As a senior academic working in China, and later as founding director of a major China research institution, I’ve sat through my fair share of meetings with academocrats obsessed with international rankings, income streams, and their beloved business models. As I’ve followed the furor surrounding C.U.P.’s self-censorship of China Quarterly (a journal for which I, like so many international colleagues, have acted as a peer reviewer, and one in which I have also published work), I could all but hear the academic number crunchers working behind the scenes with the lofty C.U.P. and Cambridge executive administrators. My guess is they were feverishly busy coming up with a few back-of-the-envelope calculations.
