Studying China in the Absence of Access: Rediscovering a Lost Art — Part 2, with Alice Miller and Joseph Fewsmith
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Hey Cynical listeners, I am very pleased to be able to bring you in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, SAIS, China Research Center, the second installment in a series of lectures titled Studying China in the Absence of Access, Rediscovering a Lost Art.

This series, which ran from September to November 2021, featured four eminent Pekingologists, or specialists in Chinese elite politics, Joseph Fusemath, Thomas Finger, Alice Miller, and Fred Tiwis.

The series is introduced by Andrew Mertha, who is George and Sadie Hyman Professor of China Studies and Director of the SAIS China Research Center. And each lecture includes moderated discussion with Andy. We'll be chatting with Andy and with some of the other speakers in future episodes of Seneca as well.

After this series, I'll also be sharing with you a second series of lectures titled Studying China from Elsewhere, which will include talks by Maria Repnikova, Mike Lampton, William Hurst, and Maggie Lewis, many of whom Cynical listeners will know from the program.

So today's talk features Alice Lyman Miller and Joe Fusmith, both absolute legends in the field. Andy will give a full introduction to both of them in just a second. And thank you so much to Andy and to Hosta Coleman of SAIS for making this possible. Let me also thank the University of Wisconsin's Center for East Asian Studies for making Seneca possible in 2025. Please enjoy the talk.

Hi, good afternoon. It is great to have everybody here. My name is Andrew Murtha. I'm the George and Sadie Hyman Professor of China Studies here at SAIS, and I'm also the Director of the SAIS China Global Research Center. And I am delighted to be able to invite all of you to the second installment of the China Methodology Workshop series, Relearning the Lost Arts of China Scholarship.

And before I introduce our speakers, I just want to thank all the people who have been just so instrumental in making all of this happen, both pre-production, post-production, and throughout the event itself. So I'd like to thank Gabrielle Rayner, Mo Alahi, Pedro Matias,

Eli Rostrum and Amanda Nepomuceno and of course, Hosta Coleman. And anybody else who I've left out, I do apologize, but this is the work of many. I am beyond delighted to introduce our two guests today.

I'm going to read their bios and try to do this as quickly as possible so that we don't lose any time. And the format will be, I will introduce the speakers, Dr. Miller will begin, and then Professor Fusmith will follow up. And then we'll see what kind of time we have left, whether or not I will moderate a brief discussion or whether we'll go straight to the Q&A.

Okay, Professor Joe Fusemith is Professor of International Relations and Political Science at the Boston University Pardee School.

He is the author or editor of eight books, including most recently The Logic and Limits of Political Reform in China. Others include China Since Tiananmen, China Today, China Tomorrow, Elite Politics in Contemporary China, Dilemmas of Reform in China, Political Conflict and Economic Debate, and Party, State, and Local Elites in Republican China, Merchant Organizations, and Politics in Shanghai.

He is one of the seven regular contributors to the China Leadership Monitor, a quarterly web publication analyzing current developments in China. And the format of the China Leadership Monitor has changed, but the older issues are online and are must-reads. Fisher-Fewer Smith travels to China regularly and is active in the Association for Haitian Studies and the American Political Science Association.

His articles have appeared in such journals as Asian Survey, Comparative Studies in Society and History, The China Journal, The China Quarterly, Current History, The Journal of Contemporary China, Problems of Communism, and Modern China. He's an associate at the John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies at Harvard University and the Party Center for the Study of the Longer Range Future at Boston University.

Professor Hugh Smith's areas of expertise include comparative politics as well as Chinese domestic politics and foreign policy.

I'm going to age all of us right now, but one of the most influential books I read the first semester of my graduate school experience in the doctoral program at Michigan was Dilemmas of Reform in China. It was very much a foundational text in my understanding of elite politics. Dr. Alice Lyman Miller is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and lecturer in East Asian Studies at Stanford.

Dr. Miller first joined the Hoover Institution in 1999 as a visiting fellow. She also served as senior lecturer in the Department of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California from 1999 to 2014.

Before coming to Stanford, Dr. Miller taught at the School of Advanced International Studies, an institution most of you know very, very well, at Johns Hopkins from 1980 to 2000. She was an associate professor of China Studies and for most of that period, the director of China Studies. So she also has left some very, very big shoes for me to fill.

She also held a joint appointment as adjunct associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins from 1996 to 1999, and as adjunct lecturer in the Department of Government at Georgetown University from 1996 to 1998.

From 1974 to 1990, Dr. Miller worked in the Central Intelligence Agency as a senior analyst in Chinese foreign policy and domestic politics, and as branch and division chief supervising analysis on China, North Korea, Indochina, and Soviet policy in East Asia. Dr. Miller has lived and worked in Taiwan, Japan, and of course, the People's Republic of China. Her research focuses on Chinese foreign policy and domestic politics and on international relations of Asia.

Since 2001, she has served as general editor and regular contributor to the China Leadership Monitor, which offers authoritative assessments of trends in Chinese leadership, politics, and policy to U.S. policymakers and the general public, and certainly the scholarly class. She was working on a new book tentatively entitled The Evolution of Chinese Grand Strategy, 1550 to the Present, which brings a historical perspective to bear on China's rising power in the contemporary international order.

Dr. Miller has published extensively on foreign policy issues dealing with China, including several in the Hoover Digest. Others include the foreign policy outlook of China's third-generation elite with Liu Xiaohong, in the making of Chinese foreign and security policy in the era of reform, edited by Mike Lanton, late imperial state, the modern Chinese state, and Is China Unstable? in Is China Unstable?, edited by David Shambaugh.

She's the author of Science and Dissent in Post-Mao China, the Politics of Knowledge, University of Washington Press, 1996, and with SAIS Professor Richard Witt, Becoming Asia, Change and Continuity in Asian International Relations since World War II. Dr. Miller won the Distinguished Teaching Award at Johns Hopkins University in 1994-1995 and the Schieffelin Award for Excellence in Teaching at the Mabel Postgraduate School in 2012.

She has been interviewed on Voice of America, National Public Radio, CNN, and in Businessweek, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, as well as press from Japan, Taiwan, and the PRC. Dr. Miller graduated from Princeton University in 1966, receiving a BA in Oriental Studies. She earned an MA and a PhD in history from George Washington University in 1969. And it is absolutely my pleasure

Pleasure to introduce both of our speakers. Alice, I believe you will go first, so I will mute myself and hand over the microphone to you, and I am just delighted to have you here. Thank you so much. Thanks very much, Andy. Let me start off by saying that instead of referring to the Lost Arks,

A China scholarship, I want to talk about China watching. And by that, I mean the art of understanding what's going on in China right now. The methods that I'll describe as the classical method apply very well to researching previous times in contemporary Chinese affairs. But the focus of it, at least as I was taught it and the way I have always used it, is to focus on what's exactly going on in China now.

And so that's going to be the thrust of the way I describe what I'm calling the classical method. Joe and I have divided up the labor a little bit. I'm going to offer a broad framework in which to understand the classical method and the premises that justify its use. And then Joe will give you some practical tips on using it, how the method actually works.

So, with that, I'll just suggest that the classical method might be called media analysis was the mainstay of analysis of China in the 1950s and 60s on into the 70s. And the premium put on it is understandable in terms of the sources that have been available for at least Americans to study China.

And so, if you look at the sources available to study contemporary Chinese affairs in the 1950s through the 1966 on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, there were Chinese media, PRC media themselves. Independent Hong Kong press offered some insight to affairs in China itself.

There were a number of emigres into Hong Kong that could be interviewed as to what their experience was in China. And there were a few foreign visitors to China who could offer insight into what they saw and into the meetings that they had with Chinese leaders. These were relatively few in those days.

because China's international relations were severely curtailed under the American policy of containment. China had relatively few diplomatic relationships and therefore foreign visitors, and including the United States, there's simply word ending. Edgar Snow went in, I think, 1959, again in 1970 or 71, but he did so illegally, at least under American law. André Malot, the French intellectual, went in, I think, 19...

1965 or '66, right after Paris normalized relations with Beijing in 1964. But that was basically the main sources that were available to try to understand Chinese leadership politics, foreign policy, and other affairs.

The Cultural Revolution opened up new sources, in particular the Red Guard newspapers and the big character wall posters, the Da Zibao, offered insight into some aspects of leadership politics, but basically the array of sources that were available were pretty much the same as in the previous period. AFP, the Agence France-Presse, operated in China after normalization with Paris in 1964, and there were Japanese reporters

reporting in the Cultural Revolution period. I recall reading about Japanese reporters wearing miners' helmets at night to go out and read all the big character wall posters in the Cultural Revolution. But basically, our sources to understand contemporary China were still severely limited, and PRC media remained the mainstay of analysis. The situation changed, especially for the United States.

at the early 70s. And so from the early 70s forward, a whole array of news sources became available that really changed the way people studied contemporary China. And so now we Americans and other foreigners had contacts with PRC officials, with Chinese academics,

Chinese traveled abroad. It was possible to do fieldwork and take residence in China to study China's local politics and so forth. And then most recently, in the last 15 years or so, new media have appeared, which supplements avenues to understand what's going on in China.

So the priority attached to analyzing Chinese media back in the 50s and 60s was basically a consequence of the very restricted access, the avenues of information that we had to understand China.

Now, the approach to using PRC media in those days to understand what was going on in Chinese leadership form rested on a discipline that's broadly called propaganda analysis. A nice Cold War term, but it conveyed basically what the approach was about.

It rested on the observation that China's open media were subject to review and control, at least at some level. And because the information presented in the media therefore reflected priorities of the regime, it was possible to reason backwards from the presentation of information in the media to inquire at and analyze Chinese authorities, these politics and so forth.

These methods applied to China beginning in the 1950s were not new. They had been applied in World War II era in the study of Nazi Germany. And the United States government set up in the spring of 1940 an organization called the Foreign Broadcast Information Service to begin to monitor German and then Japanese and Italian radio broadcasts and then to analyze the content.

And several figures in those days who became prominent in American social sciences later worked in that unit. These were Nathan Leitis, Hans Speyer, Edward Chills, and Alexander George. George was famous for writing a book analyzing Goebbels' diaries, the chief of propaganda in the Nazi regime, and comparing it to the analysis during the war years to assess how accurate the analysis had been.

The techniques had always been applied to us, I think going back to the Riga School and the 1920s to understanding affairs in the Soviet Union. And several analysts in the 50s and 60s were famous in applying this kind of analysis to the study of Soviet politics.

People like Myron Rush, Carl Linden, who worked in FBIAS and then audited Washington University, the French reporter at Le Monde, Michel Tatu, all practiced this to a fine art. And with regard to China, this was the staple of analyzing China, both in academe but also in government. And government had several analysts who were

Excellent. Practitioners of this art, people like Art Cullen, Donald Zagoria, whose name you may know from a book on the Sino-Soviet conflict in the 1950s and early 60s, Richard Wick, who worked at FVIS. He was one of my colleagues and a mentor and also taught at SAIS, I think, as Andy mentioned.

Now, how this worked in ancient time, how this method worked in ancient time, and by ancient times, I do mean the 50s and 60s and to some extent in the 70s. The way I'd like to explain this is by putting in the context of the three main information systems that were at work in Chinese politics in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

And in doing that, I want to focus on two. One is the internal media, the naibu publications, print publications, and then the public media, the gongkai media that everybody's familiar with. And I'd like to delineate the differences and purposes that they served in the political system, and then focus on why the open media offer avenues into understanding Chinese politics, foreign policy, and so forth, the basic methodological presumptions.

Now, China in the 50s and 70s, major information systems, one, confidential documents. Second, the Nebu publications that I just mentioned. Then, of course, the public or open media. Each of these had its own channels of dissemination, and they operated under different constraints. They served different purposes in the political system, and they had their own distinctive content.

The confidential documents I'll be quite brief about because we don't know all that much about them. They were classified and therefore not generally available to study. They operated in a basically three-tiered classification system similar to the American government's system, and they were circulated within the bureaucratic institutes of the Communist Party, the PLA, and the Chinese state.

The most important of these, for example, was the central documents, the so-called Zhongfa, the Central Committee documents. These were issued several times over the course of the year, and every once in a while they would publicize one of these and gave us a glimpse into these kinds of documents and the kinds of things that they addressed.

There were other categories of these sorts of documents, and some of us spent a lot of time trying to sort out the hierarchy of these kinds of documents to see what sort of insight that might give us into the priority of the various issuances. And I recall Ken Lieberthal did a nice little book compiling all the references that we had to these classified documents, which wasn't very many.

The internal publications, the Nebu publications, is an enormous system of publication materials circulated not in public. Their circulation was restricted. They're not technically classified, but they were not available in generally in public. All of them normally would carry a warning against open circulation and advising that they not be left around in public and so forth.

These publications were issued by most institutions in the Chinese political system. Many institutions published more than one, and they circulated throughout the system to provide information about the goings-on within the institutions and more broadly.

Access to these publications was mainly through your work unit. And so if you worked at some state-owned enterprise or at the foreign ministry, you had access to the Nebu publications, your own institution, plus those that circulated within the institution as well.

Also, at least back in the good old days, in ancient times, the Xinhua bookstores had a separate room that carried Nebu publications. And I worked briefly in the American Embassy in '81, and you could wander in there and wander around and look at the Nebu publications and maybe even once in a walk out, or you were stopped and saying, "You're not supposed to be in there." So these were publications whose dissemination was controlled.

The volume and diversity of these institutions is truly enormous. It's an enormous university of materials. There are documentary series that featured, among other things, in-house collections of leaders' speeches and formal documents. There were publications that carried ongoing policy proposals and debates about the proposals. There were reference materials intended to supply general information to help

the reader makes sense of what's going on in the world. These included, most famously, Tsangkou Xiaoxi reference information. This was a tabloid four-page publication that had circulation twice the size of people's day. It's a very common publication that basically was translations of foreign media on events in China and out of interest to the readership.

A more restricted publication, Tsang Kla-Liao, was compiled for the top leadership, maybe the top 200 leaders. They were so-called red stripe publications. There was a much more carefully selected compendium of materials of interest directly to the top leadership. Both of these publications were compiled by the Xinhua News Agency.

Internal publications also included unit periodicals of various kinds. The Central Party School, for example, had one of its publications, Li Luandongtai, carried ongoing speeches and articles on ongoing debates about ideology in the 60s and 70s. Obviously, there were many of these. They also published books.

In 1981, I got a hold of a Naboo collection of Shen Yun speeches from 1956 to '62 that were published for reference with respect to ongoing debates about economic reform. Li Rui, Mao's former secretary, published a record of the Lushan meetings in 1950, the famous Lushan Plenum in 1959. And so books on politically sensitive subjects were frequently published within the Naboo system.

Also, they carry translations of foreign books, all kinds of foreign books. I have myself a translation of Zhao Yu and Jian, Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice."

that was translated for Nebu and then later in the 80s made available for public publication. So this is an enormous universe of materials whose scope is really hard to get a hold of. The open, or gung-kai media, are what we think of as PRC media most broadly.

And this is an enormous system of information media that includes not only print publications, but also broadcast and more recently, electronic media. It features among the broadcast media, Beijing Radio, which was Beijing's national radio, still operates in those days. Beijing Radio broadcast in 38 foreign languages and five Chinese dialects. It had a national news program at 6 a.m., I'm sorry, 6 p.m.

that was relayed simultaneously to the provinces. All of the provinces and most local cities had their own radio stations, which carried hookups from the national radio system, as well as their own local programming. And early 80s televisions began to take off and become ubiquitous as well.

The Ximena news agency has been since the 40s, the Chinese Communist official news agency. It's officially under the state council. And so it's the state's news agency and it operates like news agencies like AFP and AP and so forth. Reuters does it. That is, it provides reports for publication in the Chinese press.

Xinhua has its main file in Chinese, but it also offers files in those days in English, Russian, Japanese, Arabic, and French. There are two associated news agencies that carried refined files aimed at overseas Chinese communities in Hong Kong, Macau, and overseas.

The print media also grew rapidly under the People's Republic. The figures here go from 1952 down through 1970, and you'll see the ups and downs. 296 newspapers in 1952 reached upwards of 364 on the eve of the Great Leap and the Three Bitter Years, and then receded to 273, and 1965 was back up to 343.

But you can gather the impact or gay impact of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution on what was available in terms of what was circulating publicly. Newspapers were reduced to simply 42 by 1970. And there are similar fears for periodicals, journals and magazines, and also for books.

The newspapers included nationally circulating newspapers, obviously People's Daily, the Army's newspaper, Jeff Hong Jun Bao, the National Trade Union Federation's newspaper, Gung Ren Er Bao, the Guangming Er Bao, which was a newspaper associated with the Third Front during the Civil War years, but was taken over to become a United Front newspaper under the People's Republic and carried on.

mostly culture and intellectual affairs. Jingzhi Yerbao, published formally by the State Economic Commission and a whole array of other newspapers. The provinces and locales had their own newspapers. Shanghai had two, and local newspapers included things like the Beijing Wanbao, four-page tabloid published in the 50s and 60s. It was the site for this famous three-family village columns written.

carrying commentaries critical of the grave leap in Mao Zedong's leadership. Of course, important news for politically in China. In those days, it was published daily and had six pages and carried no advertising. That changed as we moved into the 70s and 80s. But this was the first place to look for significant political information.

In 1980s, they began publishing an international edition, which was interesting because it was in traditional rather than simplified characters aimed at overseas Chinese communities. And in the United States, it was available for home delivery. For several years, I had a home subscription myself.

Now, in those days, this universe of materials that was gleaned from or available for analysis from the public media, the Gung-Kai media, was large but not enormous. And it was part for, in this case, an American government institution, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service.

to try to translate the materials that were deemed relevant to ongoing intelligence and foreign policy community interests. And so, FBIS published a daily report. It was one of eight daily reports that the agency published. And in this case, it carried everything relevant to ongoing current-day politics, military affairs, economy, and foreign policy, all in one convenient packet of translations, usually somewhere between 60 and 80 pages, five days a week.

It was also available publicly. And so while the intelligence community and the American government could read in translation very current stuff from PRC media, the public could too. And so libraries and China studies departments and a lot of universities had long files of these to make it available to students.

And because reading in English was faster for most of us than reading in Chinese, this green book became the staple of government and academic analysis. If you go through the footnotes of the publications back in the 60s, you'll see the FDIS Daily Report cited.

Regrettably, it stopped publication in the mid-90s for reasons that we can talk about later. Now, the question I want to pose is, why are there two systems? Why have this enormous universe of internal publications but also this open system of information? Both of these are enormous in terms of scope and volume. They both consumed enormous resources. They're both available through people's work units. When you went to your political study sessions Saturday mornings at your work unit,

it. You saw and studied materials both from the Nebu system but also the Gung-Kai system. So there may be Nebu publications on some current topic that would be provided for reference, and then you could find out what the party's line was by reading the People's Daily analysis of it or a commentary on it. But that simply poses the question, why two systems?

The answer that I've always offered, and I have to say I've never heard this confirmed by anybody from the PRC that I've ever talked to, but it seems to me that the answer that why there are two systems was that they serve different purposes in the political system.

The internal network of publications, the Nebu materials, the dissemination was controlled. It's not strictly classified, but it was not available publicly. You had to get it through your work unit or through the appropriate internal channels. The content in these publications is open. It's not censored, and it carried a wide diversity of opinions and ideas and perspectives.

That contrasted with the open media in which the dissemination is public. The Chinese state wanted everybody to get the public media, and so dissemination was everywhere, but the content was controlled. And so the two systems had different dissemination patterns and different approaches to what was published within them.

I summarize this by saying the internal media published the so-called news. You got the information there. You needed to understand what's going on. But the open media conveyed the party's line. But the party wanted you to understand about its approach to whatever the issue was or so forth. And so from that perspective, the internal media I'm proposing serve the process of policy formulation and deliberation.

The open media served the process of explaining the policy once the policy has been mobilizing the population to support it. So this is a parallel set of information systems that serve very different purposes in the political order.

Again, everybody could get access through their work unit to the internal system, but the content and the content was not controlled. And opinions on all sorts of issues could be voiced as long as you had sufficient standing within the political unit, the relevant unit, to have your views published.

The open media, by contrast, are public and everything in it is subject to review, at least at some level, by the publication's editors, by the writers themselves who self-censored, and ultimately by the propaganda department of the Chinese Communist Party, and also even by top-level leaders. There were several instances in those days where it was observed that high-level leaders, including Mao and Zhou Enlai, the prime minister, and Deng Xiaoping personally reviewed

some material that would appear later in the open media.

In the early 70s, when Henry Kissinger would go to Beijing, they'd meet with Zhou Enlai. They'd have talks through much of the day, each negotiating team on opposite sides of the table, and they would take breaks. And it was observed that when they took breaks, the Xinhua News guy would walk in and hand Zhou Enlai a sheaf of draft dispatches to be published in the Xinhua News Agency, and Zhou would work through them line by line, the dispatches that were relevant to

the negotiations underway. We also have copies of draft Xinhua and People's Daily commentaries that were personally reviewed by Mao, his handwriting in the margins, commenting on it, and so forth. So,

So, the point here is the internal media are not authoritative. They don't speak for the regime. They're simply there to provide information for the ongoing political process. The open media, by contrast, are authoritative. In some measure, and especially at the higher levels, they do speak for the Communist Party and for the Chinese state.

The agency that manages this process at the very top, of course, is the Chinese Communist Party's propaganda department. These days, I think in 1996, they decided in English to call it the publicity department, but it's still the good old propaganda department. And it's supervised through its networks and all of the media, what appeared in those media by directives outlining topics and the way they should be treated and so forth.

Xi Jinping was the director of the propaganda department in 53, 54, and this was with one of his sons who had particular political promise down the road. You may recognize a young Xi Jinping now here.

Now, this process of review could bring about an amazing consistency in treatment of almost everything in the media. The media and the open system were viewed carefully to ensure that there were no glitches, no mistakes, and so forth. And I like to use a very trivial example of this consistency in media. It was obvious to the point of mind-numbing triviality.

The so-called four modernizations, you may remember, were enunciated at the third NPC by Zhou Enlai in 1964. They were dropped during the Cultural Revolution but then brought back at the fourth NPC by Zhou Enlai in January 1975. At that NPC and his report on the work of the State Council, they call on China to build a modern socialist country with a modern agriculture, modern industry, modern S&T, and a modern national defense by the year 2000.

Chinese media repeated that injunction millions of times between 1975 over the next several years, but suddenly in February 1950, February 1981, they stopped reciting in exactly that order. Instead, they began to talk about

China building a modern socialist country with a modern industry, modern agriculture, modern S&T, and modern national defense by the year 2000. And thereafter, for millions of times, they recited that formula in exactly the same way. Now, this was a change the media did not bother to explain, but the consistencies here underscored the significance of it.

And we're entitled to wonder, well, why? Why would you shift modern agriculture and modern industry into modern industry and modern agriculture? Again, they've never explained it, but it invites inquiry into what they did based on the consistency with which it had been repeated in one pattern up to 1981 and then in a new formulation thereafter.

So, why two systems? The point is simply that the internal media assists the process, the policy formulation. They circulate perspectives, proposals, debates, relevant information, and so forth. And after a policy decision has been made, the open media explain the policy and try to enlist the population's support for it and assist in implementation of it.

And so because of that place of the open media in this policy process, the basic idea of propaganda analysis is simply to reason backward from what's appearing in the media to guess at these priorities, the editorial and policy priorities that shape the way it was presented in the media.

And so by comparing the substantive content of media over time and in particular contexts, we can perhaps infer valid conclusions about the regime's intentions, about its priorities, and about the degree of consensus on some issue or another. That's basically the process.

Now, to do this required very careful tracking of media themes and formulations across time and context. For one thing, it made going on vacation difficult because it meant when you came back, you had to fill in the gap in the flow of information that you missed while you were away. It required consistent control over the appearance of themes and formulations across time to be able to make judgments about its importance and about deviations from it.

And so what this meant was big files. You have to have control over what's been said in the past in order to judge the importance of information being presented in the present. It's useful to have long experience and memories at it, and you have to be patient. It is a time-consuming effort, but it does pay off in the end.

When you do notice changes in theme, changes, shifts in the authority of comment, and some new formulation underway, there are possible explanations that need to be considered. First and foremost, it might mean that the regime has a new position on whatever the issue is, and therefore the policy's changed, and therefore there's a new formulation. They're announcing it with a higher level of authority in public commentary, and they're addressing it with themes than it is.

It also could be that it's just a response to a new situation. It's the context that changed. China and the United States have established diplomatic relations and therefore will begin to talk about the United States in the public media in ways that we didn't before that time. Or, and this was the tricky one, media practices may have changed. And the value of long experience and big files is that

It enables you to observe when they stop using some type of commentary in favor of a new one. And so you have to be awake to the basic idea that they're presenting information in different ways than they have before.

Now, that was the classical moment. And people like Joe and I and lots of other people and people in academia spent huge amounts of time devoted to trying to do exactly that. It was the mainstay of analysis of contemporary China back in those days. So the question is, is it still feasible? And is it still worth doing?

There are real changes since the 80s and especially more recently that might lead one to think that maybe it's not as practical as it was before. For one thing, there's been a slow erosion on the Nebu publications. There are still lots of Nebu publications, but the restrictions on them have become much looser. Sankou Xiaoxi, which used to be a restrictive publication, you can now pick up at newsstands. And it's technically not an open publication, but it's now available easily.

Also, the state itself and the party have retreated from areas of activity that were previously highly politicized and therefore subject to the full-scale control of media presentation and therefore have become depoliticized.

the media themselves have become much more prolific and commercialization in some instances have taken over as a new motivation for publishing. And so this raises questions about the validity of the degree of control that's been exercised in PRC media today that might be questions of the validity of the approach, the traditional method today. And then finally, there are the new media, the internet and the various social media platforms

that have emerged respectively since the mid-90s and 2006 or 2007. To get a grasp of the scale of publications that have become available since the Cultural Revolution, these figures go down only to 2003, but you can see from the scale of print publications here,

They've gone from 42 newspapers in 1970 to over 2,000 by 2003. Actually, the numbers of newspapers I think have been retreating thanks to the internet, but it's still a huge number. The number of books has gone from a little under 5,000 to over 190,000, and that's only as of 2003.

I did a survey. I'll come back to that. The kinds of periodicals that are available these days covers the enormous range of topics and materials, no matter what area that you may be interested in, society, economy, politics, military, international affairs, and so forth. There are journals and newspapers that are available to study them.

books. This is a survey I did back in 1995, and it's pretty much the same today. It gives you the number of books published in 1995 in various topics, and you can see the relative attention given to Marxism-Leninism, Ozzedon-Faught, 104 books published in 1995 compared to other topics like culture, education, and sports.

almost 42,000 and so forth. The point here is simply that in whatever your topic that you're interested in these days, there is a journal and lots of books available to study the issue that was simply not the case back in the ancient times.

The new media also offer new avenues into Chinese society, especially the Internet and the social media, the chat rooms and so forth, offer avenues of insight into Chinese society that were simply not available previously. And so all of these...

They may be shrinking Xi Jinping, but these all raised questions for a while about the utility of the traditional method and whether or not it's worth pursuing.

But I would suggest to you that it is. Even without Xi Jinping's increasing restrictions on media and other aspects of political life in China today, this method still works because the regime has always maintained very close control and control.

management of critical sectors and over media that are central to the regime's presentation of its media. And that is to say the Xinhua News Agency, People's Daily, Chou Shih, the Party's policy journal, and so forth. Xinhua, People's Daily, they are still as important as they ever are. Their job is to convey the regime line on any particular topic, and those are the place to go to practice this kind of method.

Other media, People's Daily also publishes Global Times. Juancho Chabal, pay attention to People's Daily, don't pay attention to Global Times. They serve different purposes. And so spending time trying to dissect the media presentation methods in Global Times is going to provide different insights than you might get from analyzing People's Daily.

The situation, I would suggest, is somewhat similar to the situation in the later 80s in the Soviet Union and trying to understand Soviet affairs in the period of Gorbachev's glasnost.

And so there is a brilliant analysis report that showed back in the late 80s or early 90s that the traditional method of criminology applied every bit as well in understanding those issues that were of critical affairs to Moscow versus the information now availed openly to the Soviet public in the changes in Soviet media.

I think the impediments to applying this method these days, first of all, are a major reorientation in the study of contemporary China as a consequence of the new avenues of access to China since the late 1970s. There's been a withering away of interest in leadership politics and things like that in favor of a much more interesting and profitable or accessible topics like the study of society, otherwise, and so forth.

And so the method simply has been forgotten, I think in large part. I'm impressed by how few people still are around to do it. Just one comment. A while back, I read Liz McConaughey's new book, which is a book I like very much, but her main chapter on politics in the Xi Jinping period drew almost entirely on Western media reports, not on Chinese media sources or documents. And so I think that's

And Luce's book is a good book, but I think it just shows the tilting of the way of the field away from traditional methods in favor of others since the 1980s. The other problem, I think, is there isn't an agency like the old FBIS to sort through the ocean of materials and to gather together the materials relevant to topics that might be of interest, in this case, to the American government.

And that's a real problem. I think there is movement these days to try to bring back an agency like that, given the enhanced interest in China these days as a concern to the United States. So there are real impediments to implying it, but I think the validity of the method is just as useful as it was back in the good old days. Back to you, Joe. Thank you very much, Alice. That was terrific. Obviously, comprehensive.

I will not do anything as broad as you just did. I do want to try to talk a little bit about how this works on a sort of day-to-day basis. Just a few things from my experience with dealing with the media. I think the first thing is, you know, why do people...

misread the Chinese media. And this happens all the time, and you can find examples of this more or less daily in the

And the biggest sin, which I think Alice has referred to, is that there's a real hierarchy to the media. You can even go into the Remen Rabau site and it will have a list of editorials, commentator articles, and other types of specific articles. And you need to pay attention to that hierarchy. So that will help you define what is authoritative

and what it's not. Or maybe I should say more authoritative and less authoritative. I will say that the non-authoritative media, as I'll explain in a minute, can be very important. In fact, it can be more important than the authoritative media, but you need to figure out why that's the case. The example that I would apply, start with, is the start of this important debate

on the practices of criterion or slow criterion of truth. This was, we know now, a discussion that was started in the party school and a lot of people contributed to it. Sun Changzhang, who unfortunately passed away recently, was probably the main contributor to the article. But if you're simply looking at the Chinese media on a day-by-day basis, you don't know any of that. That's all

internal discussion. The first sign that you get is if you happen to pick up your copy of Guangming Rebao on May the 11th, 1978, and you see an article by a special commentator, Tuya Pinglin, and you say, boy, that's an interesting article. Don't know what it means.

But then you see that it's reprinted in People's Daily the next day under the same special commentator authorship. And you say, hmm, getting a lot of reprint here. This must be interesting. So the first thing you do is you go back to your files and you see if you can find any articles by the special commentator.

commentator and you say no I don't happen to see any files with this special commentator so this is something unusual I better pay attention

You probably don't know that if it is an authoritative article, an editorial or a commentator article, it has to go through Wang Xiaodong, who was at the time, actually he was head of the general office, not of the propaganda department, but he was in control of ideology. And if you were going to write an editorial or a special commentator article, it had to cross his desk. So what's going on here is,

is that they're putting it out as a special commentator so it doesn't have to go through Wang Xiaodong. That is to say there are loopholes or there were loopholes in the Chinese system. So as an analyst at the time, all you can do is say, well, that's kind of weird. I better pay attention to it. So you put it on the top of the pile. And if you're a serious China analyst, you have lots of piles that comes with it.

Alice said you have lots of files. You should have lots of files, but sometimes you just end up having lots of piles. At any case, you've just been paying attention to this, and less than a month later, three weeks later, Deng Xiaoping gives a speech at the All-Army Political Conference, and he strongly supports practice. And you say, bingo, this is important. Why is it important? Let me...

The fact that Deng Xiaoping gives this speech at an all-party army political conference and that it's reported extensively in People's Daily the next day is going to tell you, first of all, that Deng Xiaoping, then a vice premier, strongly supports the criterion of practice and that the army supports Deng Xiaoping. Politically, that's extremely important.

There's obviously a lot that you don't know, and the odds are that you're simply going to guess incorrectly. But you can figure out before too long that practice is a challenge to the two whatevers. The two whatevers, of course, is a reference to an editorial that appeared in People's Daily in February 1977.

And what we do know now is that that editorial was really not intended to hold Deng Xiaoping or other veteran leaders down. What we now know, but you wouldn't know then, was that Deng Xiaoping was in fact picking a fight. He was challenging the ideological foundations of the Huagufeng regime.

You could know simply from what you're reading in the press that there's a big fight going on, but you wouldn't know that it was really Deng Xiaoping who was picking that fight. So the bottom line here is that if you're doing contemporaneous analysis, looking at the media day to day, you're going to miss a lot.

Still, you know that there's a fight going on. You see some people supporting the criterion of practice. You see other people talking about fouling Mao Zedong's thought. You probably see other people not saying anything. You probably don't know that there's a work conference that's happening in November. Certainly, that wouldn't have been reported in any detail.

But then you finally get to the third plenum in December 1978, where publicly the two whatevers is criticized and the principle, the criterion of practice is celebrated. You see the party changing the emphasis of work from class struggle to economic construction. So you can follow at least the outposts here. I think that

For you students trying to develop your abilities as a understanding the Chinese political system,

you can get a much more complete picture because you can read the contemporary stuff, but then you also can do interviews or collect other materials to get a much more complete picture of what's going on. So over the years, we've had memoirs or interviews that have appeared in the press. There are historical accounts. And so

you really begin to get a much better, more complex understanding of how the issues come together and how power transfers hands from one leader to another. And in this case, there was a, I guess you have to call it a leadership struggle. One of Wai Wufang's

nicest, most charming aspects is that he actually gave up relatively easily. He could have, I think, put up a much bigger fight and the inauguration of reform. Well, actually, I shouldn't say that. The inauguration of reform was inaugurated by Hua Guofeng.

Okay, you might as well say that. He has begun in his own way slowly to downgrade the emphasis on Mao's ideology. He makes two trips to Europe, one to Eastern Europe, one to Western Europe. So it was really Hua Guofeng who began the opening up policy. And by the way, what's called the Great Leap Outward

is also started by Hua Guofeng and with full support of Deng Xiaoping. So the picture of what actually happens there is much more complicated than you would get out of the media. That doesn't mean you shouldn't read the media because it's important to know at the time when there is conflict and how that conflict evolves. If you look at the economic reform,

There is room in the official gongkai media for debate. If you're reading the editorials, commentator articles, that is the authoritative position. But if I recall, it was always page four was the theoretical debate article, and you would have different views within a certain framework. If you go to the internal debate, nebu publications, you get more extensive debate,

The scope of those debates is wider, but there are debates that are carried on in People's Daily and particularly in more specialized journals like Economic Research, Jingjian Zhou. That seemed to have been the favored publication of reform-minded articles.

economists at that time. So you find a lot going on there. And I should mention also more specialized newspapers like Zhongguo Nonglin Rebao, the China farmers, peasants paper, which reported extensively on the ongoing economic reforms in that sector. Then you get debates in Jingji Yanzhou about things like ownership reform, price reform,

whether the economy should be centralized, decentralized. There are people who are defending the role of state-owned enterprises, saying that they can reform appropriately. And so you have, even in the open media, you have a range of policy views on important issues. And if you pay attention to these, then you can compare policies

the debate that is going on with the party decisions that come out of such important events as the annual economic conference. And then you can track more or less where the party is going in its thinking about economic reform. So the point that I'm trying to make here is that if you look at People's Daily or some of the other national newspapers that Alice was talking about,

you find that everything is part of a conversation. The hard part is to figure out who is participating in this conversation. So particularly at the time, you would often have articles that would say, Mo Moran, somebody thinks this, and he is wrong.

Then you have to figure out, so who is Momoran? I think they're a lot more open about that these days. But in the old days, you really had to do a lot of digging to figure out who's arguing with whom and what position are they saying? Because there is a premium on not speaking clearly. That just takes work to work through those ideas.

The other point that I want to make, which I think is relevant to people studying the PRC today, we're all using word searches. It comes with the field these days. But I would argue that it's not sufficient because it is a conversation. So word searches will take things out of context. So you say, gee, in PRC,

1986, there are X number of references to some formula, and three years later, there are more or less. But unless you're reading the articles that those references go to, you're not going to understand why the number has increased or decreased. Or the Chinese have this terrible habit of changing the TIFA, the official formulation for an idea. So if you're in the

Let's say in the late Deng Xiaoping period, and you're trying to search Renmin Rao for the next five years or something, you know, you miss some of the Tifa that Jiang Zemin is using. Or that when Hu Jintao comes in, he talks about the scientific development theory. If you haven't searched for that, you don't see it.

If you're reading your paper on a daily basis, you do see it. If you miss it and do a word search, you're not picking up that Hu Jintao is criticizing Jiang Zemin for being insufficiently scientific. That, to me, strikes me as an important bit of information.

Then things can get a little bit more complicated. What do you do with a newspaper like Xujie Jingji Dabao? I used to just love to read this newspaper. It was published out of Shanghai, and it was the most reform-oriented newspaper in China. And it really went way beyond anything that you could find in any of the Beijing newspapers. It really had far-reaching thoughts on economic and political reform. It's not authoritative.

But it's important. And in this case, sort of like with the example of the criterion of practices, the sole criterion of truth, it turns out that it's important even though it's not authoritative. And what you can measure somewhat subjectively

is what I would call the heat index. How heated is the commentary in this newspaper getting? And I can assure you that it was heating up very strongly in the spring of 1989. And that should have been more of a clue than it was. Also, more on the margin of things.

Some of you probably know the journal Dushu. I don't know if anybody reads it anymore, kind of a specialized journal dealing with literary issues. Previously, Dushu was a very liberal journal. And then in the early 1990s, Wang Hui and Wang Ping took over the journal and changed its orientation to what is generally referred to as the New Left. And they would

solicit articles from people that they would know. And you got a publication that was really talking about, let me put it broadly, what was wrong with the May 4th movement and with the New Enlightenment movement. And the argument is that the

old ideas on modernization. We're simply accepting wholesale Western definitions of modernization. And what we as Chinese intellectuals need to do is think about a different form of modernization. Well, these are, you kind of look at this stuff at the beginning and you say, well, this is interesting, but it's not very important, is it? I mean, after all, you have basically modernization

A few handful of literary scholars discussing literary ideas. They're picking up on Jameson and others in the West and these sorts of critiques of modernity. But following these sorts of ideas over time, you can see them expanding. You can see them coalescing with different ideas on, say, nationalism.

And, you know, in this particular case, I think you can see the articles or the thinking moving from the sidelines. Marginal ideas move much more to the center, as I think new left ideas did do. And, you know, to a certain extent, the Xi Jinping regime kind of picks up on some of these ideas.

And so you can trace these from an earlier stage to being much more important. And let me make just a final point, which is simply that the media can be used for simply following personnel changes. In other words, something factual. As you know, every five years, there's a party Congress, very important personnel changes, and

You find these out first in the media, sometimes because personnel changes have been made before the Congress. And certainly afterwards, they will publish a list of the new Central Committee. And what is, I think, really important to figure out after that is not just who is on the Central Committee, but which positions are they holding?

You'll find, for instance, a new party secretary now will always change the head of the general office. I think the head of the general office has probably become even more important than it used to be, but in any case, it's very important. So a new general secretary wants to have his own person in charge of the general office. There are also other critical positions.

I think the military is an obvious one. The power ministries, if you will, state security, public security, propaganda organization, these are the sorts of positions that are very critical to securing your own power and taking the party in a new and different direction.

At any case, that's just my own very quick take on using the media to study contemporary politics. Thank you. So, Alice...

Joe, thank you so very much. There's so much to chew on. And the questions that we've been getting in the interim have been really, really good. And I think we're not going to really have time for me to moderate. Maybe we can carry on this conversation offline. I'll go straight to the questions. But before I do, one of the things that both of you touched upon is this idea of what can we do now? What we can, what we can't. And

I think that's a sub-theme that runs through some of these questions. But I think especially the younger scholars among us, and I include myself in that, would appreciate kind of a practical take on some of the answers to these questions. So let me just get right to them. And maybe what I'll do is I'll ask three at a time.

to save us a little time and see how far we go. And I'll more or less go in order, and I'll shorten them. So one of the questions was, in terms of the kind of the dual internal versus open media system, is that something that is specific to the PRC, or do we see analogs of that going back in time? So that would be one question. Another is, is there some sort of a opportunity

On the internal side of things, is there some kind of a cachet that's used kind of internally as having access versus not having access? And is there a kind of sense of, for lack of a better word, a sense of mystery for those who have, you know, keeping the state somewhat ambiguous or mysterious and therefore giving it a kind of strength?

Another question that I wanted to get to in this first batch is, can you talk a bit about China watchers who had experience in Taiwan? So either doing language work, working in the embassy, serving in the military, etc. And what percent of this community had a Taiwan experience? Did this have any impact on their place in the hierarchy?

of China watchers, their credibility, career trajectory, et cetera, et cetera. So let me start with those three questions and then know that I've got a bunch more.

Yeah, I believe the Soviet Union had a somewhat similar system, the three-legged system that I mentioned. And so it wouldn't be surprising the Chinese had one too, given the Soviet input into the Chinese Communist Party. I'm not aware of other systems I would

believe that the Vietnamese and the North Koreans do too. I just don't know. In terms of other systems, I think one question I ask, are there dynastic parallels? I don't think so. I'm a historian by training. I do not do contemporary China for love. I do it for money. And so my real training was in Ming and Qing history. And in the Qing period, during the Kangxi reign, and I've

This is one of my chances to delve off into what I was really changed to talk about. There were two memorial systems. One was the General Thiebun system that conveyed information from the locales up to the imperial court. And then a second one created in the 1680s that was internal. The memorials in that system, the Zoban, went directly into the emperor's secretariat.

and carried more sensitive information. But over time, it too also became co-opted by the bureaucrats. The purposes of those systems were different from Neibu versus Gongkai Media. There were no Gongkai Media in imperial China. The two systems I mentioned were bureaucratic systems that just had different channels and for different purposes. I don't think, at least in China, there are parallels for it.

The second one, is there a status that comes with publishing in the internal media? No, I think it's quite the opposite. The two channels, the internal versus public, had different purposes. And the point of the internal media is to give anybody with any standing the opportunity to voice their opinion.

That didn't mean a man from the, couldn't walk in from the street and have his opinion voiced. But if you had any standing in the system and you had an opinion that was deemed important enough to be aired, you could be published in the internal system.

That isn't true in the open media, where control over access and who is published is much more a product of the political system itself. And so I recall one incident in the early 80s, 80 or 81, at a conference that's being presided over by Hu Yaobang, the general secretary.

attended by Chen Yun, and Chen Yun piped up and said he wanted his opinion published in People's Daily. And Hu Yaobang said, no, you can't do that. You can have it published in Naibu, but you can't have it published in People's Daily. And so here's Hu Yaobang talking down to Chen Yun, a man who's been on the Politburo since 1935, while telling him, sorry, bud, you can't do that. That's not the way the system works. And so there's no particular status that accrues, I think, from publishing in one system versus the other.

Where did Hu Yaobang end up? Well, he ended up in an unfortunate place in 1987. What was the third point or third question? The third point was Taiwan. Oh, yeah. Well, I would point out that the premier China watching posts back in what I've called the ancient times wasn't in Taiwan. It was in Hong Kong.

And the consul general there was the prime post, at least for Americans. You couldn't go to Beijing. And so there were a lot of resources in the American consulate in Hong Kong devoted to watching affairs,

on the mainland. It was like Riga in Latvia for studying the Soviet Union back in the 20s and 30s before normalization. Now, I had Taiwan experience. I went to the Stanford Center. I know Joe did too, but I don't think it offered any particular cachet or relevance. There were just a lot of officials who served in Taiwan who were China-focused leaders in the American system.

That was where people got experience, unless you're old like Doak Barnett and Ralph Clough. Doak was born in Shanghai, grew up there, and Ralph served something like three terms in Nanjing before he moved to Taiwan. But I don't think there was a particular cachet attached to having served in Taipei.

Yeah, I certainly had my Taiwan experience, but the reason that I did was not that I was a China watcher. I was trying to understand the Kuomintang in the 1930s. At that time, I was more interested in the thought of Chiang Kai-shek than the thought of Mao Zedong. Yeah, did low for me. I was there to study Qing politics and try to learn Manchurian of all things. So

Yeah. Uh, so I, you know, I, I did end up spending a total of three years in Taiwan. Um, and I've gone back to Taiwan, uh, more or less annually since then. Um, uh, especially except for the pandemic years. Um,

Hope we can get back to Taiwan soon. Hope we can get back to Beijing soon. By the way, I used to go to PRC, oh, at least two times a year, sometimes three. And I'm modestly optimistic that...

as COVID gets behind us, that we can resume those contacts. All of us have some really deep friendships with people in the PRC. And it's going to be hard, very hard, I think, for young graduate students to go out and do field work. But I'm hopeful that both graduate students and scholars will

can go out, resume friendships, and have reasonable discussions about a whole variety of issues. I might take a different take than Alice on the cachet question.

What counts is whether some leader writes a comment on your article, whether it's Nebu or Gung Kai. And I certainly have heard people brag about something that Jiang Zemin or whatever wrote on their idea. I think that that is, you know, that's gold. You know, you actually, I think, get monetary rewards for that. Go ahead. Some more questions.

Let me fold these into three categories or so. So one picks up on where you more or less left off, Joe, and that is kind of what are the implications for particularly younger scholars being able to go into the field, you know, and do the kinds of things that we've grown accustomed to? And I guess a larger question to that is how might that push us

in a different methodologically, in a different field, or a different set of questions that we would be asking. And I know that opens a can of worms about disciplinary imperatives and all of that, but I think it's a question worth wrestling with. Another one has to do with the consistency or divergence of national level press versus local press. And it

presses and, and being able to compare, see if there's any, any nuance differences between the two. And I guess a lot of questions also hinge around this idea of how has technology changed a lot of the, the, the, the, the ways in which you've mapped out how things were done, uh, as Alice says in the, in the ancient times, uh, versus today. I mean, to, to, to what degree, uh, do we have to kind of rejigger some of that or recalibrate some of that? And, uh,

I'll mute myself. You shouldn't mute yourself because these are the questions that I know you're asking yourself. I mean, so much of your work has been done on really great field work. Your book on water power, for instance, you can almost see you walking through the fields

of different parts of China, talking to local officials, talking to people in Beijing, and certainly things like Don Mattingly's recent book. These are wonderful books. And I think the area where China Studies has made the most progress in recent years is sort of where the state meets the society. And that's going to be much harder to do. What Alice and I have been kind of describing

is focusing much on elite politics. I suppose that's because of what we have been doing. I think, for instance, recent history and recent comparative history is a field wide open for young people. I'm thinking of a book that is coming out that Joseph Turijian has done comparing the Soviet Union with China at various different periods.

And I think it relies a lot on both media analysis and memoirs that have come out and things like that. And of course, you can go, I hope you can still go and talk to people, participants in some of these people, some of these events. So I think that we may be headed in sort of that direction. Thanks, Joe. Alice, do you have...

Yeah, I think, as Joe says, topics that depend on fieldwork and that kind of direct contact are going to be harder and harder to do and therefore just maybe not possible to do. And so topics are going to have to change. As Joe says, the methods that we've been describing were used by us as government analysts focused on national priorities in the American intelligence and policy community.

And so they work there, but I would suggest they also work in other areas. I think Fred Davis gave a good talk on

how to do political history using traditional methods. And these methods fit very well in that and actually even better now that you have memoirs and all sorts of other documentary collections and so forth to supplement and actually refine what you can learn from looking what's in the media. So I think, as Joe suggested, some topics just aren't going to be practical and people will have to think more carefully about

the resources and access that are going to be required to do what they want to work on. Andy, you raised the question of technology, and there's all sorts of different methodologies that are coming out now. And so you have one person doing sort of networking technology. You plug people into the little boxes, and then you see who's related to whom and all that sort of stuff.

What I would like to see is somebody doing that and somebody doing what Alice and I described and seeing which methodology seems to work better in a particular situation. I don't mean this as high noon in Cheyenne or something, but I think we really need to think about methodology. For instance, there's technology that you can put... So if you...

have peaceful evolution, what words occur within a certain distance of that? Well, does that work better or worse than the methodology that Alice and I are describing? I think we can do some sorting and shifting of these methodologies to see what works better. In fact, I think that would be a great dissertation topic.

Boy, no kidding. I mean, that's looking at things at a meta level that I think could actually really have great practical use. Sorry, Alice, we'll cut you off. Yeah, I was going to respond. I think your second question was on the relationship between the central media and local or provincial media. Well, it has been, I think, consistently across BRC history, the fact that the local media

are required to carry some of the content from central media. So, for example, when People's Daily published a particularly sensitive editorial, it was mandatory for the provincial newspapers to publish it as well. But they also published their own commentary. They had their own structure of commentary. They had their own content and their own practices that they followed. And the method applies equally well in studying the local politics of Zhejiang province or Guangzhou city or whatever.

Also, it's useful to compare the way provincial or local media treat national subjects versus the way they do in central media. An immediate example was back in 2013.

I think it was when Xi Jinping wasn't yet designated the core leader. And so there were provincial references that began to refer to Xi Jinping as a core leader. And it was fascinating to watch which provinces did this versus which didn't. This was well before anybody was doing it at the central level.

Also, there will be occasions in which some prominent topic will be treated in the central media and the provincial media will or will not treat it. And it's interesting to see which ones picked up on the central media and are falling in line with the center and which ones are going their own way, either by giving a short shrift or ignoring it altogether. And so I think this relationship between the center and the provinces and the locales is really important. And this is a good way to get at that.

I did a paper one time on the treatment of Taiwan in Taiwan Yanzhou, which was the Academy of Social Sciences journal and a journal published in Fujian. In Fujo, I can't remember the name.

offhand. Anyway, it was a provincially published journal. And Fujian is a sensitive province, obviously, for Taiwan affairs. And I compared the contents in those journals over a four or five-year period, and there was a very distinct divergence in the way they treated Taiwan. Beijing was tough on Taiwan on various issues. Fujian, which had business ties across the Taiwan Strait and so forth, was much more cautious and not quite so tough. And it's

This kind of comparison of local versus center can be quite insightful. As somebody who does a lot of work in the provinces, it's good to hear. So, you know, I guess we've got a speed round. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to collect a bunch of questions into one and actually reverse it kind of.

which is to say, you've talked a lot about Phibus and other kinds of sources that were compiled here in the U.S. government. If you could dictate the best possible 21st century version of that kind of information source, what would it look like? What would it be?

Well, I think it's complicated. One of the reasons that FBIS public daily reports went away was copyright conventions, the Berne Convention. State Department lawyers decided that FBIS translating and making public translations of, in this case, Chinese material violated the Berne Convention. And so we were shut down.

So that is a problem that will have to be overcome. It may be managed internally within the U.S. government, but it doesn't do much good for the rest of us on the outside.

Also, I think the range of topics that are accessible by media of various kinds these days is huge, just given the span of publications. And so I think while there may be one central publication were that to be created that can manage the sensitive political and economic and prominent stuff of interest to policymakers, there's going to be smaller aggregations of people interested in the PLA or interested in foreign policy or whatever.

that would profit from that kind of translation and aggregation effort. And so it's more complicated to do. I think probably the internet makes it easier these days to imagine circulation, something like that, but there's some barriers to it. Well, I side with Shakespeare. First, kill all the lawyers. I'm really serious. Something that is of national security interest

that we cannot circulate publicly. It doesn't make sense to me. It just does not make sense. I guess because I've been on both sides of the fence, I take seriously the idea of a conversation between government experts and those of us on the outside who might still have something to say.

And if you withhold a lot of information from me and then say you don't know what you're talking about, this doesn't do much for that conversation. So hopefully this new center that may be set up will have much looser restrictions on those publications. Well,

We're at time. I think those fighting words are the best note on which to leave. It mobilizes all of us to fight another battle another day. Alice, Joe, thank you so much for sharing your wealth of accumulated experience.

But in all seriousness, I really want to thank both of you and looking forward to continuing this conversation in some way, shape or form in the weeks and months to come. So be well, talk soon. And thank you, everybody, for joining us. We had a really, really nice participation rate. And so I think you reached a lot of people who really needed to hear a lot of what you had to say. So thank you so much.

Thank you so much, Andy. This was great. Yep. Stay well, everybody. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye.