A leading Australian publisher has dropped a book about efforts by China’s Communist party to infiltrate Australian public life, the latest imprint to self-censor over concerns about Chinese retaliation.

Clive Hamilton, a prominent Australian professor and Silent Invasion’s author, said Allen & Unwin had taken “a big step along the path to western self-censorship of commentary on modern China”, after the publisher told him it feared reprisals from Beijing.

This month the Financial Times revealed that Springer Nature, one of the world’s biggest academic publishers, was removing articles deemed sensitive by China’s censors from its Chinese website, for fear that it would be locked out of the Chinese market. Cambridge University Press took a similar decision earlier this year but reversed course in August after an outcry over its perceived collusion in the erosion of free speech.