Weird how the actual content of the diaries is never mentioned, just an absolute certainty that it makes China look bad.

Li Nanyang, a vocal critic of the Chinese Communist Party who lives in the United States, carried most of the diaries out of China in 2017. She made the donation to the Hoover Institution official days before her father’s death in 2019, once she felt he was safe from possible reprisal.

Notice the narrative framing here. There is zero evidence that any “reprisal” was in the works, other than gusano FUD conspiracies. Gusano feelings are treated as unimpeachable fact. No evidence = China hid it very well

Stanford says Li had directed his daughter, Li Nanyang, to donate the materials to the Hoover Institution, which is known for its large archive of historical materials on modern China, for fear they might otherwise be destroyed by Chinese authorities as part of a crackdown on dissent he saw growing worse under President Xi Jinping.

What a surprise, more racist “savage natives incapable of caring for their own artifacts” shit.

But given that Zhang is now in her 90s, questions have been raised about whether the lawsuit was her idea.

The perfidious Chinese are a hivemind incapable of making decisions for themselves. I am not racist!

Only the Chinese Communist Party, he said, has “the resources, the money and the political will to do that.”

This is just factually untrue lol. Also fun fact, baseless conjecture by some gusano professor doesn’t qualify as evidence.

Feng and others worry that Chinese authorities would severely restrict access to any diaries by Li, a longtime critic of the party’s leaders and policies, whose writings were banned in China in 2006.

Fun fact: nothing in this paragraph supports the assertion that this is going to happen, other than the “worry” of gusanos which is, yet again, treated here as unimpeachable fact

His diaries, Torigian said, reveal “his thinking as well as a lot of other very senior revolutionary elders during that crisis,” public discussion of which is suppressed in China.

So why don’t you quote from this extremely compromising diary instead of vaguely alluding to it and insisting that it will end the seeseepee?

Though the Hoover Institution has scanned copies of the diaries, archivists and historians say it’s important to retain the original materials as well, both for research purposes and to reinforce the authenticity of the scans.

Really buried the lede on this one. Spent paragraph after paragraph fearmongering that the seeseepee was going to censor and destroy this information, implying the physical diary was all that was banging in the balance, only to reveal at the end that they have multiple scanned copies and it literally wouldn’t matter if the diary exploded into a billion pieces overnight.

“The Communist Party of China has a history of altering materials in order to fit what it wants the version of history to be,” said Perry Link, a Sinologist and emeritus professor of East Asian studies at Princeton who testified at the trial last week.

Projecting real hard there, Professor Link. By the way it would be nice if you listed concrete examples. Also the impact of this dire warning is extremely dampened by the fact that it was revealed one paragraph ago that they have copies of the original and any alteration would be easily caught, so it doesn’t matter what happens to the original.

If scholars publish research based on the Hoover copies but the originals are in Beijing, “the government in China can say, ‘No, your conclusions are wrong, you worked from the wrong materials. We have the originals, and that’s not what they say,’” said Link, who is also a professor at the University of California, Riverside.

Love to treat FUD conspiracies by crank professors as fact. Also, there is just as much evidence that China is going to alter the diary as there is that the Hoover whatever-the-fuck has already done so themselves. After all, they have a history of distorting Chinese history, so how can we really trust what they say? Why should we trust the Hoover Institution over the Chinese government?

With the originals in their possession, party elites could release them selectively to support their preferred narratives “and might even change what’s in the diaries,” he said. “They’ve done this before.”

Concrete examples? No? And again, it literally doesn’t matter what they do or don’t disclose considering you have COMPLETE COPIES OF THE FUCKING ORIGINAL. And pretty ironic to hear whining about selective disclosure from an article that hasn’t quoted a single sentence from this highly compromising and incredibly damaging diary and which backs up its claims with nothing but fearmongering paranoia from NED School of Fascism professors (trust me, they are all like this).

So in the end, what did we learn? That the entire premise of this article, that the information in the diary is hanging in the balance and might be lost forever should China get their hands on it, is complete and utter bullshit.

Also OP x-post to the dunk tank