For scholars who rely on state archives, the news out of China in recent years has been grim. Once open archives are now effectively closed, often without specific plans to reopen. Other archives set arbitrary limits on the amount researchers may copy. Previously available documents sometimes disappear from electronic searches. And once again scholars need advance notice of their arrival, a letter of introduction, or both to gain access. These limits are particularly stringent for materials from the socialist era, 1949–78.
Yet as one door to the study of the socialist era closes, another opens. Chinese universities themselves have begun to embrace the formal and systematic study of the socialist era as history. Leading universities now employ scholars writing books and articles, training graduate students, and even giving undergraduate lectures about once taboo topics such as the Cultural Revolution. And thanks to the advent of book and material search engines...
