We are All China Watchers Now

It’s a problem.

The term ‘China Watcher’ has a history and it’s not great. It refers to so-called experts watching China from afar during the cold war, parsing political speeches, analyzing photographs, doing whatever they could to figure out China while not being there. They tended to hold anti-China views, or at least anti-Communist Party of China views, so their reports emphasized problems and controversy.

China Watchers replaced an earlier breed called, ‘China Hands,’ a term which goes back to the opening of China to western trade in the early 1800s. China Hands were actually There, mostly doing business, but also conducting research and working as journalists. Many were Americans and they told the western world what was happening in the mysterious orient.

Edgar Snow with Mao Zedong and Liu Shaoqi in Beijing in 1960, photographer unknown, Public Domain, from Wikimedia Commons

By the 1930s and 40s, what-was-happening increasingly meant describing the Communists under Mao and the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-Shek. Grounded in the real world and not ideology, many prominent China Hands of the time, such as John S. Service ad Edgar Snow, saw the Communists as the likely winners.

Correctly predicting the unpopular outcome was career-ending for some. ‘Who Lost China?’ was a preoccupation of the McCarthy era, and by telling the truth, the China Hands became a lightning rod for blame.

I am dwelling on this earlier shift in China narrative control because

Here We Go Again!

The main story being told in the West about China is changing. Right Now.

The new one comes from China Watchers who are for the most part Not There and who have an ideological interest (a particular form of Capitalism) in representing China as a frightening adversary.

Between the time of U.S. President Richard Nixon’s meeting with Chairman Mao Zedong, through the economic opening under Chairman Deng Xiaoping and even during the early years of General Secretary Xi Jinping — China was not portrayed in the West as a frightening adversary. The basic idea for the past 50 years has been that China is gradually reforming and becoming, if not identical to…