Watching China Watching (VI) William Sima’s China & ANU — diplomats, adventurers, scholars published in late 2015 (and available for free download) is a study of Australia’s national awakening to, and continued anxieties  about, Asia (once called the ‘Near North’) more generally and in regard to China in particular.… Read

Watching China Watching (IV) Here we introduced an excerpt from The Tradition and Prototypes of the China-Watcher, a George E. Morrison Lecture presented by Lo Hui-min in 1976. As editor of East Asian History — a position I had taken up at Hui-min’s insistence — I had the pleasure of reproducing the lecture in the pages of that journal in 1996 (see East Asian History, vol.11 (June 1996): 91-110).… Read

Watching China Watching (III) It is over half a century since I first encountered New China Newspeak in English. It was 1967 and a classmate at my high-school in Sydney introduced me to the clangorous prose of Peking Review.… Read

Watching China Watching (II) In The China Expert and The Ten Commandments — Watching China Watching (I) we featured Simon Leys’ observations on China Experts. Although they were written nearly four decades ago, we are confident that readers today will enjoy the resonances between the Mao era and the Xi imperium.… Read

Watching China Watching (I) To date, we have featured the work of the celebrated Hong Kong political commentator and ‘China Watcher par excellence’, Lee Yee (see The Best China). In ‘Watching China Watching’ we offer a range of reflections by others on the study and appreciation of the Chinese People’s Republic.… Read

On 1 January 2017, we published A Monkey King’s Journey to the East. In that inaugural China Heritage essay we contemplated with bemused trepidation the first day of the first year of a newly empowered, and enthroned, American Weltanschauung.… Read