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How the American watchers in China should watch the US
American watchers in China have collectively failed to understand and explain the totality of American politics beyond what the elites have achieved.
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United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken (left) attends a meeting with China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi (right) at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing on April 26, 2024. (AFP/Mark Schiefelbein)
I
n the view of Wang Jisi, a long-time doyen of American studies in the Institute of American Studies in the state-sanctioned Chinese Academy of Arts and Sciences (CASS), China still lacks the necessary team of American specialists to understand the United States.
While Wang's observation was reported in South China Morning Post only at the end of 2021, when the pandemic was already almost over, with Joe Biden safely ensconced in the White House as president of the US, Wang was attesting to the American watchers' lack of general sophistication in understanding the US beyond Pennsylvania Avenue and the Beltway, indeed, K Street, in Washington, DC.
For the lack of a better phrase, thousands of American watchers in China have collectively failed to understand and explain the totality of American politics beyond what the elites have achieved in the White House, Congress and the lobbying firms that deck K Street.
Wang, no doubt, was alluding to the academic community in China, who have been exposed to the American way of life since 1979 at the very least, when the Sino-US relationship was normalized to allow more and more Chinese to study in the US, and failed to understand the phenomenon that Donald Trump and his followers were able to dominate the Republican Party almost in total.
Even a staunch Republican such as Liz Cheney, daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney, was unable to indict or hold Trump in contempt of his office in the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection.
To the degree Cheney eventually succeeded in creating a committee in the US House of Representatives to pore over thousands and thousands of documents on the unruly behavior of Trump and his supporters from all corners of the US, she had to make the sacrifice of reaching out to her rivals i.e. the Democrats.
Had she not adopted this bipartisan approach, Cheney, who harbors the ambition of becoming the first female president of the US one day, failed to enlist the support of the majority leader of the House, Mitch McConnell, to crack the whip to demand all Republicans hold Trump and his advisors truly responsible for the Jan. 6, 2021 event, which claimed the lives of six people as the crowd swamped in to "stop the count”.
