JSTOR Daily: “Historian Glenn D. Tieffert shows how state interests in the People’s Republic of China can be protected by editing online databases and collections. 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…”