Conditional Access and Epistemic Resilience in European China Studies

Abstract

This article argues that European China Studies is moving from an era in which access to the People’s Republic of China was widely treated as “normal” to a “post-access” condition in which field sites, archives, databases, and partnerships are increasingly governed as revocable permissions. Rather than treating access constraints as episodic misfortunes, I conceptualise them as a mode of governance that produces patterned missingness, redistributes risk onto interlocutors and early-career scholars, and shapes what kinds of claims can be made responsibly. The post-access condition is compounded by Europe’s own turn towards research security and by a synthetic information environment that shifts the burden from finding data to verifying provenance. Against this background, the essay develops the notion of epistemic resilience: the capacity of a research community to sustain critical, empirically grounded knowledge under uncertainty without confusing duty of care with intellectual timidity. Epistemic resilience requires plural data ecologies for triangulation, transparent “access-and-constraint statements” that render absences comparable, and verification routines for digital evidence, including provenance and authenticity checks appropriate to generative media.

本文指出，歐洲漢學正由“常態准入”時代轉向“後准入”境況，田野調查、檔案使用、資料庫訪問及學術合作日益被當作可隨時收回的許可加以管控。作者強調，准入限制不應被視為偶發困境，而應理解為一種系統性治理機制：它不僅造成結構性的資料缺失，也使學者更難提出穩健而有據的學術論斷。更兼歐洲對科研安全日益強化，研究重心亦從“獲取資料”轉向“驗證來源”，凡此皆使困局愈趨嚴峻。有鑑於此，本文提出“認知論韌性”概念，主張構建多元數據生態以實現三角互證，推行透明的“准入與限制說明”機制，並建立適用於生成式媒介的數位證據溯源與真偽核查常規，以在不確定中維繫嚴謹而具批判性的知識生產。