Censored skies

Claim (verbatim)

Censored skies. Chinese court astronomers recorded celestial omens for two millennia, but they worked for a state in which comets and eclipses bore directly on the Mandate of Heaven — so the record was politically sensitive by construction. Korean, Japanese, and Arabic astronomers watched the same skies under different political stakes. Comparing the four traditions event by event therefore yields a censorship index: whenever an event certain to have been visible from China appears in the other records but not the Chinese one, an omission is caught in the act. The conjecture is that these Chinese omissions are not random noise but cluster in decades of usurpation and legitimacy crisis, when unfavorable omens were most dangerous to write down. Suppression should thus be measurable, datable, and correlated with dynastic stress.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

For each celestial event (comets, novae, major eclipses) attested in at least one of the Korean, Japanese, or Arabic records in the comparative event catalogs, record whether the Chinese record also reports it, yielding a decade-by-decade Chinese omission rate; independently code decades as usurpation/legitimacy-crisis or normal from standard dynastic chronology. Primary clause: the Chinese omission rate in crisis decades exceeds the rate in normal decades by a rate ratio of at least 1.5, significant at p < 0.05 under a permutation test over decades. The verdict follows the primary clause.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

comparative event catalogs.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

Comparative multi-country celestial catalogues exist (Yau/Stephenson/Willis), Chinese curation and even fabrication of portents during succession crises is discussed, and an adjacent NEGATIVE finding exists (no correlation between record frequency and political events in a Korean-histories case). The four-tradition censorship index with Chinese omissions clustering in usurpation decades was not located as constructed — and the Korean negative result must be engaged by any future resolution.

• Yau, Stephenson & Willis, auroral observations of China/Korea/Japan (193 BC-AD 1770) — Comparative catalogue + adjacent negative finding
• 'Astro-historiographic chronologies of early China are unfounded' — Politicized portent curation/fabrication in crises

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.