When former Chinese President Hu Jintao was abruptly escorted off the stage at the Communist Party Congress in October 2022, global speculation erupted. Was the elderly Hu genuinely unwell, or was President Xi Jinping publicly asserting dominance? Some months later, Foreign Minister Qin Gang mysteriously vanished, triggering intense speculation until his quiet replacement. These episodes illuminate a troubling paradox: despite unprecedented access to information, the inner workings of China’s political elite remain strikingly opaque. Under Xi’s increasingly secretive rule, Western analysts have thus revived the Cold War-era discipline of “Pekingology” – the meticulous decoding of subtle signals from Beijing’s corridors of power.
Reading the tea leaves
During the Cold War era, Western Pekingology was essential for deciphering China’s carefully guarded politics. Without direct sources, experts parsed cryptic statements published in the People’s Daily, analysed official photographs, and scrutinised seating arrangements at major events to detect shifts within the Communist Party’s inner circles. At times, this meticulous approach yielded prescient insights – famously predicting the Sino-Soviet split and internal power struggles during the Cultural Revolution. With Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms and cautious political opening during the 1970s and 80s, the necessity of interpretive guesswork gradually diminished.
Xi’s fortress of secrecy
Under Xi Jinping, however, despite an unprecedented abundance of public information, the opacity surrounding China’s highest political leadership has intensified sharply. Since assuming power in 2012, Xi has systematically dismantled the incremental openness that characterised preceding decades, consolidating power and tightening control over information channels. Independent voices have been silenced, prominent journalists expelled, and civil society increasingly constrained. A stringent anti-espionage law introduced in 2023 places even routine exchanges with foreigners under suspicion, transforming China’s political core into a virtual fortress of secrecy.
The rise of China-watchers
This renewed secrecy at the top echelons of China’s political structure has fuelled a thriving market of China-watchers in the West. Prominent figures such as former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd – fluent in Mandarin and personally acquainted with Xi – regularly provide influential analyses, characterising Xi’s ideology as “Marxist nationalism”. Veteran scholars such as Orville Schell, widely regarded as America’s preeminent China expert, offer incisive insights shaped by decades of observation. Influential newsletters such as Bill Bishop’s Sinocism, Noah Barkin’s Watching China in Europe, and Thomas des Garets Geddes’ Sinification have become essential reading for policymakers and academics. Similarly, the CSIS’s podcast Pekingology dissects Beijing’s opaque policy landscape. Remarkably, historically marginalised Chinese voices now also inform Western debates, notably former Xinhua journalist Wang Zichen’s newsletter Pekingnology, which translates crucial Communist Party documents.
Yet the very label “China expert” remains profoundly contested. Throughout the 20th century, China expertise in public discourse, policy advice, and diplomatic mediation often resulted from self-attribution or external labelling. Interpreting China has long resembled a competitive marketplace, where journalists, academics, and diplomats vied for influence, with success frequently determined more by networks and social standing than by genuine expertise.
Recently, however, there has been a notable shift towards associating China expertise more closely with verifiable competence or specialist knowledge – a reaction, perhaps, to influential yet controversial figures such as former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, whose interpretive authority often met with scepticism from scholarly circles, highlighting how political prominence rather than academic rigour frequently shaped public perceptions.
The limits of Pekingology
Despite the vast proliferation of open-source information on China since the Cold War, genuine insights into elite politics remain persistently elusive. Contemporary Pekingology – particularly regarding Beijing’s Zhongnanhai, the nucleus of political power – remains fundamentally speculative, largely dependent on inference, subjective interpretation, and limited empirical grounding. This vulnerability was strikingly demonstrated in late 2022 by unfounded rumours of a military coup against Xi, propagated by exile groups and sensationalist media. The rapid international spread of these false reports vividly illustrated how quickly misinformation fills the vacuum left by official silence.
Similarly, Qin Gang’s disappearance underscored the inherent interpretative constraints faced by external observers. Even the best-informed analysts struggled to offer definitive explanations, highlighting what scholar Jude Blanchette describes as the fundamental “unpredictability and opacity” of China’s political system. Events such as Qin’s abrupt removal starkly underline the boundaries of knowability – the inherent limits to reliably grasping the internal dynamics within China’s meticulously guarded political walls. Understanding these boundaries is essential to avoid policy miscalculations in engagements with Beijing.
Embracing uncertainty
The return of Pekingology reveals a profound irony: although the digital age offers unparalleled access to information, understanding China’s inner political workings has arguably never been more challenging. The opacity at the heart of Xi Jinping’s China not only fuels rampant speculation but also compels Western observers to acknowledge their own interpretative constraints. As analysts sift through ambiguous signals emanating from Zhongnanhai, it becomes evident that decoding Chinese politics remains an exercise fraught with uncertainty and inherent risk. Yet openly acknowledging these constraints transcends scholarly humility – it constitutes a strategic imperative. In an era defined by geopolitical tensions and miscalculations, recognising the boundaries of reliable knowledge about China is perhaps the most crucial step towards informed and responsible engagement with the tightly guarded corridors of Beijing’s power.
