Academic news of the day: the Qing History Project at Renmin University and CASS (this is the government sponsored attempt to formally write a comprehensive and authoritative history of the Qing) has now been put on ice because higher authorities deemed the draft it produced to be politically unacceptable—“failing to honor the perspective of the people,” which is an extraordinarily negative verdict. Specifically, the project “was overly influenced by the New Qing History.” This is quite the shocking claim, as most of the project leaders have spent their entire careers vehemently attacking the New Qing History.

Nearly 2 billion RMB have been thrown into this project across two decades, and now it’s all gone to waste due to political incorrectness. If anyone was still wondering about the current state of Chinese academic censorship, well, here it is.