There is a long record of Western intellectuals joining “Potemkin tours” of authoritarian states during the 20th century. Not all of them were illiberal ideologues. In fact, from the point of view of authoritarian hosts, there were useful legitimacy dividends to be had from cultivating liberal foreign intellectuals, whose idealism could be manipulated through lavish hospitality and curated displays of social progress. During the 1920s and ‘30s the Soviet Union actively wooed them, just as it was courting Western expertise and investment for its industrialization.
One such intellectual, the American philosopher John Dewey, was invited on a tour of Russia with a delegation of educators and college presidents in 1928. Afterwards he praised the new reforming zeal in Russian social and educational life: “Russia is a revolution, involving a release of human powers…of incalculable significance” for both Russia and the world, he mused.
Josef Stalin’s homicidal purges later disabused Dewey of his hopes.
The Potemkin tour is by no means a thing of the past, but the geopolitical conditions in which such tours take place are rather different from those of the 1930s. As Alexander Cooley and Alexander Dukalskis wrote in their new book “Dictating the Agenda,” authoritarian states like China have now gone beyond defensively “parrying threatening ideas” from liberal democracies, and are actively working both to shape opinion and undermine opposition abroad.
The 2001 accession of China to the World Trade Organization, the liberalization of its economy, and the expansion of global internet connectivity once led foreign liberal intellectuals to believe that reforming forces would soon consign Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule to history – a fate that Dewey had believed Bolshevism faced in Russia in 1928. Like Dewey, they set their hopes on the removal of barriers “that prevent intercourse, knowledge, and understanding.”
Things are not turning out as they hoped. Liberal democracy’s global standing is now weakened by the re-election of an illiberal populist presidency in the United States. The CCP has meanwhile leveraged China’s increasing prosperity, and its own command of sophisticated surveillance, censorship, and propaganda technologies, to reconsolidate its power and suppress dissent at a fraction of the death tolls exacted by Stalin and Mao.
Meanwhile Cooley and Dukalkis also observed that states like China have “sought to reclaim transnational networks of influence to advance their own political ideas, to dictate the agenda” in other countries, exploiting economic interdependencies and the openness of liberal societies to transmit illiberal influence. Wealthy internationalized universities and academic publishers are heavily involved, and financially invested in those networks.
Thus, the hybrid social and market liberal imperatives driving today’s transnational faith within Western higher education – harmonizing free cultural and intellectual exchange with expanding market access – are ripe for manipulation. A recent Potemkin tour in Xinjiang involving Christie Henry, director of Princeton University Press (PUP), presents a vivid illustration of such manipulation, and opportunities to consider how that manipulation can be resisted.
According to a June article in China’s Peoples Daily, the official mouthpiece of the CCP, “China in the Eyes of Sinologists: A Cultural Tour in Xinjiang” was held in late June to promote cultural exchange and encourage deeper global understanding of Xinjiang, using the perspectives of invited foreign scholars and educators “working in publishing and translation.” Many tour participants, including Henry, were previous winners of the Special Book Prize of China award. Its 2025 award ceremony had been held in mid-June, just prior to the Beijing International Book Fair, which Henry and two of her staff had also attended.
In a press release published on June 28, PUP, a nonprofit organization that is institutionally independent from Princeton University, explained why Christie and her staff joined the tour: “Our goal with PUP’s China initiative is to ensure greater scholarly exchange, and to bring to English-language readers more knowledge and analyses” of China. By accepting the tour invitation, PUP hoped to “support that exchange by meeting with scholars, sinologists and translators, and visiting regions our U.S.-based staff had not yet been to.”
The tour itinerary explained in the June People’s Daily article seemed to accommodate that intention. It stated that in addition to cultural excursions in Ürümqi and Kashgar cities, tour participants joined multiple “in-depth exchange(s) over translated works by Xinjiang authors.” They also met a few Uyghur authors, as well as translators and representatives of local publishing presses.
The tour apparently engaged the social and market liberal dimensions to PUP’s China initiative. In August 2017, one month before Henry was appointed as its director, PUP became the first American university press to open a Beijing office, recognizing China’s “increasing centrality in the world of ideas and its growing investment in higher education and scholarly research.” PUP aimed to translate and publish “exemplary Chinese scholarship” to the world. In April 2022, PUP partnered with University of Chicago Press to provide it with “exclusive sales and marketing representation in China.” In March 2025, it inked an “exclusive representation partnership” in China with the prestigious American publishing company W.W. Norton.
Still, there are some ambiguities in the PUP press release. According to a Twitter thread by sinologist James Millward, Christie Henry and her colleagues were invited on a tour, but were not told until “quite late” that the destination would be Xinjiang. In an email exchange Henry did not respond to my request for confirmation of this claim. If Millward’s account is true, it suggests that there was no planned rationale for the PUP staff to visit Xinjiang specifically. Moreover, the press release mentions only one tour sponsor, the China National Publications Import and Export Group, with which PUP is collaborating on its China Initiative. The June Peoples Daily article mentions another sponsor: the Publicity Department of the Autonomous Region Party Committee, a propaganda organ of CCP regional government in Xinjiang.
The tour was clearly an exercise in United Front influence work. While there is a CCP United Front Department deploying multiple influence strategies domestically and abroad to “make more people support us [the CCP] and fewer oppose us,” Anne-Marie Brady, the leading global expert on United Front work, told me that it is mistaken to assume that this department does all of that work. “United front work is the task of all CCP members and all State and Party agencies,” Brady said.
The PUP press release in June tacitly acknowledged the Potemkin characteristics of the tour. It had been “curated,” not “comprehensive,” and tour footage taken by accompanying Chinese journalists had “regrettably been repurposed and mis-contextualized… undermining PUP’s every intention for inclusive cross-cultural interactions.” This footage, published by state media including the Xinjiang news website Tianshannet, sparked a social media backlash against PUP.
In this screenshot from a video clip posted by Tianshannet, dancers in Uyghur folk costumes perform while PUP’s Christie Henry speaks from offscreen about “how cultures can peacefully coexist” in Xinjiang.
While People’s Daily and Chinese language Tianshannet news coverage focused on the intellectual engagement side of the tour, state media videos captured tour participants’ interactions with Disneyfied Uyghur folk culture displays, which are now a mainstay in Xinjiang tourism. One video of Henry in Kashgar particularly infuriated Uyghur diaspora activists, sinologists, human rights journalists, and many others familiar with the Chinese government’s repressive policies of mass incarceration, mass sterilization, forced labor, and forced assimilation against Xinjiang’s Uyghur people.
Against a backdrop of tour participants dancing with Uyghurs in folk costume, Henry was filmed saying: “So many cultures exist and meet here, and it’s a way for the world to see how cultures can peacefully co-exist and exist in harmony.” She added that she hoped to “tell this story to the rest of the world.” Her social liberalism had been co-opted to promote CCP messaging on ethnic harmony, to “tell the Xinjiang story to the world.”
Two concerns arise over this public relations debacle. First, despite their awareness of “the region’s ongoing human rights atrocities,” PUP staffers were persuaded to join a government-sponsored tour of Xinjiang, and Henry was somehow inveigled into repeating its ethnic harmony propaganda. If they cannot resist such inducements, can they resist government censorial pressure that compromises the independence of their book acquisitions processes? The tour footage thus feeds suspicions that PUP’s investment in the Chinese publishing market is weakening its commitment to free cultural and intellectual exchange.
In its June press release, PUP referenced its publication of “China-critical” books such as Sean Roberts’ “The War on the Uyghurs,” as if to exonerate itself of those suspicions. Roberts responded angrily on X, accusing PUP of using his book to “whitewash” Christie’s actions, and suspecting it was likely “all about $.”
The American sinologist Perry Link told me that his co-authored biography of the Nobel prize-winning poet and political prisoner Liu Xiaobo, “I Have No Enemies,” had originally been contracted to PUP, with a generous advance payment. After initial enthusiasm, PUP contacted the authors in March 2021 to request extensive revisions to the book manuscript. Link and his co-author’s subsequent revisions did not satisfy PUP editors, who canceled the contract, while allowing the authors to keep their cash advance. Columbia University Press then quickly accepted the book, requested no major revisions, and in 2023 it was published to acclaim.
Link told me he had “no smoking gun connecting this event to PUP’s setting up its office in Beijing.” However, his suspicions of political bias or censorship had been revived by the Xinjiang tour news.
When asked for comment, Christie Henry rejected these suspicions, stating that “we deny any political influence on PUP publishing decisions, including the rights reversion for this manuscript.”
The second concern is that PUP’s director joined a tour in a region where the Chinese government has been credibly accused of committing crimes against humanity, and possibly genocide. The intellectual engagement side of the tour was compromised by the fact that leading Uyghur scholars whose works are candidates for PUP’s translation projects, like Ilham Tohti and Rahile Dawut, are currently serving lengthy prison sentences. Moreover, Henry’s statements about ethnic harmony, even if “mis-contextualized,” invite accusations not only of moral but also of intellectual irresponsibility. She allowed herself, as the head of a prestigious academic press, to become a mouthpiece for disinformation whitewashing grave human rights violations.
At this point, I should declare my own interests. I am also a socially liberal academic, still holding out for free scholarly and cultural exchange despite authoritarian headwinds. I have published translated work by Chinese (and Taiwanese) scholars for Anglosphere readers and I hope that my books are reaching readers in China, even if they encroach on taboo topics for censors. My latest edited book was published by Routledge’s Beijing office, and I have no complaints about the professionalism of its staff.
Nor do I think Christie Henry should be “cancelled.” However, incidents like PUP’s Xinjiang tour demonstrate that international academic presses operating in China must be vigilant against United Front entanglements, to safeguard their reputation and integrity. They must also work out exit strategies with clear red line triggers. At minimum, those red lines should include censorial pressure on their acquisitions processes, demands to join compromising engagements like Potemkin tours in return for market access, and state-directed intimidation, or persecutions, of authors and employees.
There is, finally, one message I want to convey to Henry, to the 13 international scholars and translators who also took part in the Xinjiang tour, and to other scholars tempted into joining such Potemkin tours. It comes from the Uyghur historian Tohti Tuniyaz. In 2014, shortly before his death, the Chinese newspaper Southern Metropolis Weekly interviewed him on his new book, “Medieval Uyghur Society.” There was much that Tuniyaz could not mention, including his 11 years of imprisonment in Xinjiang on false charges of “stealing state secrets” and “inciting national disunity,” over authorized archival research he had conducted in Urumqi.
But at the interview’s conclusion, he did address the following to researchers visiting Xinjiang: “Regarding scholars…I hope they treat ethnic history and culture with seriousness and integrity.” He then warned against “tourism dressed up in academic clothing,” and “so-called researchers [who] insult ethnic communities by writing with a sense of voyeurism, deepening ethnic misunderstandings.”
