This blog has previously noted the details of the effective Chinese ban on Google Scholar. Now Newsweek reports that the Chinese Communist Party is urgently seeking to isolate China even further, and from next month they will…

… ban any foreign-invested company from publishing anything online in China [This move] will be a hard blow to companies like Thomson Reuters, Dow Jones, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, and the New York Times who have collectively invested hundreds of millions of dollars to build up the Chinese publishing industry and do reports in Chinese, for a Chinese audience.”

Presumably all large academic publishers and aggregators will also be affected by these moves, in the same way as the news media.

It seems to me it’s also a gangster-ish way for the Party to expropriate all foreign media holdings in China, since it effectively forces operators and investors to sell out to government-connected local businesses at (presumably) low prices…

The only way anyone is going to publish anything online in China next month is if the business is 100% owned by Chinese companies”

The Web servers and all online content will also need to be located inside China, licensed by the state, and any local content vendor will need to practice strict pre-publication self-censorship in accordance with the government’s strictures.