Asei Ito (Associate Professor, Institute of Social Science, the University of Tokyo; HYI Visiting Scholar, 2022-23)
Abstract: Against the backdrop of China’s own transformation, advances in analytical techniques, and changes in the political environment for research, contemporary China studies is undergoing a transformation that can be summarized as “gaining data, losing ground.” The digitization of sources and the development of large-scale datasets have brought a quantitative increase in the data available for analysis. At the same time, amid rising geopolitical tensions, access to fieldwork and archival materials has been constrained, narrowing the opportunities to understand context, discover questions, and check data against observation in the field. Drawing mainly on the experience of China studies in Japan, the paper traces the evolution of the research environment and the constraints faced by researchers inside and outside China, and considers what functions alternative sources, research conducted outside China, collaboration among researchers, and the use of artificial intelligence can and cannot fulfill. It treats the current change not as a simple return to the Cold War starting point but as a process in which gain and loss proceed simultaneously, and it identifies two tasks in particular: restoring the verification function of research and responding to the shrinking opportunities for contact with the field.
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