and “the fragility of our knowledge base.” Tiffert is a historian of China, where the Chinese Communist Party works to “engineer a pliable version of the past that can be tuned algorithmically to always serve the CCP’s present.”

Tiffert uses an example of two Chinese journals, Political-Legal Research and Law Science, that since the 1950s have been the dominant academic law journals in that country. There are very few print editions of them in libraries: most users access them online. The two Chinese databases that offer full-text access to them omit precisely the “same sixty-three articles” from the years 1957 to 1959, he notes. This was the time of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, a Party purge of “rightists” that consolidated one-party rule under a single leader.

Only a very careful user would note the gap in page numbers in one of the databases. The other database eschews page numbers all together, so there’s literally no way of knowing that the articles—which were once leading articles of the magazines in question—have been erased.

The articles seem to have been redacted because advocates for the “rule of law and greater separation between party and state” who once published in those pages don’t fit into the CCP’s version of history. Similarly, the “persecutions they endured” during the Anti-Rightist period have also been erased. Legal expert Yang Zhaolong (1904–1979), the most heavily censored figure, was sentenced to a dozen years imprisonment—and decades later the Party is still dedicated to disappearing him from the record.

Meanwhile, entire issues of other Chinese legal and social science journals have been erased from databases. Even paramount leader Xi Jinping’s 2001 dissertation was taken off relevant databases.

China’s state archives have transitioned to digital delivery, meaning every request can be monitored. In selling its version of authoritarianism to the Chinese and now around the world as an alternative to liberal democracy, the CCP is a firm believer in Orwell’s assertion that “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”

Tiffert notes that western publishers like Cambridge University Press and Springer, as well as internet colossi Google, Apple, and Facebook, have all bowed in various ways to Chinese censorship pressures. For profit-driven entities, it’s a cost of doing business.

And China is only the most obvious example. The digital battlefield, writes Tiffert, is a “predicament Chinese studies confronts today, and it will come to other fields tomorrow.” The “post-truth” present’s attack on history is a global phenomenon. As an example, what the American Association of University Professors calls “an ideologically driven assault unparalleled in US History” is whitewashing the teaching of American history in Florida.

With AI promising “automated manipulation of the past,” writes Tiffert, “[a] savvy government or other interested party can adulterate the historical record with unprecedented ease, not just at home but also universally, the better to achieve dominance and shape the global public opinion battlefield.”

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