ACLS Community Message for March 2025

Over the course of my career as a historian of China, I have been turned away from more archives than I have been admitted to. Research access is of deep personal importance to me and critical to our field, which is a major reason I joined ACLS to work on the Luce/ACLS China Studies Digital Mapping Project in 2023.

As I began the work of understanding access challenges that face China scholars, I found myself retracing my own fieldwork in China and experience as a former ACLS fellow. I carried out my fieldwork in the mid-2010s at a time when archival and fieldwork access was tightly controlled, but possible under limited circumstances. But as I ran into walls at official archives, I spent more of my fieldwork scrounging through flea markets, where a vibrant grey market trade in discarded government documents offered an unexpectedly fruitful stream of primary materials. I picked up documents in the homes of archival collectors, online marketplaces, and occasionally in the early morning ‘ghost markets’ of old steel towns in Hebei.

Today, I could not advise any researcher in the same position to follow that approach. Those spaces for unconventional inquiry, already narrowing when I was in China, have become increasingly closed off. Along with the disintegration of US-China relations, the research environment in China has become far more restrictive and securitized, placing scholars in jeopardy and causing programs and opportunities to wither away. The stifling of research access is a slow-moving crisis in China studies that threatens the field as we understand it.

The Digital Mapping Project launched in 2023 as part of the Luce/ACLS Program in China Studies with the purpose of expanding equitable access to primary materials that are vital to the long-term advancement of the field. The Mapping Project cannot fix access barriers in China any more than bilateral ties. But through sustained engagement and collaboration with researchers, librarians, and institutional stakeholders, we are working to identify gaps in research infrastructure and build resources to support early career scholars wherever they may be.

One pillar of this work is common access. Not every institution has a dedicated China studies librarian, so we are partnering with China studies libraries in the US to improve the discoverability and integration of open access materials. With the guidance of Joshua Seufert, Princeton University, and Luo Zhou, Duke University, both members of our China Studies Libraries Working Group, we created a searchable directory of open access databases and free resources for the field. With the help of library partners, we are also developing an access plan to enable non-affiliated researchers to make use of walk-in services at partner libraries to utilize online and offline collections.

Another area of our work is disseminating practical knowledge. We directly engage researchers who administer and maintain digital databases that are increasingly vital to the field. In February 2025, ACLS convened a virtual Open Databases Technology Workshop to bring together the teams of researchers behind several innovative projects. The purpose of the workshop was to hone best practices through a deliberately technical, nuts-and-bolts discussion of database features. I was moved by the issues the project teams raised for one another, including questions around the tension between database work and academic reward structures, the applications of GenAI, and the economics of open access. This emphasis on developing common resources that activate long-term change in China studies aligns with the aims of the Luce/ACLS Collaborative Grant in China Studies, which announced its inaugural award last year.

Recently, I have been thinking about my work at ACLS and the field of China Studies within the context of broader changes in higher education in the United States. Around the same time that I joined ACLS in 2023, it released China Studies in an Uncertain Age, a report on the state of the field prepared by Luce/ACLS Program in China Studies faculty advisers Emily Baum and Yingyi Ma. Through a series of in-depth interviews, the report details the challenges and anxieties facing US-based scholars in the field, including banned subjects, shrinking opportunities for research, and threats to academic speech.

These issues remain salient for China studies, but in the US, we may also be at a moment when these concerns have become generalized across humanistic fields of research. External pressures that once seemed distant and parochial to China studies have manifested as challenges for scholars everywhere. While our experience in China studies does not offer a clear prescription on how to weather this uncertain age, I have been encouraged to see that despite the many challenges to the field, people continue to produce outstanding work. Whether this persists depends on how we collectively respond to the moment, and more importantly, what investments we make for our next generation of thinkers.

JM Chris Chang
ACLS Special Projects Researcher for International Programs