I would add another layer: even when data and access are available, many outside frameworks still misread China because they look mainly at property, consumption, debt, and headline GDP, while underreading production, industrial upgrading, supply-chain depth, energy systems, state capacity, and manufacturing organization.
That is why “you don’t understand China” should not be used as a slogan to shut down debate. It should be treated as a methodological challenge. China has to be studied as a system: industrial capacity, state capacity, capital allocation, social pressure, political control, technology diffusion, and ordinary people’s lives all have to be analyzed together. Otherwise we only get fragments: either the spectacular China of factories, EVs, robots, and high-speed rail, or the troubled China of debt, unemployment, censorship, and declining expectations.
The hard part is that both Chinas are true. The more important question is how they interact.
I feel like this is true about countries more broadly. To take China's most similar cousin (tongue in cheek), the US has the same recognizable patterns. Even San Francisco is a microcosm of these contradictions. Within the same city or metro, you can visit the most successful corporations in the world producing some of the most cutting edge technology and research. A few blocks away you can see the public disorder and humans defecating on the street along with shuttered pharmacies or needles strewn on the street. You can see the housing crisis as well. San Francisco and the US more broadly holds both of these contradictions and both are products of the same politico-cultural society that can perfectly explain both realities.
I’m beginning to think people outside China don’t have the means or imagination to think relationally to that scale and in a way this is fine, being a mystery is a competitive advantage but damn frustrating for Chinese ppl that have to live in a sea of English media 😮💨
Thankyou Andrew for your insights. I haven't been back to China for over 15 years so it isn't clear to me the extent to which constraints on academics in China are greater than before. As someone who's academic focus is the Middle East, including Palestine studies there are similar real threats faced by US academics. Many colleagues have had their tenure cancelled, funding cut, received multiple threats, or cancelled simply because - like you- their area of expertise is deemed inappropriate. I think the issues you raise are important, but are far broader than Chinese studies.
Two professors there invited me to discuss their research but insisted on meeting in a noisy beer garden so that government agents could not overhear them.
I fear you are ignoring the constant and rising threat of another US attack on China, the endless harassment of Chinese researchers in America and the vitriolic coverage in our media.
Thoughtful essay. I cannot count how many times I have been told "You don't understand China." Long ago it bothered me, but I gradually came to accept it as true. Even Mao Zedong admitted as much in his younger days, telling Edgar Snow, “I did not want to go to Europe. I felt that I did not know enough about my own country, and that my time could be more profitably spent in China.”
Squelching access, shielding data, paranoia over losing control of the desired narrative, these are indeed hi-level drivers today. They cannot but inhibit and harm needed mutual understanding and connection, let alone awareness and empathy. Fearful self-censorship, moving to greener pastures, I understand it all. Yet, as you write (and as I witnessed during my recent month in China and wrote about in The China Chronicle), the on-the-ground realities in China are not cookie-cutter, do not fit into pre-packaged media assessments, and are generally warm and inquisitive. Most importantly, they should not be feared.
the peculiar things is if you tell some Japanese 'i don't really understand Japan', they would say 'me neither' with a smile and go on with the conversation. based on some Chinese comments, you would think that they are all 100% dialed in.
Thanks for this. I was wondering why on a recent visit I was ghosted by someone who had previously talked openly about transportation policy.
I also feel it’s frustrating that we don’t get the detailed looks of the good and bad outside of the whiz bang technology advancements in western media. Visiting many cities in the last two years has been amazing and the people friendly and open. But it’s also a big mystery that there are not enough lifetimes to uncover.
Thank you! This is an excellent discussion of the difference between familiarity and understanding. I first lived in Beijing in 1984–1985, studied Chinese academically, and have returned to China only once since, yet I would never claim to understand China completely. Nor do I completely understand the United States simply because I am American. Experience gives us perspective; it does not make that perspective objective.
I also agree with your observations about exchanges on X, although I increasingly question whether genuine discussion still occurs there. Too much of what passes for discussion is performance before an audience: slogans, accusations, clipped quotations, and predetermined positions intended to generate approval rather than understanding. I can no longer reliably determine whether I am engaging with an actual person, a coordinated account, a bot, or someone operating several sock-puppet identities. An anonymous account may still make a valid argument, but meaningful dialogue becomes nearly impossible when the identity, sincerity, and purpose of one’s interlocutor cannot be reasonably assessed.
Interpretation flows in both directions. Some American journalists use China’s failures to minimize America’s, while some China-sympathetic commentators respond to criticism of China by redirecting attention toward Iraq, homelessness, Fannie Mae, or some other American failure. These comparisons may contain truth, but comparison becomes whataboutism when it replaces examination. America’s wrongdoing—real or alleged—does not excuse China’s, and China’s wrongdoing—real or alleged—does not excuse America’s.
As an American, when I hear reports of students graduating from high school unable to read proficiently, or entering college needing remedial reading instruction, I must look inward and question my own country. Pointing toward deficiencies in Chinese education would not answer the question of how the American educational system failed those students. A nation cannot understand its own problems by continually redirecting attention toward another nation’s failures.
More than a century ago, the Chinese reformer Liang Qichao (梁啟超, Liáng Qǐchāo) confronted a related question during his 1903 journey through the United States and Canada. In his 《新大陸遊記》 (Xīn Dàlù Yóujì, Observations on a Trip to America), Liang admired American energy, civic institutions, libraries, parks, and economic development. He also documented poverty, concentrated corporate power, racial discrimination, Chinese exclusion, and lynching. America was neither the ideal celebrated by its admirers nor simply the villain portrayed by its critics.
Liang was trying to determine what China could learn from America without assuming that American institutions could simply be transplanted into Chinese soil. Some of his conclusions—particularly about the Chinese people’s readiness for democratic government—were products of his time and deserve criticism. But his underlying methodological question remains important: Can one society be understood, judged, or remade merely by applying the categories of another?
“China is China, and America is America”—中國是中國，美國是美國 (Zhōngguó shì Zhōngguó, Měiguó shì Měiguó)—is best understood as a concise expression of that principle rather than as a verified verbatim quotation from Liang. It does not mean that either country is exempt from universal standards of evidence, human dignity, or moral judgment. It means that neither can be understood by treating the other as its default model. Each must first be examined within its own history, culture, institutions, and circumstances before meaningful comparisons can be made.
Context explains differences; it does not excuse wrongdoing. What is needed is disciplined objectivity: the same standards of evidence, context, and reasoning applied to every side, including one’s own.
A simple but likely hard to answer question. But I’d love to hear your opinion. Which government or power structure (includes businesses, “elites” within the country) do you think cares more about it's people, China or America? For me it’s very hard to see that America gives one hoot about the regular citizens of America. Everything is done for the wealthy, the connected (made men/women), keeping the status quo quo’ing, while I don’t know enough about China, while it seems they care (or perhaps fear) the Chinese people more than America or the west.
I am disturbed by how poor even the good sources on China are. If there's a better single volume book then Spence's Search for Modern China I don't know it. And the latest edition still describes the politics of provincial administration based on information from the 1980s. Its final chapter attempts to be critical of Xi's authoritarian turn, but it pulls almost every punch it throws. It's sad when one of the books that has taught generations of college students interested in China Is now less insightful than some of the blogs on this website.
I understand how academe works but it remains strange to me that there isn't a market for regularly updated general works on a topic as important as the state of modern China. Most readers who want to remain informed are not going to wade through a dozen different narrow scholarly monographs or hundreds of articles.
In China, criticism is not strictly forbidden, but it is heavily shaped by the country's past. Having experienced long periods of "total self-negation" (intense social upheaval), the government now requires criticism to be constructive rather than destructive. Any feedback must align with the nation’s general direction and act as a functional tool for improvement.
The core of this framework is a "red line" known as the Four Cardinal Principles, which cannot be challenged. Within this boundary, constructive criticism regarding how policies are carried out is seen as helpful and necessary. However, deep-seated critiques regarding the system itself or high-level strategies are kept strictly internal. These "bitter but necessary" insights are delivered through private channels—such as internal reports, targeted research, or closed-door meetings—to serve as a reference for top decision-makers.
This model of "public unity, private advice" is essentially a modern version of China’s 2,000-year-old Censorial System. It is designed to allow the system to fix its own mistakes from within, while maintaining total control.
I would add another layer: even when data and access are available, many outside frameworks still misread China because they look mainly at property, consumption, debt, and headline GDP, while underreading production, industrial upgrading, supply-chain depth, energy systems, state capacity, and manufacturing organization.
That is why “you don’t understand China” should not be used as a slogan to shut down debate. It should be treated as a methodological challenge. China has to be studied as a system: industrial capacity, state capacity, capital allocation, social pressure, political control, technology diffusion, and ordinary people’s lives all have to be analyzed together. Otherwise we only get fragments: either the spectacular China of factories, EVs, robots, and high-speed rail, or the troubled China of debt, unemployment, censorship, and declining expectations.
The hard part is that both Chinas are true. The more important question is how they interact.
I feel like this is true about countries more broadly. To take China's most similar cousin (tongue in cheek), the US has the same recognizable patterns. Even San Francisco is a microcosm of these contradictions. Within the same city or metro, you can visit the most successful corporations in the world producing some of the most cutting edge technology and research. A few blocks away you can see the public disorder and humans defecating on the street along with shuttered pharmacies or needles strewn on the street. You can see the housing crisis as well. San Francisco and the US more broadly holds both of these contradictions and both are products of the same politico-cultural society that can perfectly explain both realities.
Even SF is much different from ten years ago when I visited that time the street was much secured than today.
I’m beginning to think people outside China don’t have the means or imagination to think relationally to that scale and in a way this is fine, being a mystery is a competitive advantage but damn frustrating for Chinese ppl that have to live in a sea of English media 😮💨
Thankyou Andrew for your insights. I haven't been back to China for over 15 years so it isn't clear to me the extent to which constraints on academics in China are greater than before. As someone who's academic focus is the Middle East, including Palestine studies there are similar real threats faced by US academics. Many colleagues have had their tenure cancelled, funding cut, received multiple threats, or cancelled simply because - like you- their area of expertise is deemed inappropriate. I think the issues you raise are important, but are far broader than Chinese studies.
Well said
Two professors there invited me to discuss their research but insisted on meeting in a noisy beer garden so that government agents could not overhear them.
I fear you are ignoring the constant and rising threat of another US attack on China, the endless harassment of Chinese researchers in America and the vitriolic coverage in our media.
not denying that at all! In fact I acknowledged some of that in the piece, if you read the whole thing :-)
Thoughtful essay. I cannot count how many times I have been told "You don't understand China." Long ago it bothered me, but I gradually came to accept it as true. Even Mao Zedong admitted as much in his younger days, telling Edgar Snow, “I did not want to go to Europe. I felt that I did not know enough about my own country, and that my time could be more profitably spent in China.”
Squelching access, shielding data, paranoia over losing control of the desired narrative, these are indeed hi-level drivers today. They cannot but inhibit and harm needed mutual understanding and connection, let alone awareness and empathy. Fearful self-censorship, moving to greener pastures, I understand it all. Yet, as you write (and as I witnessed during my recent month in China and wrote about in The China Chronicle), the on-the-ground realities in China are not cookie-cutter, do not fit into pre-packaged media assessments, and are generally warm and inquisitive. Most importantly, they should not be feared.
the peculiar things is if you tell some Japanese 'i don't really understand Japan', they would say 'me neither' with a smile and go on with the conversation. based on some Chinese comments, you would think that they are all 100% dialed in.
ya this comment is mostly uttered in media/academic circles honestly; everyday people in China occasionally, but far less so!
Thanks for this. I was wondering why on a recent visit I was ghosted by someone who had previously talked openly about transportation policy.
I also feel it’s frustrating that we don’t get the detailed looks of the good and bad outside of the whiz bang technology advancements in western media. Visiting many cities in the last two years has been amazing and the people friendly and open. But it’s also a big mystery that there are not enough lifetimes to uncover.
Death to fully justified walls of text. Bring back left justification.
I kept wondering whether I was the only one bothered by it.
I had the same experience in Singapore
Thank you! This is an excellent discussion of the difference between familiarity and understanding. I first lived in Beijing in 1984–1985, studied Chinese academically, and have returned to China only once since, yet I would never claim to understand China completely. Nor do I completely understand the United States simply because I am American. Experience gives us perspective; it does not make that perspective objective.
I also agree with your observations about exchanges on X, although I increasingly question whether genuine discussion still occurs there. Too much of what passes for discussion is performance before an audience: slogans, accusations, clipped quotations, and predetermined positions intended to generate approval rather than understanding. I can no longer reliably determine whether I am engaging with an actual person, a coordinated account, a bot, or someone operating several sock-puppet identities. An anonymous account may still make a valid argument, but meaningful dialogue becomes nearly impossible when the identity, sincerity, and purpose of one’s interlocutor cannot be reasonably assessed.
Interpretation flows in both directions. Some American journalists use China’s failures to minimize America’s, while some China-sympathetic commentators respond to criticism of China by redirecting attention toward Iraq, homelessness, Fannie Mae, or some other American failure. These comparisons may contain truth, but comparison becomes whataboutism when it replaces examination. America’s wrongdoing—real or alleged—does not excuse China’s, and China’s wrongdoing—real or alleged—does not excuse America’s.
As an American, when I hear reports of students graduating from high school unable to read proficiently, or entering college needing remedial reading instruction, I must look inward and question my own country. Pointing toward deficiencies in Chinese education would not answer the question of how the American educational system failed those students. A nation cannot understand its own problems by continually redirecting attention toward another nation’s failures.
More than a century ago, the Chinese reformer Liang Qichao (梁啟超, Liáng Qǐchāo) confronted a related question during his 1903 journey through the United States and Canada. In his 《新大陸遊記》 (Xīn Dàlù Yóujì, Observations on a Trip to America), Liang admired American energy, civic institutions, libraries, parks, and economic development. He also documented poverty, concentrated corporate power, racial discrimination, Chinese exclusion, and lynching. America was neither the ideal celebrated by its admirers nor simply the villain portrayed by its critics.
Liang was trying to determine what China could learn from America without assuming that American institutions could simply be transplanted into Chinese soil. Some of his conclusions—particularly about the Chinese people’s readiness for democratic government—were products of his time and deserve criticism. But his underlying methodological question remains important: Can one society be understood, judged, or remade merely by applying the categories of another?
“China is China, and America is America”—中國是中國，美國是美國 (Zhōngguó shì Zhōngguó, Měiguó shì Měiguó)—is best understood as a concise expression of that principle rather than as a verified verbatim quotation from Liang. It does not mean that either country is exempt from universal standards of evidence, human dignity, or moral judgment. It means that neither can be understood by treating the other as its default model. Each must first be examined within its own history, culture, institutions, and circumstances before meaningful comparisons can be made.
Context explains differences; it does not excuse wrongdoing. What is needed is disciplined objectivity: the same standards of evidence, context, and reasoning applied to every side, including one’s own.
A simple but likely hard to answer question. But I’d love to hear your opinion. Which government or power structure (includes businesses, “elites” within the country) do you think cares more about it's people, China or America? For me it’s very hard to see that America gives one hoot about the regular citizens of America. Everything is done for the wealthy, the connected (made men/women), keeping the status quo quo’ing, while I don’t know enough about China, while it seems they care (or perhaps fear) the Chinese people more than America or the west.
I am disturbed by how poor even the good sources on China are. If there's a better single volume book then Spence's Search for Modern China I don't know it. And the latest edition still describes the politics of provincial administration based on information from the 1980s. Its final chapter attempts to be critical of Xi's authoritarian turn, but it pulls almost every punch it throws. It's sad when one of the books that has taught generations of college students interested in China Is now less insightful than some of the blogs on this website.
its not that Spence's is not a useful book for history, but China changes too fast now; books are out of date after just a couple years!
I understand how academe works but it remains strange to me that there isn't a market for regularly updated general works on a topic as important as the state of modern China. Most readers who want to remain informed are not going to wade through a dozen different narrow scholarly monographs or hundreds of articles.
There is a theme that government has decided “we can do all of it ourselves”, which is a cursed path, I believe.
While the mainstream media is hyper-fixated on every single drone intercept in the Strait of Hormuz, they are missing the forest for the trees.
The Middle East crisis isn't the main event. It’s a massive geopolitical sideshow. And the biggest winner isn't even in the Persian Gulf—it's Beijing.https://triggledger.substack.com/p/the-grand-sideshow-how-beijing-exploits?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=8gc1q
f
In China, criticism is not strictly forbidden, but it is heavily shaped by the country's past. Having experienced long periods of "total self-negation" (intense social upheaval), the government now requires criticism to be constructive rather than destructive. Any feedback must align with the nation’s general direction and act as a functional tool for improvement.
The core of this framework is a "red line" known as the Four Cardinal Principles, which cannot be challenged. Within this boundary, constructive criticism regarding how policies are carried out is seen as helpful and necessary. However, deep-seated critiques regarding the system itself or high-level strategies are kept strictly internal. These "bitter but necessary" insights are delivered through private channels—such as internal reports, targeted research, or closed-door meetings—to serve as a reference for top decision-makers.
This model of "public unity, private advice" is essentially a modern version of China’s 2,000-year-old Censorial System. It is designed to allow the system to fix its own mistakes from within, while maintaining total control.