Zheng Ge: Why Does America Keep Misreading China?A Chinese scholar watches America’s China watchers—and turns the critique inward.
I recently read Professor Zheng Ge’s latest book review, also a set of reflections on David M. McCourt’s The End of Engagement. I found this exercise in “watching America’s China watchers from China” particularly interesting and wanted to introduce readers to a Chinese scholar’s observations on how knowledge about China is produced in the US. Zheng is a professor at KoGuan Law School of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. he earned his Doctor of Laws degree at PKU in 1998 and subsequently remained as a faculty member. He was a visiting scholar between 2000 and 2004 at the University of Toronto in Canada, as well as at the University of Michigan, Duke University, and Columbia University. From January 2004 to January 2014, he taught at the University of Hong Kong's Faculty of Law. This Jan, I had the honor of translating his article, “When Wars of Aggression Become 'Law Enforcement': The Imperial Logic of American Counterinsurgency Law.”当侵略战争成为“执法行动”：美国平叛法的帝国逻辑 to English
Zheng’s observation is that rather than an expert community shaping policy, a policy framework comes first, and those in power then cherry-pick whatever serves their needs. This is also a form of path dependence in knowledge production in which, from the moment knowledge is produced, it no longer belongs exclusively to its author but becomes available to anyone seeking to use it. Both the earlier “engagement” camp and today’s “competition” camp operate within frameworks constructed by their respective communities. Yet replacing one framework with another is not fundamentally a matter of the community evolving. Instead, it depends on changes in the structure of power, followed by the construction of a new framework from the ground up. For Zheng, the problem in America’s understanding of China is not simply a question of whether a particular framework is right or wrong. The problem is in the mechanism that produces these frameworks; it inevitably compresses a complex subject into a single narrative, then uses jobs, funding, and prestige to reward those who disseminate that narrative and penalize those who question it. Optimism and pessimism about China may appear to be polar opposites, but both involve fitting empirical evidence about what China actually is into an a priori framework of what China ought to be. Whatever the prevailing framework, the American model of knowledge production about China is now gradually unraveling. Zheng cites Rush Doshi’s article “America Is Losing the Ability to Train Tomorrow’s China Experts” as the number of American students in China declines, younger Americans have fewer opportunities to experience life there firsthand. They become increasingly dependent on congressional hearings, intelligence summaries, and translated policy documents prepared for them by others. (As someone who provides those kinds of translations, I know the limits. I can point out particular combinations of policy terms, but policy documents often contain nuances that are easier to grasp than to explain. Consider the difference between “implementing a more proactive fiscal policy with precision and effectiveness” and simply “implementing more proactive policies.” For readers who do not consult the Chinese original, the difference in emphasis can be difficult to discern.) Zheng argues that competition within America’s China-watching community has relegated knowledge grounded in the closest contact with China to the lowest position in its hierarchy. Meanwhile, the shortage of emerging talent leaves fewer people to carry that knowledge forward. The knowledge underpinning U.S.-China policy is thus subject to a structural process of cherry-picking to support an existing policy direction. Incentive structures and generational turnover then entrench it, while the absence of firsthand experience in China deprives the resulting biases of a crucial corrective. Some readers of this newsletter are part of the US China-watching community whose work I regularly read and from which I have learned a lot. I translate this essay not to judge that diverse community, but to share how it looks from a Chinese scholar’s perspective. Zheng’s judgments are open to debate. What makes it worth sharing, to my mind, is that he also turns the mirror toward China. In his view, the book’s greatest value for China lies in the cautionary tale it offers about China’s own mechanisms for producing knowledge about the US. China, too, tends to substitute secondhand narratives for firsthand research. It must also guard against a mirror-image form of self-Orientalism that treats America’s present as China’s future. When discussing the construction of an "autonomous knowledge system" (自主知识体系), China should move beyond the urge to coin new terms and instead establish practices of knowledge production that can withstand scrutiny. Inside China is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Why Does America Keep Misreading China?On David McCourt’s The End of EngagementZheng Ge Over the past twelve months, China and the United States have staged a drama that has unfolded at a dizzying pace. On October 9, 2025, China’s Ministry of Commerce issued six announcements in succession, bringing key links in the rare-earth supply chain—from ore to finished products—under export licensing requirements. Announcement No. 61 extended the scope of these controls beyond China’s borders: any product containing more than one part per thousand of Chinese rare-earth content, regardless of where it was manufactured or to whom it would ultimately be sold, would first require a license from China. A week later, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent issued a stern warning at a press conference, declaring that if China proved to be an unreliable partner, the entire world would decouple from it. Five days before that, Trump had announced on social media that he would impose an additional 100 percent tariff on Chinese goods beginning November 1. The threats were thunderous. But what happened next? On October 17, Trump himself reversed course in an interview, acknowledging that a 100 percent tariff was unsustainable. Just seven days had passed between the threat and its retraction. Another nine days later, Bessent revealed his own hand: the tariff threat had always been a negotiating tool, and the threatened outcome had now been avoided. If you followed these headlines merely for their spectacle, you might take them as bluffing at the negotiating table—Trump’s version of the art of the deal. But pull the camera back, and a more unsettling fact comes into view: American decision-makers lacked even a basic assessment of the cards China held and the consequences of playing them. The U.S. Geological Survey’s figures were there for anyone to see: 83.7 percent of American rare-earth imports came from China, while dependence on China for heavy rare earths reached 97 percent. The International Energy Agency’s 2026 report stated clearly that, in 2024, China accounted for 91 percent of global refined rare-earth output used in magnets and 94 percent of sintered permanent-magnet production. These were public figures, not intelligence secrets. A country possessing this information should not have been surprised when China played its rare-earth card. Yet the United States was surprised—and kept making the same mistake. When the first round of controls took effect in April 2025, China’s rare-earth permanent-magnet exports to the United States fell from approximately 600 tonnes in March to 246 tonnes in April, then to just 46 tonnes in May. Ford’s Chicago plant shut down for a week. Six months later, Washington was still erupting in anger over the same kind of development. What followed looked even more like a carefully scripted drama of reversals. On October 30, 2025, the two countries’ leaders met on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Gyeongju, South Korea, and announced a trade truce. In May 2026, Trump flew to Beijing. On September 23, Xi Jinping arrived in Washington for a state visit—the first state visit to the United States by a Chinese leader in eleven years—with Trump personally greeting him on the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base. The two sides announced a further two-month extension of the truce. China pledged to purchase more American soybeans and postponed the implementation of its new rare-earth export controls until January 10, 2027. Treasury Secretary Bessent told Fox News that he had discussed with Vice Premier He Lifeng whether they could reach a bigger deal rather than a collection of small, piecemeal arrangements. A man who had called for decoupling a year earlier was now talking about a bigger deal. On the surface, this was diplomatic theater. At a deeper level, it was a forced recalibration after repeated collisions between perception and reality. Figure 1: Major events in the China–U.S. rare-earth and tariff confrontation, 2025–2026 (compiled from public reporting) This brings us to the question this article seeks to address: What kind of knowledge underpins American policy toward China? If that knowledge is systematically distorted, what mechanisms produce the distortion? David McCourt, a sociologist at the University of California, Davis, has published a new book that addresses precisely this question. Its title is The End of Engagement: America’s China and Russia Experts and U.S. Strategy Since 1989, published by Oxford University Press in September 2024. The book is not about China or Russia themselves. It is about where the knowledge informing American policy toward China and Russia is produced. A review in Foreign Affairs captured its conclusion particularly well: American policy too often swings between the extremes of optimism and pessimism, with swings far larger than changes in the target countries’ behavior can explain. That observation cuts through an obscuring layer: if policy responds to reality, fluctuations in reality and fluctuations in policy should broadly move together. What we see instead are small provocations triggering major shifts, and major facts eliciting slow responses. The distortion lies not at the point of input, but in the processing machinery in between. After reading this book, one discovers that the astonishing reversals and misjudgments in today’s China–U.S. contest were already foreshadowed in its pages. A Book That Does Not Study China, Yet Does So Much to Explain the China QuestionMcCourt’s starting point is straightforward. After the Cold War, the United States pursued engagement with both Russia and China, believing that incorporating these countries into the world market and the American-led international order would, in time, make them more like the West. The first two chapters trace this history clearly. After 1989, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton continued engagement with China despite domestic opposition. Annual debates over most-favored-nation status recurred throughout the 1990s, until legislation granting permanent normal trade relations in 2000 and China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 brought engagement to its high point. In 2005, Robert Zoellick’s call for China to become a “responsible stakeholder” articulated the policy’s expectations most clearly: China’s rise was welcome, provided it rose in accordance with the role the United States had assigned it. Russia followed much the same script, joining the Group of Seven in 1998 and the WTO in 2012. By the late 2010s, this optimism was dead. Obama announced the pivot to Asia in 2011; Trump’s first National Security Strategy designated China a strategic competitor in 2017; and the trade war began in 2018. The age of engagement had ended. The conventional explanation attributes this transition to changes in the target countries’ behavior: China had become more assertive, and Putin more aggressive. McCourt does not deny these external factors. But he raises a question that almost every analysis overlooks: What role did America’s own expert communities play in the transition? Why did it occur at that particular moment, and why did it move in that particular direction? To investigate, he conducted 170 semi-structured interviews, including 117 with China experts and 53 with Russia experts, between 2016 and 2023. His interviewees ranged from retired diplomats and former National Security Council officials to think-tank researchers and university professors. Of the ten U.S. ambassadors to Russia who had served since 1991, he interviewed six. The interviews employed snowball sampling and abductive coding, and all interviewees were identified by anonymous numbers. He also analyzed several prominent open letters published in The Washington Post, Politico, and other media outlets in 2019 and 2020. These included the July 2019 letter “China Is Not an Enemy,” drafted by five figures—M. Taylor Fravel of MIT, former ambassador to China J. Stapleton Roy, Michael Swaine of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, former Assistant Secretary of State Susan Thornton, and Ezra Vogel of Harvard—and signed by nearly one hundred people, as well as the backlash it provoked. McCourt examined the composition of more than ninety signatories one by one: Richard Bush and Cheng Li of the Brookings Institution, David Lampton of Johns Hopkins University, Douglas H. Paal of Carnegie, and C. Fred Bergsten and Nicholas Lardy of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The list was almost a roll call of the engagement era. The letter’s reception was itself a footnote to the book’s argument: its signatories sought to keep the engagement framework alive, only to discover that they had already been pushed beyond the boundaries of the mainstream. Ezra Vogel died a year after the letter appeared. He represented an era that still believed understanding China had to begin with understanding Chinese society. David McCourt is a sociologist working from a constructivist perspective. His concern is not whether China or the United States is more justified, but how threats are socially constructed. With sociology’s scalpel, he opens the black box of the foreign-policy knowledge community. The book’s central argument can be summarized through a contrast. Policy toward China underwent a paradigm shift: engagement, the overarching framework that had dominated for thirty years, was uprooted and replaced by strategic competition. Policy toward Russia, by contrast, stagnated: no new framework replaced the old one; relations gradually froze over. Why did the failure of engagement produce a revolution in one case, but merely an unfinished project in the other? McCourt’s answer is that the difference lay not in what Moscow and Beijing did, but in the internal structures of the two expert communities. China’s size, the depth of trade relations, and the number of academic positions helped create an American China-studies community large enough, sufficiently stratified, and internally competitive enough to generate a paradigm revolution. The Russia-studies community, by contrast, continued to shrink after the Cold War. Funding declined, positions disappeared, and the community could not even muster the scale needed to launch a revolution. The Russian half of the story also deserves close attention because it serves as the control group in this natural experiment. McCourt divides American Russia experts into two camps. One is the “Russia we want” camp, which advocates containing and transforming Putin’s regime. Its representative figures include Alexander Vershbow, Daniel Fried, Celeste Wallander, and Michael McFaul. The other is the “Russia we have” camp, which advocates bargaining with Russia as it actually exists. Its representatives include Thomas Graham, Rose Gottemoeller, Fiona Hill, and Matthew Rojansky. The former is more ideological; the latter places greater weight on analytical restraint and nuance. The two camps argued for more than a decade, yet neither eliminated the other. Policy muddled along between resets and sanctions until the war in 2022 finally froze it in place. Without the support of a sufficiently large community, even disagreement could persist only at low intensity. This control group neatly demonstrates the book’s central theme: the energy driving policy change comes from within the community, not from the country being studied. Figure 2: A comparison of America’s two expert communities (drawn from McCourt’s argument) The book is particularly adept at dissecting the concept of engagement. McCourt argues that engagement has three faces. As a policy, it is a set of concrete arrangements, ranging from granting China most-favored-nation status and supporting its WTO accession to establishing various dialogue mechanisms. As a framework, it is a cognitive schema for understanding China, whose core belief is that economic interdependence will bring political convergence. As a community, it is a group of people who use that belief to determine who belongs and who is marginal, who is qualified to enter the National Security Council and who can only write reports that nobody reads. The three faces are mutually constitutive. Policies can be adjusted, but frameworks are difficult to loosen because they are anchored in people’s careers. For an expert who obtained tenure, a think-tank position, and government appointments through the engagement framework, overturning that framework amounts to repudiating the first half of their professional life. That is why engagement could not simply die of old age: its death required a coup. Figure 3: McCourt’s dissection of the concept of “engagement” (drawn from the book) That coup occurred after 2016. Trump’s election brought hard-liners who had long stood at the community’s margins into the centers of power. McCourt carefully traces their routes to the top: they did not persuade the mainstream with better evidence; they bypassed it and occupied the positions directly. One of the book’s most dispassionate—and most brutal—conclusions is its policy-world confirmation of the famous observation associated with Kuhn and Planck: paradigms change not through persuasion, but through the replacement of people. The older generation retires with its frameworks, while new frameworks enter the establishment with new people. Knowledge here is not a truth-seeking activity independent of power, but a by-product of the distribution of power. McCourt also devises an ingenious generational analysis. In his interviews, he asks everyone the same question: When did you first visit China or Russia? The answers reveal a strong relationship between an expert’s attitude toward China and the period in which they first experienced the country. Those who arrived in China in the late 1970s and early 1980s had seen a poor country beginning to open up, and developed an almost religious faith in engagement. The generation that came of age after the 1990s first encountered a China already rising and self-confident, and was naturally skeptical of the narrative of political transformation. No genuine debate took place between the generations. What happened was simply a replacement of the people occupying the positions. In retrospect, the so-called breakdown of consensus often amounted to little more than a different set of license plates in the parking lot. How Taking a Hard Line Became Good BusinessA paradigm shift occurred. But why did it move toward greater confrontation rather than in some other direction? This is the most explanatory part of McCourt’s book. He identifies three mechanisms. The first is polarization. The American China-studies community had long been divided between “dragon slayers” and “panda huggers.” The nicknames themselves are revealing: one side imagines itself as heroic warriors slaying an evil dragon, while the other is mocked as sentimental people embracing a panda. Both labels emerge from cartoon-like imagery rather than empirical research into Chinese society. This divide, which cannot be neatly mapped onto either party or institutional affiliation, was fully activated by the broader political polarization of the 2010s. When society as a whole becomes polarized, the middle ground becomes an intellectual no-man’s-land. One interviewee’s account is especially telling: in Washington today, anything you say about China from a middle-ground position will be attacked by both sides. Moderate, qualified voices were not refuted; they lost their place in the discussion. The corrective mechanisms a knowledge community ought to possess depend on dissenters remaining inside the arena. Once dissenters have been collectively driven out, all that remains inside is a chorus. The second mechanism is competition for professional status—the most subtle and consequential mechanism of all. McCourt finds a hidden hierarchy within the community: experts with security backgrounds rank above those with economic backgrounds, who in turn rank above area-studies specialists with extensive experience living in China and command of its language and culture. In other words, the more distant the knowledge is from China, the higher its status; the closer it is to China, the more its objectivity—and even its loyalty—is questioned. Every place in this hierarchy is occupied by people with real names. At the area-studies level are Kenneth Lieberthal, David Lampton, Susan Shirk, and Michel Oksenberg, together with observers such as Orville Schell, who brings a background in the humanities. What they have in common is that substantial portions of their careers were spent doing fieldwork in China. One interviewee from the Trump camp referred to them sarcastically, saying that forty years of American engagement with China had followed the expert advice of precisely these people—Lieberthal, Winston Lord, Stapleton Roy, and Schell—who had supplied the intellectual foundations of successive administrations’ engagement policies toward China. At the economic level are Bergsten and Lardy of the Peterson Institute, David Dollar of Brookings, and Yukon Huang of Carnegie. They understand China’s industries and financial system, but do not make threats their professional stock-in-trade. At the security level are Michael Pillsbury, Newt Gingrich, and Peter Navarro, author of Death by China. Pillsbury’s The Hundred-Year Marathon reads Chinese strategic history as a century-long deception, and the book was almost standard issue in Trump’s circle. One interviewed expert described the new fashion with penetrating sharpness: people who had previously worked on the Middle East, Russia, or international-relations theory, and had never studied China, were now switching fields because China had suddenly become the “flavor of the month.” Former Soviet and Cold War specialists were now all doing China—Michael McFaul, Hal Brands, Thomas Wright—people who had scarcely met a handful of Chinese people in their lives. “Flavor of the month” is a cutting phrase, but an accurate one: when the hierarchy was reordered, experience in China became a liability. At the moment of paradigm change, this hierarchy performed a selection function: the knowledge elevated to the highest level was securitized knowledge of China—the kind that treats China first and foremost as a threat. For a young scholar seeking to advance quickly in the field, the most rational career strategy was not to learn Chinese and conduct fieldwork in China, but to study China’s military modernization and cyber capabilities. Taking a hard line thus became good business. Figure 4: The status hierarchy within America’s China-studies community (drawn from McCourt’s argument) The third mechanism is personalization. McCourt devotes two chapters to personal relationships and grievances. During Trump’s first term, Matt Pottinger’s ascendancy in China policy was inseparable from the personal experiences behind his hard-line stance. He had worked as a China correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, spending the early part of his career in its Beijing bureau. That experience shaped his profound distrust of China’s political system. He later put down his pen and joined the Marine Corps, eventually becoming deputy national security adviser and one of the most important architects of the White House’s hard-line approach to China. One detail recorded in the book is particularly symbolic: when a senior China expert submitted a policy report, Pottinger pushed it aside without even reading it. Personal distrust thus overrode the community’s accumulated knowledge. Navarro’s rise is even more revealing. This economist from the University of California, Irvine, had no standing in mainstream economics, and professional circles generally regarded his Death by China as alarmist. According to Josh Rogin’s account in Chaos Under Heaven, Jared Kushner discovered Navarro while searching Amazon for books about China and brought him into the campaign with a cold email. When citing this story, McCourt specifically notes that it may not be reliable. Yet the story circulated precisely because it captured something real: the selection criterion of the new paradigm was not recognition by the professional community, but compatibility with the boss’s instincts. The triumvirate of Trump, Navarro, and Robert Lighthizer thus tore a hole in America’s thirty-year free-trade consensus. An individual’s résumé became the underlying color of a national strategy. In Russia policy, meanwhile, Fiona Hill’s presence or absence directly determined whether policy traveled along the fast track of personalization or the slow track of bureaucracy. Changes in a knowledge community must ultimately be enacted through particular people, and particular people carry particular wounds, ambitions, and loyalties. Frameworks are abstract; the people who carry them are not. Together, these three mechanisms explain why, once the transition occurred, it went too far. The book offers a compelling analysis of unintended consequences. In 2018, Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner published their famous reckoning with China policy in Foreign Affairs, declaring engagement a failure. Both authors belonged to the Democratic establishment. Campbell later served as deputy secretary of state and Indo-Pacific coordinator in the Biden administration. Their intention in writing the article was to prepare the ground for a Democratic administration’s adjustment of China policy. It was an exercise in positioning: occupy the moral high ground of toughness toward China before the Republicans did, so as to avoid accusations of weakness in an election year. But the article’s actual effect was to give an even harder-line framework the appearance of bipartisan consensus, closing off any room for later recalibration. When the Biden administration genuinely wanted to ease tensions on certain issues, it discovered that its own article had already supplied the other side with ammunition. You intended to nudge the steering wheel, but ended up welding it in place. McCourt does not use the following term, so I will add it for him: this is path dependence in knowledge production—and path dependence with acceleration. Once a statement enters the public domain, it no longer belongs to its author. It belongs to everyone who wants to use it. |