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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.
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?’…
