China no longer wants to manufacture only goods. It now wants to manufacture global knowledge by exporting censorship and coercing conformity.
By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill
China shapes global knowledge not just by blocking information at home, but by exporting censorship through economic coercion and diplomatic pressure. It is increasingly influencing what the rest of the world knows about its internal repression, territorial revisionism and even China itself.
Its strategy rests on three pillars. The first is corporate compliance. Beijing leverages access to its vast domestic market to make Western companies — from Hollywood studios to the National Basketball Association — self-censor topics such as Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang and Hong Kong in order to protect their commercial interests.
The second is platform control. Chinese-owned apps such as WeChat enforce domestic censorship rules on overseas users. TikTok has faced sustained international scrutiny over its algorithms that tend to deprioritize or shadowban content critical of the Chinese government.
The third is the suppression of independent scholarship. Beijing employs economic leverage while threatening to withhold visas from Western researchers, suspend funding for overseas Confucius Institutes or curtail tuition revenue from Chinese international students. Foreign universities, think tanks, nonprofits and academic publishers have all faced targeted pressure intended to shape research on modern Chinese history and politics, including Beijing’s claims over Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang and the South China Sea.
Few cases better illustrate China’s campaign against academic freedom abroad than the world’s premier conference on Tibetan studies, which had been scheduled to open on August 23 in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital. Under pressure from Beijing, Nepal’s government suddenly scrapped the conference before the first panel could even begin.
The Chinese pressure led Nepal’s government on August 5 to cancel the International Association for Tibetan Studies (IATS) conference altogether. Before the cancellation, the Tibetan Policy Institute — the think tank of the Tibetan government-in-exile — had already been compelled to withdraw in an effort to accommodate Chinese concerns. Yet even that concession, along with organizers’ repeated assurances that the meeting would be purely academic, failed to prevent the conference from being scrapped. About 100 officials and supposed scholars from Chinese state institutions, including the China Tibetology Research Center, had registered to participate.
The cancellation illustrates a stark reality: Beijing’s influence now extends beyond shaping participation in scholarly debate to preventing that debate from taking place at all.
It also underscores China’s growing leverage over Nepal, wedged between Chinese-ruled Tibet and India. Beijing routinely uses economic inducements to pressure Nepal into policing Tibetan exile activities, suppressing protests and imposing strict restrictions on Tibetan exiles.
The IATS meeting, held every three to four years, is widely recognized as the leading academic conference on Tibetan history, language, culture, philosophy and religion, drawing Western Tibetologists.
The Nepal episode is a window into a broader transformation in China’s exercise of power. No longer content merely to censor discussion within its own borders, Beijing is increasingly using diplomatic leverage, economic influence and political pressure to shape who gets to speak — and who is denied a voice — on the international stage. This represents a new form of geopolitical competition: the struggle not simply for territory or markets but for authority over knowledge itself.
China is increasingly seeking to convert economic and diplomatic leverage into epistemic power — the ability to influence what others think, know or believe and which narratives acquire institutional authority. This entails controlling knowledge norms and information access.
Chinese diplomats warned Nepali officials that the conference could become a platform for “anti-China rhetoric.” The diplomatic intervention ultimately outweighed the assessments of Nepal’s own security agencies, which reportedly concluded that the gathering posed no security threat, as well as the organizers’ extensive efforts to accommodate the concerns of a country that is increasingly dependent on Chinese investment and attentive to Beijing’s political priorities.
Academic freedom depends not only on individuals’ ability to speak but also on the existence of forums where competing institutional voices can engage one another. When geopolitical pressure is used to prevent such exchanges from taking place, the marketplace of ideas itself becomes distorted.
This is why the Nepal episode should matter to Americans. The U.S. has spent years addressing Chinese influence by phasing out Confucius Institutes, increasing scrutiny on federal grant recipients for foreign ties, and tightening controls on sensitive research. Now, another dimension deserves equal attention: Beijing’s growing ability to shape the production of knowledge itself.
Knowledge is power. Whoever shapes accepted historical narratives — and determines whose voices are treated as legitimate while others are quietly erased — acquires lasting influence.
None of this is an argument for excluding researchers from Chinese state-run institutions. Robust scholarship requires intellectual exchange across political systems. The problem arises when geopolitical pressure determines whether scholarly debate can take place before it even begins.
Academic conferences should be arenas where evidence competes with evidence — not places where geopolitical power determines whether scholars are allowed to meet at all.
What Beijing increasingly seeks is to shape the global institutions that determine which arguments are heard, which voices are considered legitimate, and which histories become accepted as authoritative. Its more-fundamental objective is to encourage preemptive self-censorship, effectively narrowing what the world can say, see and study.
The larger struggle over who defines the world’s understanding of Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, the South China Sea — and China itself — is gathering pace, with universities and scholarly institutions emerging as a critical battleground in the geopolitical competition.
Brahma Chellaney is the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”