The changing politics, policies and personalities in China make China watching both fun and challenging. How well do American China watchers understand what is going on within China? What are the new opportunities available to them, and what constraints affect their analyses? This was the focus of a recent conference in Washington sponsored by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies entitled "Trends in China Watching: Observing the PRC at 50."
Who is watching?
Several key trends are apparent, regardless of what profession China watchers belong to. First, functional expertise is supplanting area specialists with linguistic skills and deeper appreciation of Chinese culture and traditions. This trend has pros and cons: those with experience in other countries bring a comparative dimension to their work and are not trapped by illusions or mistakes of the past. For instance, journalists who arrived in China in the mid-90s did not look at China though the lens of the Cultural Revolution or Tiananmen. Because they had not been disillusioned by those events, their reporting was not colored with lost hopes, as had been the case with journalists of earlier times. Those with experience in other authoritarian regimes expected China to be authoritarian, and were familiar with the techniques they witnessed for controlling both journalists and society at large. But because they lacked that experience, they also missed or did not fully appreciate the depth or extent of changes occurring.
Scholars with no China experience are eager to try out their theories there. They see China as a lab for experiments based on Western theories and have less interest in understanding China per se. Businessmen with a period of in-country experience are often transferred to new posts within their firms before the firm is able to absorb all their experiences. They are then replaced by a new person who has to start back up the learning curve.
In government, there is a mix of area specialists with lots of experience and linguistic skill and functional generalists who are assigned to issues, topics, and crises as warranted. Functionalists seem more prevalent in recent years because budget cutbacks limit the government's ability to train and maintain country specialists. In an era of tight resources, those who can be transferred around like pieces on a gaming board have a competitive advantage, but this comes at the cost of depth of understanding that only comes with years of careful analysis. Higher officials occasionally pay lip service to the contributions of country specialists, but the advice of these specialists is often ignored.
Information paradox
Most professions complain that there is now a flood of information that is impossible to collect and absorb in a timely fashion. Within China, there are new sources of official information -- local histories, elite biographies, histories of ministries, sectors and CCP, etc. -- that are richly detailed. Outside China, there are new journals, newsletters, trade publications, and on-line services that provide good secondary analysis. This flood of information prevents a rigorous scrutiny of a few documents, a forte of Pekingology when no direct access was possible and documentation was limited. There is simply not time to be familiar with all relevant information even within an individual's area of expertise, let alone general trends.
RSS