A former assistant professor of international relations at Yibin University in Sichuan, China, said he was fired from his job and “forced” to retract a paper on COVID-19 because the article did not “paint a good picture of the Chinese government.” In the 2021 paper, Thomas Ameyaw-Brobbey, now an adjunct lecturer at Accra Business School in Ghana and an adjunct research fellow at the Ghana Armed Forces Command and Staff College, discussed the negative effects of the pandemic on the global public opinion of Chinese leadership and how the outbreak fostered an “unfavorable image” of China.
Ameyaw-Brobbey used data from the Pew Research Center which, according to their website, is a “nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world.” In one of the meetings with Yibin officials, they asked why he did not use a Japanese public opinion survey instead.
The paper was retracted in December 2021. The journal has not posted a retraction notice – which goes against guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics – but the PDF of the article is watermarked “retracted.”
More: https://retractionwatch.com/2024/07/10/author-blames-retraction-on-chinese-censorship/
