Berkley Center

China can be difficult to understand. Analyses of China vary in their quality, pulled and pushed by two conflicting forces: on the one hand, accuracy and applicability, and on the other the struggle of making an insightful claim. Many studies tend to feature one (often the latter) and not the other; my own attempts over the past semester have reflected these paradigms as well. But I had not realized how to ameliorate this until a class I had just this past week.

As I approach the end of my first trip to China, I find myself reflecting back on the origins of my journey—not just my arrival and the first days, but before then, the weeks and years I spent in anticipation of it. This period of time is the culmination of an academic passion, a career interest, and, above all, a lifelong dream. In previous posts, I have spoken of my overarching goal to understand Chinese politics and how people interact with that system. I had plans, both grand and simple, to get the most out of my time in China; I have traveled back and forth across it, spent every day learning about it, and often just sat back to absorb it. All of this was to help improve my analytic skills.

And then, in one class, I was tasked with comparing two sociological studies of Chinese views on their future. One was a narrow-sighted, nearly neo-colonial manifesto masquerading as a statistical survey, and the other was a level-headed, if conditional, evaluation of a Chinese population sample. The former purported to discover what was, to Western eyes, “never seen before”; the latter explored questions that were frequently dealt with in analyses of China, seeking answers through data to ultimately yield a balanced but surprising perspective. This embodiment of the classic Chinese studies struggle struck me: on the one hand, a haphazardly bold assertion, and on the other a thorough procedural base of investigation. These studies, and all studies of China regardless of quality, are a gamble; they will not always be completely right, and claims may lose validity as reality shifts. But so long as they do not purport to be a universal truth, that is the nature of a claim.

There may be little that I can say with certainty about China. That China is an opaque and rapidly changing system has been a hard lesson for me, especially considering how seemingly apparent these characteristics are to anybody with even a cursory background in analyzing China. More than any analytic perspective, though, the most important thing I have learned about understanding China has been that neither trying to stuff China into a box, nor treating it as inscrutable mystery, will produce a meaningful insight. Paradoxically, one must do both: capture an image of China and put it in focus, but be mindful that it is not the whole picture, and will almost certainly change. There is no futility in this task. As long as they are formed diligently and thoroughly, these images piece together a narrative, and if the pieces are solid and incisive, the whole will be too. So this final post is as much a reflection as it is a promise: to keep my eyes open and put my neck out in drawing conclusions that are worth listening to.