Decoding the Discourse: Five Precepts for Discerning China Analysts
Delivered in Madison, Wisconsin, April 2023
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The following is the original text of a talk I gave at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in April 2023. Originally titled “Re-thinking the U.S. Approach to China,” the speech as delivered deviated a bit from the text below — I didn’t read off a page, ad-libbed large portions, and left out some bits in the interest of time. The audio version included here is the actual speech, sans introduction. Hope you enjoy it!
I’m often asked whether we are actually in a new Cold War with China. About four years ago, pondering the same question with a group of China specialists, one of the wiser participants suggested that a state of Cold War exists between two nations when the major organizing principle of life in each is hostility toward the other. “Whew,” I thought. “Things are bad, but surely they aren’t that bad.”
Since then, of course, it feels very much like hostility, or at least contestation with China, is fast becoming if indeed it has not already become the most important organizing principle in this country. It’s the way we sell every major piece of legislation, after all — notably the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act. We’ve had more than 125 mass shootings so far in 2023 alone, but thank God our Congress can put aside partisan differences to focus on the important task of banning TikTok.
But seriously: Infrastructure, investment in domestic semiconductor production, revitalizing manufacturing, it’s all packaged, at least, as being about China.
We’re in a precarious moment right now in our relationship with China — still our most consequential bilateral relationship, and one that’s in deep trouble. I realize that as an American of Chinese descent who spent much of my adult life in China, perhaps I have more at stake than most people.
But you should all realize (and hopefully, before it’s too late) that the consequences of an actual war with China — and such a war has never in my life felt more horrifyingly possible — would be catastrophic for all countries and not just the two great powers.
When we seem to converge, as the House Select Committee on Competing with the Chinese Communist Party seemed to in its first hearing on Tuesday night last week, around this language of China’s ruling party as an “existential threat” to the U.S., either we’re using irresponsible hyperbole or we really do think that it’s existential, which means either they die or we die. In either case, my reaction in watching how we’ve responded to China in recent months and years is embarrassment. We’re not behaving like a confident superpower that still believes that upholding our values and institutions at home — our openness, our freedoms, our diversity, our rule of law, our democracy — will prevail, will appeal to and attract, and will ensure that we continue to innovate. I’m embarrassed at the way we’re talking about China as if it’s all-powerful and we’re somehow helpless. We’ve lost our confidence, and we’re lashing out in an inchoate paroxysm that’s really unbecoming — and dangerous to our future and to our way of life.
I don’t think most Americans have any real sense of the extent to which the world’s two biggest economies are intertwined or the shock that would come of an abrupt and total decoupling. Few seem aware that the quality of life to which they’ve grown accustomed depends on advanced semiconductors made on the very faultline of this looming Sino-American contest. We fret about global warming but there’s little appreciation for just how carbon-intensive arms racing is — let alone how bad an actual large-scale kinetic war would be in that respect. I shudder to think of what life will be like in this country for people who look like me and my family, as part of a community that is already experiencing horrific levels of hate, whether in speech or in the form of actual violence.
Recent events have me really worried about our ability, as a country, to think seriously and craft reasonable, effective policy when it comes to China. It’s hard for me to imagine that any dispassionate observer could have watched the collective American response to the Chinese balloon and concluded that we behaved with the good sense, dignity, poise, and equanimity of a responsible superpower. Our panic over TikTok feels the same: another moral panic, like the ones we had back in the 80s about Satanic backmasking in music, or Satanic cults of ritual child abuse — though some folks in this country are still in the throes of that particular moral panic. Or Dungeons and Dragons. Or comic books a few decades earlier. Or “reefer madness.”
The way China has become a means of scoring domestic political points, as if what we say and do doesn’t affect the actual relationship or shape China’s response, as if China isn’t real but rather just distant and conceptual, is deeply worrying. To far too many Americans, China is just an abstraction that we invest with either our fears and insecurities, or is painted in our minds as some techno-utopian fantasyland of hyper-modernity, where technocracy has triumphed.
China seems to have become, for many Americans, a way to feel better about ourselves, to enjoy a sense of moral superiority. There’s a line I really like from a speech that President Obama once gave, in Oslo, Norway: “I know,” he said, “that engagement with repressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation.”
In the years since his presidency ended, we’ve abandoned the idea of engagement with China altogether. Few people are willing to come to the defense of the policy, and somehow both Democrats and Republicans have converged on the idea that it was a failure. Time permitting I’d be happy to talk about why I think that’s simply wrong. But the point I want to make is that today, on our political left, we regularly bathe in what President Obama called the “satisfying purity of indignation,” over human rights abuses in Xinjiang or in Hong Kong, the Chinese surveillance state, censorship, and the quashing of dissidents without enough thought given to the best way to address those very real abuses. Meanwhile, on the right, we get a lot of chest-thumping, jingoistic bluster, and what I’ve come to think of as Taiwan tumescence — as well as the cynical weaponization of human rights issues, which only galvanizes Beijing. After all, the Chinese leadership doesn’t believe any more than I do that the very same people behind the Muslim ban in America would suddenly become earnest, ardent defenders of the rights of Uyghurs.
But we’re in a place now where one side — the China hawks, let’s call them by way of shorthand — have a succinct, straightforward argument to make. It’s one that is flattering to Americans, that makes us feel good about our moral rectitude as a country, that seems principled, clear-eyed, and tough. What’s more, their arguments on China accord with the facts as most people in the U.S., it seems, have come to accept them, whether they watch conservative or liberal cable, whether they listen to AM talk radio or NPR.
Meanwhile, ask someone from the other side to present their case and you’re likely to be treated to a long and detailed history lesson, complex textual interpretation, a picture of the relationship rendered in dozens of fine shades of gray. Which side do you think is going to prevail in our current intellectual climate?
So many times in recent months I’ve been in rooms full of individuals who work on China professionally: academics, think tankers, many who worked in the intelligence community or in government. These aren’t panda-huggers or communist dupes. They understand well what challenges China poses. But the disconnect on the big questions — what China wants, whether Xi has any kind of a timetable to move on Taiwan, how we should respond to China’s growing technological prowess, what China’s posture on the Ukraine War really is — the disconnect between these people and the Hill, or the DoD, is profound, and profoundly troubling.
The fact is we are, as citizens of this democracy, faced with important decisions about how to move forward with policy toward China. It’s an issue of enormous significance that absolutely will touch our lives, and I say this irrespective of whether you’re an elected official, a business leader, a journalist, a student, an activist, or just some person who likes to sound off on Twitter or TikTok. We need to develop a smart set of policies — not just an attitude, which is about all we have at present.
But the reality is not all of us — indeed very few of us — can dedicate our lives or even much of our time to becoming truly informed about China.
Instead, we need to know who among the multitude of people who write about China, who pontificate on the cable networks or the Sunday talk shows, who advocate for policy positions on China, who are engaged in the analysis of China, who among these people we ought to be listening to and taking seriously.
So, how do we know who to believe? Let me first be clear that this isn’t an argument that says only people with PhDs in Chinese studies, who are proficient in the language, and who have spent years and years living in China are to be trusted. There’s no political litmus test, either: Quite a few of the people whose China expertise I regard highly have worked under Republican administrations or are themselves Republicans or political conservatives, and quite a few of the folks who absolutely don’t pass muster, by the set of criteria I would propose we apply, happen to be Democrats.
In my role as the host of the Sinica Podcast, my main job really is to select guests. Not everyone who comes on the show is someone whose main arguments I agree with. Granted, it’s not an adversarial show, it’s not gotcha or “hard talk,” as you’ll know if you’re a listener, but I do like a spirited conversation with some pushback. But I don’t want to give a platform to people I think fail to exhibit certain qualities. And in my thirteen years now doing this show, I like to think I’ve developed a sense for what qualities matter the most, and for how to tell whether they’re present in a given individual.
So what are those criteria or qualities? I would identify five of them: Humility, sensitivity to bias, holism, historical acuity, and lastly and most importantly, cognitive or strategic empathy.
We can dispense with humility pretty quickly.
When someone describes him or herself as a “China expert,” you can dismiss or at least seriously discount what that person has to say. You don’t hear it too often today, but if anyone out there listening is still calling themselves a “China expert,” please stop. It’s just embarrassing.
Look for people who are candid about the limitations of what we can know. Given the nature of China’s political system,with its well-deserved reputation for opacity, there’s simply a lot that we can’t know. People should admit this up front, and show a little epistemic humility. When someone cherry-picks quotes from a handful of speeches or documents to make some sweeping argument with great certainty — that Xi Jinping has a timetable for an invasion of Taiwan, or that China seeks to supplant the U.S. as the global hegemon, just as a couple of examples — you should know that it’s equally easy to cherry-pick statements that completely contradict such claims. The fact is we don’t know, and we should have the humility to know that we don’t.
We should also look for evidence of cultural humility, which as you’ll see ties in with a number of the other attributes I hope we look for. Cultural humility involves a lot of self-awareness, self-reflection, and a habit of recognizing and challenging a lot of the prejudices, biases, assumptions and privileges that we have. All peoples are susceptible to such biases, but awareness of them, and humility about this, falls away quickly in the rough and tumble of argument over fraught issues like foreign policy. This is when it’s most badly needed, however.
I’ve talked about humility first because I believe it’s the wellspring, I think, for the other habits of mind that we should ideally cultivate ourselves, or at least learn to recognize and expect from the specialists we look to. Humility helps us to recognize the value in other perspectives — from different disciplines, thus leading to holism. Humility also leads us away from thinking of our own history as the one true path — and helps us to recognize instead that history is deeply contingent. It helps us dial down our own sense of exceptionalism. It’s a spirit of humility that helps us to take the learner’s stance, and recognize the importance of understanding how the Chinese themselves see us, and our relationship, thus leading to cognitive empathy.
And humility helps cultivate the habit of self-interrogation for sources of bias. And that’s the next thing I want to talk about, the next thing we should look for in our trusted sources on China: Sensitivity to bias.
I think it’s vitally important that we understand the optical properties of that lens through which so very much of the information we get about China ultimately filters, and what I mainly mean in the present context is the media. Our newspapers, wire services, and other media outlets comprise the nearly exclusive source of knowledge for anyone who isn’t a specialist in China. Even the specialists — in academia, in think tanks, in government — depend on the media for a huge amount of what they think they know when it comes to China. And reporters in turn depend on these specialists, who they quote and whose works they cite in their articles or broadcasts. You can see how there is real potential for echo chambers to form.
Reporters aren’t presenting a neutral or “objective” set of facts. That’s impossible — and it isn’t something anyone should expect or demand from our journalists. But we can try, as we read them or listen to their broadcasts, to know something of their own privileges and prejudices, and to give due weight to the structural biases that are inherent when reporting on a foreign country.
I could devote an hour to what those structural biases are, and why it’s really not the fault of the reporters themselves. But suffice it to say they aren’t going to write about the quotidian, the everyday. Nor should they: that’s not news. They’ll write about the bridge that collapsed, and not the thousands that didn’t. They’ll avoid the dog bites man story, choosing instead the man bites dog. They will go to one of the precisely three types of China stories, as a friend once quipped: Big China, Bad China, and Weird China. It’s up to us to remember that the whole reality of China is not reflected in the selection of stories we read. They may be accurate, indeed they’re often impressively accurate. But accurate does not get you all the way to realistic, and when it comes to forming ideas about a country as consequential as China, I would argue that realistic is ultimately more important.
The fact is, most of us just don’t pick what media outlets to trust based on much more than whether their reporting confirms our preexisting biases and beliefs. This is very hard to get over. And as those pre-existing biases become part of our mental furniture, as these narratives harden, it becomes even harder to dislodge them.
So let’s understand that there will be bias in the reporting you read on China. That doesn’t mean that there’s some coordinated campaign to smear China. I’m lucky enough to know most of the English-language journalists who covered China in the 20-odd years I lived there, and they are on the whole people with genuine professional integrity, not to mention a lot of courage. They’re not doing it for the money but out of a conviction that it’s important to learn truths. But we’re talking about a relatively small number of individuals with an outsize ability to shape our views on this massive nation of 1.4 billion people. Together they form a kind of lens through which we view China, and we simply have to take some time to think about the way that this lens tends to distort and diffract the light passing through it.
I won’t dwell on holism as an approach to look for except to say that there’s a pernicious tendency right now to view China in this country through one single lens — the lens of national security. Many of the so-called experts who you’ll hear from have only this lens in their toolkit, and that’s dangerous. It’s a classic case of the blind men and the elephant: what these single-lens types describe is only its trunk, or its leg, or its tusk, or its tail. Getting our heads around something as complex as China requires us to see it from multiple perspectives. National security is inarguably one of them. But anyone who focuses so narrowly on that perspective that they ignore other vitally important facets — the economy, business and finance, domestic politics, technology and not just technology as it impacts national security, the environment, demography, and yes even the humanities — or who only interprets these other facets through the filter of national security, is doing a big disservice. You don’t need to cut such a person out of your diet, but at the very least, balance those perspectives. Look for people with what a friend of mine calls “dragonfly eyes,” who have that rare ability to see things from multiple different angles at once, and just as importantly, are able to integrate the complexity generated by those perspectives, and process it.
When I enjoin you to look for historical acuity in the China specialists who you make time for, you’d be forgiven for assuming that I mean they have to have intimate familiarity with China’s history: that you should expect them to be able to recite all those dynasties and their dates, the treaties and battles and emperors. And sure, that’s part of what I mean — but it’s not the most important part. In fact the basic contours of China’s history, the narrative as Chinese people understand it and as it affects their own thinking, isn’t all that hard to grasp.
What I really mean is acuity when it comes to our history — that is, the history of the West, of Europe and its colonial offshoots. The thing to beware of is that teleological tendency that pervades so much of our thinking about history. Most people, I find, have trouble letting go of the idea that history has a goal. It’s there when we describe something as “progressive,” or when we talk about “development.” It’s in there when we say some other country or government is “behind the curve of history.” Or when we say, “the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” It’s hard to resist, it’s so baked into our ideas and into our language.
Since the end of the Cold War, this has been particularly prevalent — this belief that the basic process of history, the competition among ideologies and ways of organizing society, had come to an end and that we had a winner: Us. Liberal democratic capitalism. Clearly, this was not the case, but we’ve not completely recovered from that moment of amnesia, and have not learned the lessons of that momentary hubris.
What did we forget? We forgot our own history. We forgot how incredibly contingent it is, how unlikely and how dependent on just so many lucky rolls of the dice, so many touch-and-go episodes, so many skin-of-the-teeth victories, so many tensions that had to be there, and were resolved as they did, for us to have developed the institutions we now take so much for granted and believe, blithely, should be the universally adopted by all other peoples of the earth.
We now look across a historical chasm at countries that are on the other side — that don’t have these institutions, or that are still held back by the traditionalist or theocratic or merely authoritarian systems that we, of course, just shed so effortlessly — and we wonder why they just don’t come on over to our side. C’mon Iran! C’mon, Russia! C’mon, China — just be like us.
But were we to look down into that chasm that separates us — to look at the tortuous path through many narrow defiles and narrow escapes, at all the bodies we left along the way, we might get a better sense of how hard it might really be and cut the others some slack. We might come to a better appreciation for the gravitational pull of history on other worlds — that while we attained escape velocity, it’s not perhaps as easy to achieve that for China, or Iran, or Russia.
So when you’re shopping for China expertise, look for that sensitivity to disparate historical experience, and especially that awareness of contingency.
We come now to the fifth and, I think, the most important: cognitive empathy.
Empathy is something we’re pretty much all born with and can exercise pretty much reflexively. But cognitive empathy is something that requires some effort. Sure, we’re all human, but the fact is we were taught very different things in school. We were socialized differently. We relate to our history differently, brought up as we were on entirely separate vocabularies of historical and mythological archetypes. We have quite separate pantheons of heroes and villains and quite distinct corpora of fables and fairy tales that we were raised on. With vastly different experiences of the world, it shouldn’t surprise us that we have quite a bit of psychological distance from one another.
But with enough knowledge, we can imagine it. We can put ourselves in that headspace and, if we’ve taken the time to understand the very different influences, assumptions, values, and habits of mind, to populate it if not with precisely the same mental furniture, then something, in any case — a decent representation that’s going to take us a whole lot closer.
Let me offer up just one important piece of that “mental furniture” for you to consider when you think about China, because it’s something that, for me at least, goes far to explain why Chinese people see things the way they do. Always try and keep in mind the compressed, incredibly rapid nature of China’s modernization over the last 45 years. What do I mean by that? It’s hard to imagine but when I was 15 years old and first visited Beijing, there were about two buildings of more than 10 stories in the whole city. There were no private automobiles: Just about everyone got around on bicycles. They all wore what we now think of as “Mao suits” in either green, blue, or gray. There were no private restaurants. Donkey carts were still a regular sight — something you’d see everywhere throughout the city. Contrast that with the images you’re now familiar with, of what Beijing and China’s other major cities look like, with their gleaming forests of skyscrapers, streets jammed with cars, these cities all connected to one another in an incredible network of high-speed rail trains. I could of course go on.
But maybe think of it this way: When the reform and opening that helped transform China from what it was to what it is now began back at the very end of 1978, the per capita GDP of China was about $178. Forty years later it was over $11,0000. But someone who had graduated from high school, or just junior high as was more often the case, and had just entered the workforce in this world where the per capita GDP was just $178 was, 40 years later, only thinking about retiring. The transformation, in other words, had all taken place within this one working lifetime.
What does that mean? Let me suggest three things. First, while there have been periods of widespread protest and popular discontent, on balance — and for the vast majority of Chinese people — their experience has been one of steadily growing wealth, stability, and a growing sense of dignity and indeed pride. It’s not surprising, then, that when they assess the country’s political leadership across those four decades, most people give it high marks: They see it as having steered China mostly successfully through some difficult waters, without getting the country into wars, having spent for the most part wisely on modern infrastructure, and laying the groundwork for very rapid growth.
Secondly, and relatedly, I would suggest that it’s given Chinese people a very different relationship with technology than the fraught relationship we Americans now have with it. They’re not, on the whole, as worried about the negative impacts of technology in the way so many of us are today. And that shouldn’t be surprising: After all, in their own lived experience, their lives have improved in lock step with the advance of technology. The better their connectivity, the more powerful their devices, the more income, the more opportunity, and the more personal freedom they enjoyed.
A third result of this is perhaps less positive. I think it goes far toward explaining why it is that China as a nation, and Chinese people, can often seem so thin-skinned about perceived or real slights to China. Americans often seem to wonder why China, with its gleaming skylines, industrial might, and amazing high-speed rail, would be so quick to take offense. But that, I would suggest, is because what we see from the outside is the hardware, and that can change just a whole lot faster than the software can. That takes multiple generations, and China, as we’ve said, has only had that one working lifetime since its Maoist, impoverished past.
Thinking about these things — the factors that shape people’s views — is cognitive empathy.
Cognitive empathy in this case is mainly about understanding how Chinese elites view the world around them, and especially in crisis situations like the one we’re now in, understanding how they interpret our behaviors and our actions. This is something political scientists call “security dilemma sensibility:” the ability to put yourself in your counterparty’s shoes to see how your own behaviors are perceived.
I urge cognitive empathy because it doesn’t require us to abdicate our values. Instead, we just hang them on the coat rack before we step into the other’s shoes, and gaze out at the world from behind the other’s eyes. When we’re done – when we’ve seen what the chessboard looks like from the other side, what the neighborhood looks like through that whole apparatus of that other’s beliefs, values, assumptions, and formative experiences – then we can slip back into our own values, now much better informed and able to make much better decisions.
This is the chief quality you need to look for in an analyst, a pundit, even a policymaker. People for whom China isn’t a distant abstraction but a flesh-and-blood reality with a rich and complex emotional life. People with this capacity also tend to have a real appreciation for the stakes. They don’t casually speak in terms of policies that gamble with thousands, even millions, of lives. Part of cognitive empathy is, I think, having skin in the game and a genuine sense of the stakes.
Happily, there are quite a number of people who work on China, who are publishing in Foreign Affairs or in the Financial Times, in the Washington Post, in the Wall Street Journal, who really do embody all these qualities: the humility, the awareness of where bias creeps in, the dragonfly eyes that the holistic approach gives, the sophisticated awareness of how history works and doesn’t work, and of course this fundamental cognitive empathy. I urge you to make this your checklist: to look for evidence of these qualities before you subscribe to that Substack or follow that highly opinionated guy on Twitter — or vote for that politician.
I’ve recommended these five qualities of cognition, these five habits of mind, as things to look for when deciding what voices you should be listening to as a non-specialist. I hope it’s clear to those of you listening who do aspire to be specialists — and I really hope that some of you do so aspire! — that these are also five precepts you should embrace in your own approach, whether it’s toward China or indeed toward any other country. Be humble, both epistemically and culturally. Take that holistic approach, and keep a lot of different lenses in your toolkit. Be sensitive to the presence of that structural bias in the news media that you consume. Be conscious of how your own understanding of history affects the way you think of other countries, and how their experience of history might be radically different. This will help you be a better scholar, a more discerning thinker, a better-informed citizen.
Thanks so much.
