China is becoming much harder for Western scholars to study

Scholars researching everything from urban development to religious belief in China say they are running into barriers—many erected by Beijing but some arising at home—that increasingly hamper their work.

A relentless tightening of political controls by Chinese leader Xi Jinping has curtailed access to even routine information and throttled research into topics that were once open. Interactions between people in China and foreigners are subject to intensifying state surveillance, stymying the flow of ideas.

Those obstacles have led some China scholars to change their fields of study, or reprise research techniques developed during the Mao Zedong era, when the country was largely closed off to the rest of the world.

A sharp rise in anti-China sentiment in the U.S. and other Western countries is compounding the difficulties, according to many scholars. Some say they fear being denigrated for their association with China. Money is also getting harder to come by, with new data showing U.S. federal funding for China-focused research falling markedly in recent years.

Some academics worry that a decline in China studies will make it more difficult for the U.S. and other democracies to manage relations with one of the world’s most consequential nations, while Beijing continues building expertise on open societies in the West.

“We just don’t have the expertise on China that China has on us," said Rory Truex, a politics scholar at Princeton University.

Concerns over data control and researchers’ safety have been sticking points in U.S.-China negotiations over the renewal of a landmark bilateral science and technology agreement that sets terms for academic cooperation. A short-term extension expired late last month, though a senior Biden administration official said the two countries remain in communication on the pact, including “strengthened provisions for transparency, and scientific data reciprocity."

Allowing the agreement to lapse could make it even harder for U.S.-based scholars to do work in China, as they would no longer be able to count on either government’s commitment to facilitating access.

Conditions for Western scholars of China have deteriorated steadily since Xi took power in 2012, but worsened further during the Covid-19 pandemic. China’s border closures obliterated on-the-ground research by foreign academics, while many Chinese scholars couldn’t go abroad. Chinese universities also controlled cross-border conversations on videoconferencing platforms.

A growing number of foreign academics have returned to China since it reopened its borders in early 2023. But some say they have faced difficulties when entering or leaving the country, being held up for hours by immigration officials who grilled them about their research.

Other researchers say they are hesitant to visit at all because of security risks for them and any Chinese people they speak to. They cited China’s detentions of foreign nationals on alleged national-security grounds in recent years, as well as the disappearances of some Japan-based Chinese academics.

Several scholars who have returned to China report finding a bleaker landscape than before. Social scientists and historians, for instance, found it harder to conduct in-person interviews, archival research and other fieldwork that they traditionally rely on.

Ke Li, an associate professor at the City University of New York’s John Jay College who studies gender and legal issues, said on previous trips she was able to talk directly with local judges and sometimes slip inside courtrooms to observe trials. Now, she said, that has become virtually impossible.

“For an ethnographer, that has almost like a death penalty," Li said.

Some Chinese researchers stopped sharing data with foreign counterparts to avoid violating data-security laws, complicating collaboration and peer-review processes for assessing research quality. The uncertainty over broadly worded data-security regulations “has brought anxiety and nervousness," said a professor at a leading university in Beijing.

After interviewing more than a dozen China scholars in North America about their recent research experiences, the New York-based nonprofit American Council of Learned Societies reported last year that several had completely changed their areas of study because of the barriers they faced.

Emily Baum, a co-author of that report and an associate professor of Chinese history at University of California, Irvine, said she had planned to visit China in 2020 on a Fulbright grant to study how the traditional practice of fortunetelling evolved and remained popular. But she discarded those plans due to China’s Covid border controls, as well as increasing sensitivities around religion.

“I was not entirely confident that I would be able to find many materials anymore," said Baum, who switched to researching the practice of acupuncture in the U.S.

Academic surveys have become more difficult to run in China. Fewer local survey firms are willing to work with foreign clients due to political sensitivities, said Reza Hasmath, a political scientist at the University of Alberta, who recently received quotes as high as $50,000 from Chinese vendors to run a survey that cost $10,000 or less a decade ago—a surge that could price out some researchers.

A rethinking of support for Chinese studies in Washington is compounding the difficulties.

The Trump administration halted funding of Fulbright academic-exchange programs to China, in response to Beijing’s curtailing of civil liberties in Hong Kong. The Justice Department’s defunct China Initiative, which targeted security threats from Beijing and resulted in a series of failed prosecutions of U.S.-based academics, also fueled concerns among scholars.

The number of China-related research projects funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation fell by more than half from the 2012-2017 period to the 2018-2023 period, with the declines most pronounced in social and economic sciences, according to a forthcoming working paper by Princeton’s Truex and his research partner. They also found that NSF grants supporting field research in China fell by nearly 75% over the same time periods.

It wasn’t clear whether the decline was due to a reluctance to support China-focused research, or to scholars choosing not to seek funding for China-related projects out of fear or inconvenience.

Some American universities have set new procedures for reviewing whether their faculty can accept flights, accommodation and speaking fees paid by Chinese hosts when attending conferences, or even barred them outright from receiving such perks, said Andrew Mertha, director of the China Studies Program at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. “This is partly out of a legitimate fear of losing U.S. government research support."

For students who plan to go into government service, “spending time in China has a direct negative effect on their ability to receive security clearance," Mertha said.

The U.S. National Security Council didn’t respond to queries on such China-related scrutiny.

Heightened challenges in China studies are affecting scholarly output. Editors at several Western academic journals say they are seeing more submissions of studies that rely on data-driven quantitative analyses rather than ethnographic research.

The growing reliance on data is generating “research that sometimes isn’t necessarily interesting or important," as academics work around whatever data sets they can access, said Timothy Hildebrandt, a London School of Economics associate professor and an editor of the China Quarterly, a prestigious U.K.-based academic journal.

Some researchers are looking to the past for workarounds. One approach is studying time periods before Communist rule. Another is dusting off Mao-era research techniques, such as textual analysis of party documents, state-media reports and other material.

“It is an ‘analog’ approach in an ever-digitalized world," which requires an appreciation of nuance and subtlety honed through “endless immersion in often impossibly monotonous written sources," said Mertha, the Johns Hopkins professor, who has organized workshops where Mao-era experts shared their methods with younger scholars.

Others are turning to modern technologies. Lauren Restrepo, an anthropologist who studies urban development in authoritarian states, said she likely isn’t able to return to China given the sensitivities around her research, which analyzes how Chinese authorities use urban planning to assert control over ethnic Uyghurs and other Muslim communities in the northwestern region of Xinjiang.

Restrepo, an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, now relies on “remote sensing"—reviewing sources such as satellite imagery, government documents, news and social media—to conduct research. “It is an act of desperation," she said. “You just do what’s possible."

Some scholars say they can still do useful fieldwork in China by stepping around sensitive topics and relying on local relationships, built over years or even decades. But the prognosis is grimmer for junior scholars and doctoral students, who have less experience and funding. A sharp decline in the number of American students in China during the pandemic and the lack of a significant post-Covid rebound have also raised concerns over the long-term pipeline of China expertise.

“We don’t know whether in ten years China will be America’s enemy, competitor, or perhaps even friend," said Michael Szonyi, a Harvard University historian who traveled to China in August 2023 for an extended research trip after an almost four-year absence. “Do we really think that under any of these scenarios, it is better that we know less about China rather than more?"

Write to Chun Han Wong at chunhan.wong@wsj.com