Invisible Empire: The Global Implications of China’s Engineered Opacity

I. A New Era of Unknowing

In early 2023, a U.S. consulting firm’s Beijing office was raided by Chinese police, with employees taken in for investigation on charges of “illegally obtaining intelligence.” A few months later, a German scholar’s planned research visit to China was abruptly canceled without explanation—only a terse notice stating the timing was “inappropriate.” Meanwhile, a Chinese researcher formerly active in international think tank circles suddenly deleted their social media accounts and quietly withdrew from global academic discourse. These are not isolated incidents; they exemplify a growing pattern in research, data collection, and cross-border collaboration involving China.

Why is China becoming harder to understand? More critically, why has obtaining accurate information about China become an almost impossible task? The answer lies not only in legal or technical obstacles, but in a deliberately engineered epistemic regime: a political system that denies the outside world the right to know. It is not opacity by accident, but opacity by design.