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.