Broken Engagement — US-China Experts in Recovery

Celebrating New Sinology

自擺烏龍

Paris taxi drivers are notoriously sophisticated in their use of invective. ‘Hé, va donc, structuraliste!’ is one of their recent apostrophes — which makes one wonder when they will start calling their victims ‘China Experts’!

— Simon Leys, 1981

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For me, the timing of the publication of Breaking the Engagement: How China Won & Lost America by David Shambaugh, academic and sometime government adviser, is delicious. It comes just as speculation about Xi Jinping’s dominance over China’s party-state was reaching fever pitch. Alex Colville of the China Media Project summed up the frenzy in the following way:

A growing number of media outlets in recent weeks are bearish on the prospects facing Xi Jinping. The Daily Telegraph reports that “there are signs China’s leader could be in political trouble.” The New York Post claims Xi has been “conspicuously missing from the pages of the People’s Daily.” At the slightly unhinged end of the spectrum, beyond innumerable reports from Indian media outlets, one influencer insists that former president Hu Jintao is now secretly pulling the strings — quietly calculating, like any Capricorn.

[Note: For a sober analysis, see also Holly Snape, Containing Xi, or refining party rule?, Observing China, 9 July 2025; and, see my Deathwatch for a Chairman, 17 July 2018. See also Beyond the Whispers — China Watching in a New Era of Pekingology.]

Just a decade ago, David Shambaugh had confidently opined that ‘The endgame of Chinese communist rule has now begun, I believe, and it has progressed further than many think’.

In an essay titled The Coming Chinese Crackup published by The Wall Street Journal on 6 March 2015, Shambaugh announced, in his trademark ex cathedra fashion, that:

We don’t know what the pathway from now until the end will look like, of course. It will probably be highly unstable and unsettled. But until the system begins to unravel in some obvious way, those inside of it will play along—thus contributing to the facade of stability.

Shambaugh hastened to add that ‘Predicting the demise of authoritarian regimes is a risky business’. After all, he admitted,

Few Western experts forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union before it occurred in 1991; the CIA missed it entirely. The downfall of Eastern Europe’s communist states two years earlier was similarly scorned as the wishful thinking of anticommunists—until it happened. The post-Soviet “color revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan from 2003 to 2005, as well as the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, all burst forth unanticipated.

Even so, back in March 2015, he brashly claimed authority for himself and those of his ilk:

China-watchers have been on high alert for telltale signs of regime decay and decline ever since the regime’s near-death experience in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Since then, several seasoned Sinologists have risked their professional reputations by asserting that the collapse of CCP rule was inevitable. Others were more cautious—myself included. But times change in China, and so must our analyses.

We were assured that:

Communist rule in China is unlikely to end quietly. A single event is unlikely to trigger a peaceful implosion of the regime. Its demise is likely to be protracted, messy and violent. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that Mr. Xi will be deposed in a power struggle or coup d’état. With his aggressive anticorruption campaign—a focus of this week’s National People’s Congress—he is overplaying a weak hand and deeply aggravating key party, state, military and commercial constituencies.

The Chinese have a proverb, waiying, neiruan—hard on the outside, soft on the inside. Mr. Xi is a genuinely tough ruler. He exudes conviction and personal confidence. But this hard personality belies a party and political system that is extremely fragile on the inside.

Based on media reports, insider gossip and his recent academic tourism in China, Shambaugh went on to list five indicators that the Chinese party-state was imperilled (for these, see The Coming Chinese Crackup). And then this:

We cannot predict when Chinese communism will collapse, but it is hard not to conclude that we are witnessing its final phase. The CCP is the world’s second-longest ruling regime (behind only North Korea), and no party can rule forever.

This final observation brings to mind another line from The China Experts, the 1981 review-essay of the writings of Ross Terrill, a one-time best-selling China expert, by Simon Leys quoted above:

Most of Terrill’s utterances come across as bland and irresistible truisms. (For which he seems to share a taste with some famous statesmen. Remember de Gaulle: “China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese”; or Nixon’s comment on the Great Wall: “This is a great wall.”)

Fortunately for some, no one else has kept a Simon Leys-like tally of the frequently contradictory and often nonsensical claims advanced by the ‘expert class’ over the past half a century.

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It is also piquant to recall The Coming Chinese Crackup today, when its author is now living in the fractious and shaky autocracy of Donald J. Trump. But irony is not Professor Shambaugh’s strong suit and, as the review of his new book, reproduced below in full, surmises:

In the end, Breaking the Engagement mirrors the very pathology it condemns: grandiose ambition unmoored from rigorous self-scrutiny. It offers a morality play in which earnest Americans, hypnotized by profit or prophecy, are duped by an inscrutable China, only to awake chastened under the harsh fluorescent light of great-power competition.

After having been so egregiously wrong in 2015 about the impending collapse of the People’s Republic, perhaps Professor Shambaugh will have better luck predicting the future of the American Republic in 2025.

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I remember the heady days of ‘China collapsism’ all too well. The alternative Chinese media, as well as the remnants of independent opinion, colleagues, friends and rumour-mongers had been obsessing over the party-state’s ‘end of days’ from just after the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Over the years, I too wrote about some of these prognostications, including the dire warnings of analysts like Deng Yuwen and the evangelising of pro-Party lobby groups like The Children of Yan’an. I also published an issue of China Heritage Quarterly devoted to the ‘Late Qing’ 晚清 wǎn Qīng and questions surrounding China’s Prosperous Age. I had followed the ebb and flow of what Gloria Davies called worrying about China for decades, still I was cautious about making predictions about the future: the past was already inscrutable enough for me.

Shortly after David Shambaugh outlined his ‘five indicators of collapse’ in The Wall Street Journal in 2015, Peter Hartcher, foreign affairs editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, sought my reaction. Below I preface the review of Breaking the Engagement by China Thought Express with the article Peter wrote at the time, titled Is the Chinese dragon losing its puff?

China Thought Express is a Substack publication that advertises itself as introducing ‘the most distinguished thinkers, writers, and artists from contemporary China’ ‘free from political and ideological influences’. Sandwiched between Peter Hartcher’s article and the review of Shambaugh’s book, I’m also including some old observations that I made about ‘The Disappointed’, that ragtag group of erstwhile China boosters who, by and large, were flat footed by Beijing’s egregious authoritarian turn under Xi Jinping. (This is paired with ‘The Golden Mean’, the preamble to Even Now, It’s Still Pays to Look Back). In Shambaugh’s telling, they include his ‘Engagement Coalition’. Many remain aggrieved today, just as in an earlier era some international Maoists felt betrayed by Deng Xiaoping’s disavowal of radicalism.

This is part of our 2025 series devoted to Celebrating New Sinology. We pair it with Even Now, It’s Still Pays to Look Back, the introduction to Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium, which originally appeared in February 2022, and two other chapters:

  • New Sinology in the Era of Xi Jinping, an unpublished lecture from 2015; and,
  • Xi Jinping’s Cultural Revolution, a previously unpublished essay.

I also recommend the two parts of Chapter Three in Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium:

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One can ‘chase the dragon’ 追龍 zhuī lóng or, for that matter, ‘ride the dragon’ 駕龍 jià lóng, but for the Chinese rubric of this chapter we have chosen 自擺烏龍 zì bǎi wū lóng, a Cantonese expression that can be translated as ‘to score an own goal’. Self-inflicted wounds are preferable to 龍馭賓天 lóng yù bīn tiān, riding the dragon to heaven.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
12 July 2025

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Related Material in China Heritage:

In Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium:

Is the Chinese dragon losing its puff?

Peter Hartcher

16 March 2015

The collapse of the Chinese Communist Party has been predicted many times before. But never by David Shambaugh, an eminent US Sinologist of some 40 years’ standing. That changed last week when he wrote a much-discussed essay in the Wall Street Journal titled “The Coming Chinese Crackup“.

“The endgame of Chinese communist rule has now begun,” wrote the professor of political science at George Washington University. “Its demise is likely to be protracted, messy and violent.”

China under the Communist Party has been described as history’s most successful dictatorship. China is not just a rising power: it has risen. While average income per person in the US grew fourfold from 1980 to 2013, and sixfold in Australia in the same years, in China it burgeoned by a factor of 35, measured in current US dollar terms, according to the World Bank.

China today is the second biggest economy and military spender on the planet. The Communist Party regime is now in its 66th year.

So where does Shambaugh see evidence of imminent collapse? He lists five “telling indications of the regime’s vulnerability”.

First is that “China’s economic elites have one foot out the door, and they are ready to flee en masse if the system really begins to crumble”. He cites a survey of 393 millionaires and billionaires by Shanghai’s Hurun Research Institute; 64 per cent said that they were emigrating, or planning to do so.

Second is Xi’s harsh political repression: “A more secure and confident government would not institute such a severe crackdown. It is a symptom of the party leadership’s deep anxiety and insecurity”.

Third is the hollowness of official belief in Xi’s doctrines. Officials are only going through the motions, he says. He recalls sitting through a conference on Xi’s call for a “China Dream” where it was “evident that the propaganda had lost its power”. Demand for a pamphlet by Xi was so feeble at the Central Party School bookshop that the sales staff were giving it away.

Fourth, Shambaugh says, corruption runs deep and will outlive Xi’s anti-corruption purge, which will succeed only in enraging powerful interests.

Finally, the economy “for all the Western views of it as an unstoppable juggernaut is stuck in a series of systemic traps from which there is no easy exit,” he says. Xi’s attempt to break the traps, his economic reform plan, is encountering stiff internal resistance.

The exact manner and timing of collapse, says Shambaugh, is impossible to predict.

Predicting the demise of China’s regime is not quite as startling as it might seem. In some ways it’s entirely routine.

The blindness of the West to the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union was a chastening experience. Analysts since have been hyperalert to a Chinese Communist downfall.

Hundreds of supposed seers and Chinawatchers have cried wolf in the past quarter-century, falling into embarrassed silence when their phantom wolves are consumed by the rampaging Chinese dragon. This church of false prophets even has a name – “collapsists”.

Nor is it just a Western thing. As a historian of China, director of the ANU’s Australian Centre on China in the World, Geremie Barme, points out: “The Communists themselves speculate internally about whether the party will collapse. They speculate about it constantly.”

No party can rule forever, anywhere. The big questions are exactly when and exactly how the regime will collapse. And David Shambaugh himself says he cannot answer either.

The Soviet collapse was, at core, a crisis of confidence. The Communist party was not challenged by another party, by a coup or by an uprising. The party yielded much of its power because its leadership had lost the self-belief and the will to go on.

China’s Xi Jinping may have many deficits, but a deficit of confidence is not one of them. “Confidence is rising, not falling,” says Barme. The well-regarded China economist, Arthur Kroeber, concurs: “Xi Jinping’s government is not weak and desperate, but forceful and adaptable.”

Kroeber adds a fundamental consideration: “The forces that might push for systemic political change are far weaker than the Party.”

There is a major economic crunch beginning, certainly. But the Communist regime has prevailed through much worse. There is no sign that the instruments of coercion are wilting.

Barme, a longstanding acquaintance of Shambaugh, laughs at his anecdotes of hollowing faith among officialdom: “Every political conference I’ve been to in China in 42 years, the officials are always bored. Everyone’s bored. The leader’s works never sell. They always have to give them away.”

Barme suspects that Shambaugh’s conversion into the church of “collapsism” tells us more about today’s America than it does about China.

“If this were written by a Spanish author or a Greek author or an Italian author, they’d say, ‘Yes, we have capital flight, corruption, a lack of reform, massive popular dissent – sounds like a normal day,” Barme argues.

“However, we are looking at an American writing about Chinese collapse amid huge anxiety about US politics and its future. I agree that Xi’s China is uglier, more repressive and narrow, yet it’s more confident, more articulate and more focused than at any time since Mao Zedong. That’s why an American is worried.”

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Source:

[Note: See also:

For my take on the nascent Xi Jinping era at the time, see:

‘Oh, for shame, why aren’t you blushing?’

— a note on The Disappointed

老羞成怒

Since the rise of Xi Jinping in late 2012, it has been a commonplace for The Disappointed — that is, a disparate group of the powerful, the influential and the opinionated scattered both within and outside China — to bewail how the leader has reasserted Party power and encouraged in the People’s Republic a more muscular regional and global stance.

The Disappointed have been confronted, and affronted, by what is now dubbed China’s ‘authoritarian turn’. To reverse a well-known expression, one has the impression that The Chinese People (albeit the un-elected representative of the People, the Communist party-state) have hurt their feelings!

The Disappointed can be thought of as those ‘China Hands’ nostalgic for beliefs and hopes that were predicated on a range of economic, political and cultural assumptions, along with a kind of condescension that smacked of colonial hauteur. That is to say, in their obsessive focus on neo-liberal economic goals along with unquestioned presumptions about globalisation they — be they politicians, analysts, business people, academics, journalists or a host of others, including Chinese factional players — repeatedly ignored or underestimated what the Party and its theoreticians (along with fellow-travelling academic New Marxists) were saying, thinking and actually doing. Too often this encouraged a purblind belief in immutable historical and economic forces that predetermined China’s path forward. Such near-burlesque confidence — which, in many respects, mirrored the dogmatic historical determinism of the Communists — has been challenged by significant changes in official policy and rhetoric over recent years.

Readers familiar with our publications, and of views that date back to the early 1980s, will be aware that a number of ‘inflection points’ in post-1978 history long foretold the possibility of the kinds of changes that have been witnessed under Xi Jinping and Wang Qishan. In this 2019 anniversary year, we would do well to recall three such moments:

  • March 1979: the dissident Democracy Wall activist Wei Jingsheng posted his essay ‘Do We Want Democracy or New Autocracy?‘ 要民主還是要新的獨裁 leading to his arrest and long-term imprisonment. Wei’s poster was followed a few days later by the announcement of the Four Basic Principles 四項基本原則, ‘core Party values’ that have remained at the heart of the one-party state, its Constitution and its draconian rule ever since;
  • January 1987: following student demonstrations in favour of media freedom in late 1986, the ouster of Hu Yaobang, Communist Party General Secretary, and the purge of dissenting Party members who championed ‘bourgeois liberalisation’, that is who advocated political reform, a free media along with intellectual and cultural pluralism. These events reflected an on-going political and ideological contest that resulted in
  • June 1989: the fall of Zhao Ziyang, the Beijing Massacre and Deng Xiaoping’s re-affirmation of the dangers of Western-led attempts to pursue ‘peaceful evolution’, that is a policy first championed by the United States in the late 1950s aimed at encouraging socialist countries like China to abandon one-party dictatorships in favour of citizens’ rights and constitutional democracy.

Even for the latecomers, in particular from the 2007-2008 Olympic Year, it was evident that the People’s Republic was leaning further in to its noxious brand of authoritarianism. This too was a significant ‘inflection point’, and Chan Koonchung addressed it perceptively. As the author of In an Age of Prosperity observes in the interview below, since the People’s Republic remains in a ‘party-state prosperous age’, he sees no reason to write a sequel.

Only now are The Disappointed fitfully catching up with four decades of reality, not to mention the last decade of China’s ‘prosperous age’, and all that it entails.

— from Geremie R. Barmé, Sic transit gloria mundi — Ten Years of A Prosperous Age, 14 February 2019

[Note: For more on this subject, see Even Now, It’s Not Too Late to Looked Back.]

Source: China Thought Express, 10 July 2025

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Turning Against Engagement:

A Close Reading of a Former China Hand’s Renunciation

by China Thought Express 中國思想快遞

 

David Shambaugh’s Breaking the Engagement: How China Won & Lost America (Oxford University Press, 456 pp., June 12 2025) enters the canon of U.S.-China polemics with the sonic boom of an overloaded cargo plane. From its portentous title to its epilogue’s sermonette on the inevitability of strategic rivalry, the book aims to supply a grand narrative explaining how an energetic bipartisan consensus to “engage” China metastasized into today’s bipartisan consensus to confront it.

Shambaugh’s organizing conceit is what he calls the “Engagement Coalition,” a loose alignment of government officials, multinational CEOs, journalists, think-tankers, and sinologists who, beginning in the early 1970s, “bet their careers and, in many cases, their national honor” on the notion that commercial exchange and people-to-people contact would coax China toward liberal democracy. By tracking this coterie from its post-Nixon genesis through its supposed apogee in the 1999 WTO deal and its Götterdämmerung during the first Trump term, the author hopes to show that the Coalition was both the engine of rapprochement and the architect of its undoing, having lulled Washington into a false sense of inevitability about Chinese reform. The periodization is neat—too neat. Shambaugh never satisfactorily defines membership criteria, much less demonstrates how such a heterogenous set of actors could move in lockstep for half a century. Lobbyists angling for market share, journalists angling for scoops, and academics angling for archival access made common cause now and then, but to elevate their intermittent alignment into a deterministic “Coalition” is to retrofit intellectual scaffolding onto a jumble of opportunisms.

The first third of the book, devoted to the Coalition’s “rise,” reads like a greatest-hits mixtape of Cold War nostalgia. We get whirlwind drive-bys of Kissinger’s secret flight, the deluge of ping-pong diplomacy, and the sentimental idyll of exchange students on Beijing campuses in the 1980s. Shambaugh repeatedly claims to be “setting the record straight,” yet his new evidence amounts mostly to personal diaries and dinner-party recollections. Primary-source excavation—declassified memos, private-sector lobbying archives, unpublished oral histories—rarely appears. Instead, episodes already well-tilled by Ezra Vogel, Orville Schell, and James Mann reemerge draped in the author’s autobiographical asides: he was there, and therefore it was so. The scholarly rigor one expects from a seasoned China hand gives way to anecdotage worthy of a college reunion speech.

When the narrative arrives at 1989, Shambaugh insists that Tiananmen should have snapped the Coalition’s spell, only to argue, almost in the same breath, that the crackdown “paradoxically fortified” engagement by shocking elites into doubling down on reform-through-trade. The causal chain is asserted, not demonstrated. One looks in vain for granular data—say, campaign-finance tallies, congressional voting patterns, corporate lobbying outlays—tracking how and when engagement-minded actors prevailed over skeptics. A single, scatter-plotted chart could have tested the thesis; none is offered. The result is a curious historiographical two-step: the book denounces predecessors for ignoring structural forces, then substitutes its own impressionistic collage.

The middle chapters promise to anatomize the Coalition’s “apex”—the 1990s boom culminating in China’s WTO accession—but devolve into board-room voyeurism and Beltway gossip. Shambaugh’s portraits of Henry Paulson, Jeffrey Immelt, and Bob Zoellick bristle with insider color yet rarely rise above character sketches. He likens Paulson to “an evangelical preacher” and Immelt to “a sentimental mercantilist,” colorful, perhaps, but analytically thin. At one point the author calls a White House staffer’s memos “Rosetta Stones of engagement ideology,” then quotes three sentences before reverting to paraphrase, never mind close textual exegesis. For a book that sets out to chart the intellectual edifice of a grand strategy, it skimps on the intellectual scaffolding—no conceptual genealogy of “constructive engagement,” no serious reckoning with parallel détente thinking toward the Soviet Union, no discussion of liberal internationalism’s theoretical grammar.

By the time Shambaugh reaches his pièce de résistance—the Coalition’s “collapse” circa 2017—his tone shifts from dispassionate chronicler to ex-believer scourging heresy. He depicts Donald Trump’s Section 301 tariffs as “shock therapy” that “exposed the hollowness” of earlier idealism. Yet he sidesteps the inconvenient fact that the bugle call for strategic competition predated Trump, echoing in Obama-era export-control debates and Senate Armed Services hearings. Nor does he dwell on how Beijing’s own policy lurches—state-led cyberespionage, island-building in the South China Sea, and Xinjiang’s surveillance gulag—handed decouplers their most potent talking points. In Shambaugh’s dramaturgy, the Coalition’s internal contradictions implode all on their own, with Chinese agency relegated to a narrative aftershock. History is thus reduced to a morality play about American naiveté.

Methodologically, the book is infatuated with the memoirist’s prerogative. Shambaugh cites his role in Carter-era exchange programs, Clinton-era think-tank meetings, and Obama-era Track 2 dialogues as though proximity conferred omniscience. Where archival paucity obstructs detail, he pads the record with rhetorical questions: “Who among us, in 1999, truly grasped China’s Leninist resilience?” Such gestures may humanize the scholar, but they also betray an evidentiary deficit. An intellectually honest reckoning with his own earlier writings—many of which extolled the very engagement he now derides—would have lent the book self-critical depth. Instead, he sprinkles the text with defensive disclaimers: “I was hardly alone,” “Hindsight is 20/20,” “The data were murky then.” These read less like candor and more like preemptive legal briefs.

As literature, the prose swings between oracular pronouncement (“History will record 2018 as the year illusions died”) and pop-journalistic zing (“The corporate types finally woke up and smelled the yuan”). Such rhetorical ricochet might be forgiven if the argumentative line were taut, yet the chapters meander, doubling back on themes already hashed out. A harsh editor could have trimmed a third of the pages without sacrificing substance, exposing the skeleton of what should have been a muscular essay, not a brick-heavy tome. The repetition grows wearisome: every ten pages the reader is reminded that “engagement became entrapment,” a phrase Shambaugh must imagine thunderously original the first five times he pens it.

What, then, of the book’s value for understanding present-day U.S.-China dynamics? Its principal contribution is negative: by overwriting the diversity of motives behind engagement and by caricaturing its downfall as ideological reckoning rather than policy learning, Shambaugh inadvertently demonstrates how self-flagellating meta-narratives can obscure concrete statecraft. The volume reminds us, albeit unintentionally, that the real drivers of twenty-first-century competition reside less in Beltway psychology than in structural power shifts: Chinese technological catch-up, demographic divergence, supply-chain geopolitics, and the weaponization of interdependence. These hard variables make only cameo appearances here. A reader who comes seeking an integrated model linking domestic political economy, alliance systems, and global governance will close the book hungry.

When it comes to forecasting future relations, Breaking the Engagement offers little beyond mood music. Having narrated engagement as a pendulum swing fated to reverse, Shambaugh leaps to the prophetic claim that decoupling is the “new orthodoxy” for at least a generation. He gestures at the potential for calibrated coexistence but dismisses it as “wishful nostalgia,” thereby leaving a scorched rhetorical earth inhospitable to policy nuance. The irony is acute: a treatise that lambastes earlier scholars for binary thinking reproduces a binary forecast—cooperation passé, confrontation perpetual. In brushing aside the variegated realities of selective integration (semiconductors here, climate finance there, maritime crisis-management hotlines everywhere), the book narrows the reader’s imagination precisely when strategic creativity is most needed.

Even the author’s policy prescriptions—tighten export controls, block sensitive FDI, expand alliance techno-pacts—plateau at a consultant’s white-paper level of abstraction. They neither grapple with enforcement trade-offs nor acknowledge the economic blowback to America’s own innovation ecosystem. The reader is told that the United States must “invest in itself” while “denying China’s worst impulses,” bromides that could have been copied from any bipartisan commission over the past five years. There is no granular roadmap, no matrix of costs and benefits, no edge-case scenario testing. Strategy is rendered as attitude.

A scathing review must, in fairness, weigh the shards of merit. Shambaugh’s firsthand vignettes—watching a U.S. Chamber of Commerce delegation blanch at Zhou Xiaochuan’s candor in 2003, or witnessing the contortions of think-tank fund-raisers courting both Lockheed Martin and Huawei—do illuminate the sociological soup in which engagement thrived. The author’s instinct that personal networks mattered, sometimes more than institutional mandates, is intuitively persuasive. Yet this insight cries out for systematic mapping: social-network analysis of revolving-door career trajectories, quantitative coding of congressional testimonies, empirical substantiation beyond diary entries. Such a project would have advanced the field; instead, we get a book that alternates between dinner-table gossip and sweeping verdict.

In the end, Breaking the Engagement mirrors the very pathology it condemns: grandiose ambition unmoored from rigorous self-scrutiny. It offers a morality play in which earnest Americans, hypnotized by profit or prophecy, are duped by an inscrutable China, only to awake chastened under the harsh fluorescent light of great-power competition. Yet by overstating consensus where contestation reigned, by inflating his cohort’s sway over a half-century of policy gyrations, and by eliding the complex feedback loops of domestic politics and international structure, Shambaugh leaves us with a morality tale rather than an analytic framework. Readers seeking historical color will find a palette, if a muddied one; readers seeking guidance for the turbulent decade ahead will find a signpost pointing in every direction at once. The tragedy is not that America “won and lost” China, nor that engagement died of naïveté; it is that a scholar of genuine insight chose to package retrospective self-justification as prophecy, thereby adding noise to a discourse already cacophonous. Intellectual decoupling, it seems, can be as perilous as economic.

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Source:

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In April 2010, I founded The Australian Centre on China in the World (CIW) with the support of Kevin Rudd, then prime minister of Australia, and Ian Chubb, vice-chancellor of The Australian National University. The following year I presented the inaugural CIW Annual Lecture, the title of which was Australia and China in the World: Whose Literacy?. On the eve of my retirement in October 2015, I was invited to give another lecture. I called it ‘New Sinology and the Xi Jinping Era’ (the text is reproduced in a separate chapter of Celebrating New Sinology.)

The title of the 2025 CIW Annual Lecture was ‘The Evolution of Contemporary China Studies in the US: Coming Full Circle?’. Presented by David Shambaugh, it appear to have been a retail exercise on behalf of the volume reviewed above.

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This chapter, inspired as it is by David Shambaugh’s Breaking the Engagement, will also be included in Watching China Watching, a series that began with an observation by Simon Leys:

The Expert should in all circumstances say nothing, but he should say it at great length, in four or five volumes, thoughtfully and from a prestigious vantage point. The Expert cultivates Objectivity, Balance and Fair-Mindedness, in any conflict between your subjectivity and his subjectivity, these qualities enable him, at the crucial juncture, to lift himself by his bootstraps high up into the realm of objectivity, whence he will arbitrate in all serenity and deliver the final conclusion.

— from Recalling an Expert ‘China Expert’

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