Understanding China's Establishment Intellectuals
A Transcript of a CST Panel Event
On January 18th the Center for Strategic Translation held a panel event at the National Press Club in Washington DC. Our topic: how should observers of Chinese politics understand the output of China’s “establishment intellectuals?” We asked our panelists to help us understand the relationship between these intellectuals and the Chinese state, the shape of the larger intellectual ecosystem in China, and what the writings of these intellectuals can, and cannot, tell us about Chinese politics.
The panelists included David Ownby, a professor of history at the University of Montreal and founder of the website Reading the China Dream, which publishes translations of the writings of contemporary Chinese intellectuals; Jude Blanchette, who holds the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and is co-director CSIS Interpret: China; and Nadège Rolland, the Distinguished Fellow in Political and Security Affairs at the National Bureau of Asian Research. Tanner Greer, director of the Center for Strategic Translation, moderated this discussion.
What follows are some of the highlights of their discussion. This transcript has been lightly edited to remove “ums,” “likes,” and other grammatical errors common in spoken English.
Situating Establishment Intellectuals in China’s Broader Intellectual Ecology
Tanner Greer: Let’s start with a broad brush look at China’s intellectual ecology. What are the different categories of things that are published [in China]? By whom are they published? And where do the kind of intellectual writings that we are focused on today fit in that broader system?
Jude Blanchette: I would say I've found that the information environment, the intellectual and discourse ecosystem in China, is both more restricted than many people feel and less restrictive [than many people assume].
By that I mean I think there are some who over interpret the fact that China is a one-party dictatorship. They take that to mean there is no discourse other than what Xi Jinping says. That, I think, would be a very tragic misreading. Even as a system becomes far more autocratic, it is still a remarkably varied, lively society with 1.4 billion voices, all of whom cannot agree on any one single issue.
And even as we see the Party play a more dominant role in shaping, restricting, and steering the discourse ecosystem, diversity still exists. So in that sense, I think [understanding Chinese discourse is] more open now. I think it's less open [than it might seem] because if anyone wants to dip their toes into a popular WeChat account, or they find an article that Interpret project translates, you have to be very aware of the context within which that article comes out.
As Ryan [Hass] from Brookings said, these outputs from the ecosystem are situated in the middle of a contextualized conversation. If an alien from Mars turns on Tucker Carlson at the 24 minute mark and they just analyze that one minute without knowing who Tucker Carlson is, where he sits in the ecosystem, what the first 23 minutes said, and also have some sort of tactile sense for the language and logic of modern American political discourse, you're gonna have a fairly distorted, wacky view of what you've just witnessed. And you can't understand information ecosystems in China without understanding its political infrastructure, which plays a role in how discourse emerges and is shaped.
We need to understand that there are a lot of very important voices in China that demand to be heard, even as it becomes more dictatorial. But on the other hand, we need some situational awareness to not over or under interpret what any single document or article means.
If you know someone from Mars pops on Tucker Carlson at the 24 minute mark and they just analyze that one minute without knowing who Tucker Carlson is, where he sits in the ecosystem, what the first 23 minutes said, and also have some sort of tactile sense for the language and logic of modern American political discourse, you're gonna have a fairly distorted, wacky view of what you've just witnessed. And you can't understand information ecosystems in China without understanding its political infrastructure, which plays a role in how discourse emerges and is shaped.
Tanner Greer: How do you do that? Nadège, when you write your reports, how are you able to assess and situate the various voices and judge how authoritative they are?
Nadège Rolland: That is, I think, the trickiest question. So I principally work around the core circle that is the official discourse. To me it's like – and I'm going to be a little bit blasphemous here – but what the Party says to itself is sort of a sanctified scripture. Sometimes it can be elusive or vague. It has some unique vocabulary. And if you don't know what this vocabulary means or that imagery is about, then you cannot really understand what they are saying.
And so I pay attention to the cohort of priests who are doing the exegesis. Usually [they are] establishment intellectuals [who] are members of research centers that are attached either to ministries or agencies of the Party, or even [at times] to universities. They are free to think as they will–but within certain limits. But because they are inside of the system, they know how to interpret the vague admonitions or terminology that the Party uses in official documents. Sometimes [they] even try to put some flesh around the bone that the Party throws at them.
I want to hear things that are not meant for me to hear. I'm casting my net very wide. And when I do this, I end up with loads of documentation. Some of them are really repetitive and empty. Others are little nuggets – I call them my little nuggets because it's like sifting for sand and rocks and pebbles. And then you have that little one that is very shiny and that illuminates the whole system. Once I find one [nugget] then I look for others that radiate around this one. That is how I do it.
To me it's like – and I'm going to be a little bit blasphemous here – what the Party says to itself is sort of a sanctified scripture. Sometimes it can be elusive or vague. It has some unique vocabulary. And if you don't know what this vocabulary means or that imagery is about, then you cannot really understand what they are saying. So I pay attention to the cohort of priests who are doing the exegesis.
Tanner Greer: What would you say to somebody who says, “Well, okay, you found some intellectual who wrote that thing or this thing, but that doesn't mean anything. If Jude Blanchette writes a thing on China, that doesn't mean Biden is implementing Blanchette’s ideas.” What is your response to that?
Nadège Rolland: I'm getting at this question not by asking “is this what Xi Jinping thinks?” and therefore this is the truth. Instead I come at the question by asking: “What is this? What is the debate about? What are the ideas that are bubbling to the surface?” And if a very obscure scholar from the University of Chengdu is telling me what this is what it's about, then I pay attention to what this person has to say. [It doesn't matter] whether this scholar from Chengdu is listened to by Xi Jinping, because what I want to understand is what a question like, “what is the Belt and Road from a Chinese perspective?,” or “how those scholars see the emerging world order?”
By doing this with 50, 60, 100 papers, you [start to] see that there are themes that are very common. There are terminologies that [are common] also, and it gives you an idea of the direction [of the discourse].
Tanner Greer: David Ownby, you kind of come at it from a very different perspective. Could you kind of outline your approach?
David Ownby: Yes. I mean, there are similarities and differences [between my approach and Nadège’s]. The big difference is I do not come from a policy background, so I'm not guided by the United State’s concerns or strategic concerns. And I don't get the impression that most of the Chinese that I read are particularly connected with policy either.
I'm trying to just get a sense of what Chinese intellectual discourse is as an interested reader. What I've tried to do is locate the rough equivalent of this kind of thing in China, and it's a very rough equivalent because the ecosystem's not the same. And then I go back to those same sources over and over again to see who's talking about what.
Most of the people I read don't mention Xi Jinping. His name does not come up, [or] very rarely comes up. A good example of this is a guy I'm working with to translate a book [that is] coming out this year. His name is Yao Yang, and he is the head of the School of National Development at Peking University, which has been described as the Chinese government's “number one think tank.”
He's a very mainstream economist who over the course of the last few years has developed interest in Confucianism. He believes that Confucianism is a set of ideas that can save China and save the West as well. He's deeply concerned about the crisis of democracy in the Western world and thinks that if we became more Confucian, we would get a sense of why merit and hierarchy matter.
Over the course of the last five years or so, he's developed this big intellectual program based on this. And he's collaborated with younger scholars who are actually experts in Confucianism to write very long articles showing how Confucianism can compete with liberalism and how Confucianism can solve the common prosperity problem. As crazy as it sounds, he is actually a good writer and a good thinker, and is worth reading.
But an example of what you're talking about, where these fears interact, occurred on July 2nd, 2021. The day after the big hundred-year birthday celebration of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, he published in the Peking Cultural Review–a mainstream, quite reputable journal–an article saying that China should sinicize Marxism via Confucianism. The article did not mention Xi Jinping. This has to be resistance of some sort because Xi Jinping and the Party had not been talking about that. They'd been talking about sinicization of Marxism for weeks and months leading up to the birthday party. And they didn't talk about [Confucianism] at all.
He didn't say, “In your face Xi Jinping! You're wrong!” He just put out his 10,000 word manifesto and let it go at that. And I talked to him once and he said, "Yeah, I'm pretty sure Xi saw that. I was proud to know that he knew."
I don't really know how to describe what this is in terms of a functioning intellectual ecology.
To Translate Is Not To Interpret
Jude Blanchette: I think it's important for the general audience who doesn’t read Chinese to understand just how much finger-tipping on the scale there can be when you've got a scarcity of resources in translation. Anyone's choice of what to translate as a very subjective choice. And I see this used and misused on all sides. You'll see people who will unearth a given document in isolation and translate it because they want to support [a certain] narrative about China.
You know the time when the only sources you had were authoritative sources and you didn't have a marketized media environment, with first Weibo, and now WeChat, as well as many other platforms, meant that the problems you were solving were in part defined by the scarcity of resources.
We're trying to solve a different problem now. This problem is that, even in the Xi Jinping era, we have a ton of voices out there [producing] content. So we now [have] a scarcity problem of using subjective judgment to make these specific choices about what to translate – which will have a political effect on the discourse here. And you know, I see some of my colleagues in the back who work on this with me. There is not a science for this. But we have to make some judgment calls here. And my judgment ain't perfect. I celebrate this trend of translation, but I think we need to understand its limitations.
Nadège Roland: It's not just about the translation. I mean, it's not just about understanding the meaning of the words, it's understanding the subtext and what it alludes to. I say this as a foreigner who has lived in the US for eight years. [Rolland is originally from France]. There are still some cultural references that I don't get. So that tells you how complicated it is. And the Chinese language has a lot of fixed expressions where if you haven't learned them you cannot understand the subtext or the reference. So it's not just the language, it's also all the cultural historical context that goes with it.
David Ownby: Oh, I agree completely. If you run across anything that's even slightly meaty, you have to read five texts about the same thing so you know what they're talking about. I'm completely humble about what I wind up understanding.
Tanner Greer: Can I ask David—from just a really practical perspective: if you come across something you don't know, how do you pick those five things to read? What is your process?
David Ownby: Well, the internet is what makes it possible. You can just Google whatever, just follow the rabbit hole. If you put in the effort and you just keep at it, you can usually construct a preliminary database of a few pieces and read those or have your deep read them for you and get a sense of what's out there. So that's the way I work.
Are We “Chewing Rhinoceros Sausage?”
Tanner Greer: Let me present you with a quote. This is a famous passage by a Sinologist named Simon Leys. He was trying to describe what he thought were the main difficulties of doing this kind of interpretive work in the nineties. So I am curious whether you feel like this still describes the skills needed or if things have changed [since Lays’ heyday]. Quote:
The analyst who wishes to gather information through such a process [reading party documents] must negotiate three hurdles of thickening thorniness.
First, he needs to have a fluent command of the Chinese language….
Secondly, in the course of his exhaustive surveys of Chinese official documentation, the analysts must absorb industrial quantities of the most indigestible stuff. Reading communist literature is akin to munching on rhinoceros sausage, or to swallowing sawdust by the bucketfull… with the eye of an eagle that can spot a lone rabbit in the middle of a desert, he must scan the arid wastes of the small print in the pages of the People’s Daily, and pounce upon those rare items of significance that lie buried under mountains of clichés….
Thirdly—and this is his greatest challenge—he must crack the code of the Communist political jargon and translate into ordinary speech this secret language full of symbols, riddles, cryptograms, hints, traps, dark allusions, and red herrings.
Is this the same challenge it was then? Or is a different skill set needed to “crack the code” today?
Nadège Rolland: I used [this quote] in the introduction to China's Vision of a New World Order because at that time it described how I felt. I thought, yeah, it really is like rhino sausage. Plus I like Lays’ penmanship. It is very witty.
But I think [reading Chinese sources] may be a bit different today for the reasons that everybody has explained here. Back then you only had this or that source, just a few sources you could look into and try to understand. Now I think it is the opposite problem: You have a plethora of sources and not everything is good, but you need to spend a lot of time reading just to decide whether it is good or not, and [whether what you are reading] is just a repetition of what you will find in the China Daily [or if it something else].
Jude Blanchette: Well, I hate [the quote] for very specific reasons. It is the negation of my entire spirit on why we are doing this. It is both self-congratulatory–because he is basically saying, “I have cracked the code, I consume prodigious amounts, industrial amounts of this rhinoceros sausage and sawdust”– and it is orientalizing.
Having read my fair share of Party documents, I can say this: if I really thought it was sawdust, I would find a different career! I think if you don't find it interesting to engage with elite level authoritative discourse, to try to understand the message that is being put out, do something different!
The most memorable thing about the quote is not the insights, for I don't think there are many. It is his turn of phrase. Take away the rhino sausage and sawdust and you are left with a very banal comment. China does not write in some, some secretive language or code because that would be a very stupid way to run a political system.
Is there a certain type of vocabulary that cadres are familiar with? Of course. But by the way, if an alien comes down and reads a speech by a US politician they will find it filled with platitudes and banalities about freedom, greatness, and so on. [Just like in American rhetoric] there's a message being communicated that you have to understand. But it is not some unbreakable code.
The way I think about Chinese politics is by taking any phrase anyone uses about Chinese politics and translating it into a comment about America. That’s why, for example, I hate the idea of there being a “China expert.” There is no “America expert.” It is a meaningless, ridiculous thing to say. Do I know about traffic patterns in third tier cities? No. Do I know about China's nuclear modernization program? No.
I think that's what unites everyone here. If we thought that this is such an unbreakable set of hieroglyphics where you needed a Rosetta stone, and we are the Rosetta Stone–well, I think that kind of defeats the entire purpose of this. We should all be engaged in this endeavor together.
And one final thing I'll say is it is oftentimes the person who comes to this with fresh eyes, who notices the thing that our little priesthood misses. It could be someone who's a functional expert on demographics in Russia. Who looks at a document and goes, “that's interesting for what it doesn't say.” That [is something] I would [otherwise] have no idea about. The whole idea of unlocking this to the masses is that this should be an all-eyes problem.
Tanner Greer: Thank you. I'm gonna break out of the moderator role and just add a comment because I really appreciate what you said. That is kind of the entire purpose of what we're doing.
The analogy that makes the most sense to me goes like this. Let us say you were to read Defense Department documents. They are full of these like acronyms and these very technical words for weapon systems and so on. You could look at that and say, “oh, that's a magic code!” Yes, sure, but it's a magic code that a 19 year old Marine must be able to understand. The Communist Party of China has 90 million members. If Mr. Wang in rural Gansu can understand the directives that he is receiving then it is not something that is designed for only a secret few to understand.
David Ownby: So it's more like a scripture. It's ritualized. There's not a secret code. It's just a language that you learned as part of the group.
Jude Blanchette: I think the [analogy] of biblical scripture is helpful. If you take a biblical passage, there is no overt meaning absent from the social ritualistic discussion and debate of that passage. So when the work report comes out from the 20th Party Congress and there's the immediate hot takes of what it means–and I admit we get into this at CSIS–I always sort of do caution.
I agree with you, Tanner. It would be a very weird way to run a political system if everything was so inscrutable that every, you know, of the 95 million Communist party members, three of them kind of knew what the heck was going on.
David Ownby: There is also a sort of code switching going on too. I remember once I translated a political scientist named Yuan Peng, who's a specialist on US relations and also a high official.
I had translated several of his pieces on foreign policy and on what COVIDwas going to mean to the world order. He writes elegantly. And then he wrote this thing as the head of his Institute about national security, and it was, to me, almost incomprehensible. I don't read Party documents, but I did it just to train myself and to illustrate the different voices in which people wind up writing for different purposes. The difference in the language he employed was very striking.
You could look at that and say, “oh, that's a magic code!” Yes, sure, but it's a magic code that a 19 year old Marines can understand. The Communist Party of China has 90 million members. If Mr. Wang in rural Gansu can understand the directives that he is receiving then it is not something that is designed for only a secret few to understand.
Advice for the Budding China Watcher
Tanner Greer: For the young people here in the audience who would like to be able to read these documents, translate these documents, become better thinkers about China, be it through reading, translating, or finding original sources, what would your advice to them be?
Jude Blanchette: Go into a different field! [Laughter].
I think there's a fetishization of language competency. It is extremely important if you wanna be a translator, obviously. But if you want to be an interpreter I would say just focusing on your language skill without building a broader sort of ecosystem of understanding from which you can contextualize [is not enough].
I can only think about China's political system in a comparative sense. So I had learned a lot about Xi Jinping and about where the Party is going by reading Stephen Kotkin’s biographies of Stalin. Is it a perfect analogy? No, you need to know the limitations of it. But I find there are elements which ring true to me. I think reading outside of China is a really helpful way to go.
And then I think the other challenge we have now is we have a lot of “China experts” who then add on another competency like tech. I think we probably need more tech people who then learn about China.
I think one of the other things I would say is we're beyond the Pierre Ryckmans or Simon Leys era of a swashbuckling generalist who can just plop down on a podium and just rattle off on everything about China. It's probably time to sort of build out some hard, narrow, deep expertise in an area, and then add on a China element to it.
David Ownby: When you start to translate, you often think if you get every word right, you'll get the document right at the start. That's simply not true. The thing about translating is you have to know what the author means to say, which sounds obvious, but it's actually one of the hardest things.
Nadège Rolland: Yes. When I started learning Chinese 30 years ago our teachers were telling us, “you know, just the language is not enough. Go and do an MBA or do something useful.” I think what is common to the [answers that the] three of us [have given] is that we see language as just one key. But you need to have other things going with it to understand the layers, to understand the specifics. I personally feel like I constantly need to go back to classical Chinese philosophy sometimes, or even that critical juncture of the end of the 19th century, to understand some of the concepts that are being reinvested in by the party state now. It is necessary to try to understand where these ideas come from–even though it's not a 1:1 application of what once was that is now applied today.
How Do Chinese “America Watchers” Interpret America?
Audience Member:. So I'm Chinese myself and I came here kind curious to see, you know, what the West is doing to try to understand my country. I guess my question is whether you have an understanding of how the Chinese are trying to decipher the West. Now we know there is a language asymmetry in ability where – at least in academia – Chinese researchers all speak English. They're reading directly from American papers, but Americans, or Westerners, often don't do the same. And I'm wondering if in the field of politics or strategy, [you] think Chinese have similar [translation] initiatives [like CST]. Are they trying to translate Western primary sources and documents for their understanding of the world?
David Ownby: China has a huge translation industry, which I assume you know. You can see this very much in the citations when people write about the United States a vast amount, and they're very well informed, as you just said. It’s stunning that the Chinese know so much more about the United States than the Americans know about China.
It's a strategic disadvantage, which I think, is worrying to some degree. I'm always stunned. [For example,] I like the debate on Black Lives Matter within China. These are not American specialists. These are just Chinese intellectuals who are engaged with the world, who make it a point to read broadly.
Jude Blanchette: So in terms of the quantity, the translations are extraordinary.You know, [CSIS] just did a report on the war game in Taiwan, and within 24 hours, that large chunks of that report were on the Chinese internet.
What I would say though is that when you read it [their translations and commentary on them] you realize how there still are some pretty significant gaps in understanding, or in their interpretation of what is happening here. And of course, their interpretation is affected by their own political ecosystem. So if you're working on US-China relations at a Chinese university, it's not an apolitical field where you can say whatever the heck you want. But I do feel like it highlights the point of how mere translation is not the same as interpretation.
Tanner Greer: Plus there's an interesting problem of why someone looks abroad for something.
To give you an American example first: There are many, many American discussions about China that are not really about China. They're actually about the United States. I noticed this back when I was just a journalist. [One thing] I wrote about was American conservatism and its internecine debates. China is a big part of those debates. [Participants in those debates] are very not interested in China itself, though. They're interested in what China means for their [domestic] political program. Or what China might represent as a cautionary example, as a villain, as a model to aspire to or to avoid.
A lot of Chinese social commentary on America is doing the same thing. You can comment far more freely about America than you can about China [inside China’s borders]. One of the reasons you might have a debate about Black Lives Matters is because you cannot have quite as open a debate about sensitive issues in China. But debates on America can serve as a sort of proxy for what many of these intellectuals and commentators really care about: their own society.
FIN.