{"id":10446,"date":"2018-01-06T19:01:50","date_gmt":"2018-01-06T09:01:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chinaheritage.net\/?page_id=10446"},"modified":"2025-09-03T18:46:33","modified_gmt":"2025-09-03T08:46:33","slug":"watching-china-watching","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/chinaheritage.net\/watching-china-watching\/","title":{"rendered":"Watching China Watching"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Watching China Watching<\/em><\/a>\u00a0we offer essays and reflections on studying the Chinese world and approaches to understanding the Chinese People’s Republic. Our method is underpinned by\u00a0New Sinology<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The men and women who taught us to engage with the Chinese world and to appreciate things Chinese in a holistic fashion were motivated and inspired by many things: their personal histories, a diverse range of interests, as well as a pressing necessity to watch (and to watch out for) China. For many of them, Chinese and non-Chinese alike (after all, some of the greatest China Watchers are from China), China was not a distant subject for study but an essential part of lived reality. Their insights were generally based not on some crude social science or anthropological approach to observing The Other, or the result of dissecting an object rich in possibility as part of some ambitious career trajectory. Their understanding was based as much on entanglement, fraught questioning, a spirit of self-discovery and personal enrichment as the result of a lifelong effort to approach what is in fact an all-encompassing cultural-political world from a broad humanistic perspective.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014 Albert Camus<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

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T\u014dng<\/em> also written \u901a, as in ‘Old China Hand’ \u4e2d\u570b\u901a, \u00a0a back-handed compliment<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We are interested in the professional China Watchers, a once nearly-defunct claque of people working in government for national political ends, journalists, academics, ne’er-do-wells, as well as the talented curious and literary dilettantes. In the ‘New Epoch’ of Chairman of Everything Xi Jinping, the long-overlooked, or underestimated, skills of being able to read, listen to and understand the bloviations of the Chinese party-state are, perhaps, in vogue once more.<\/p>\n

In producing Watching China Watching<\/em><\/a>\u00a0we also want to leave some material from the past for those who are engaged with the Chinese multiverse and who would watch, learn, imbue and develop their own approach to China and its world as part of their personal human struggle in what is a world of contentious ideas, ideological fabrications, conflicted interests and strained emotions.<\/p>\n

For more on the topic of \u2018The China Expert\u2019 \u4e2d\u570b\u901a, or \u2018Old China Hand\u2019, see my introduction to\u00a0Jao Tsung-I on \u901a t\u014dng<\/i> \u2014 \u9952\u5b97\u9824\u8207\u901a\u4eba<\/a>, China Heritage<\/i>, 23 June 2017.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Geremie R. Barm\u00e9
\nEditor, China Heritage<\/i>
\n5 January 2018<\/p>\n

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Watching China Watching\u00a0<\/b><\/h2>\n

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