Over the past few years, historians of China have grown increasingly worried about changes they’ve seen at Chinese archives that threaten to impede understanding of China at a time when such understanding is taking on a growing importance. Many archives in mainland China have been tightening access and imposing new restrictions on scholars, which can make conducting academic research in China a time-consuming and frustrating experience.
At the Dissertation Reviews website, which provides information about archival access in countries around the world, students of Chinese history have written in to warn fellow scholars about new regulations that make navigating the archives trickier than before. The Shanghai Municipal Archives (SMA) is now enforcing a long-ignored requirement that foreign researchers affiliate with and present a letter of introduction from a Chinese university or research institute when registering at the archives. While that may seem like a reasonable and minor bu