Interpreting Official China

The Politburo of the Communist Party of China Central Committee met last week. After reading several posts by respected China hands reporting on this high-level meeting, I was struck once again by a significant deficit America suffers from in dealing with China. Most of us do not understand the language official China uses to express itself and therefore too often miss the real story.

Zhongnanhai Leadership Compound, Beijing

The Politburo meeting set priorities for China’s economic policy and political focus for the balance of the year. Interpreting the meeting communique tells us that China’s leaders are increasingly worried about the domestic economy and want to see greater action at all levels of government throughout the country in righting the listing economic ship. Consumption (goods and services) is anemic. Youth unemployment is soaring. The crashed property sector remains mired in the doldrums. Government debt is uncomfortably high. The stock market is volatile.

For purposes of U.S.-China relations, the issue is that digesting the communique and trying to determine what is probably happening inside the veil that is Chinese governance requires an advanced degree in Chinese official-speak. This is a degree that too few Americans (and even fewer politicians) possess. As a result, the nuance and much of the underlying meaning of what China does and why escapes us. This weakens our ability to work with and respond to China and needs to be remedied.

Official Chinese CCP pronouncements, no matter the subject matter, are painstakingly crafted, turgid, and abstruse. Nothing is straightforward. In a nutshell, official China speaks in code, and we do not have an easy-to-use decoder. For a culture like America’s where we are overtly direct, this leads to further misperception and misunderstanding, which in turn lead to angst and then suspicion.

As Zichen Wang wrote in the Pekingnology, “Economy-focused readouts should be parsed with more care than given to a Federal Reserve statement and the Fed chair’s post-meeting remarks: changes in verbs, modifiers and omissions can carry substantive meaning.“

On their face, what are we to make of the meeting’s calls to “intensify countercyclical adjustment” and “promptly plan and roll out pragmatic and effective incremental policies” or statements that “macroeconomic policies must be more forceful and effective, accelerating the pace of fiscal expenditure and the use of bond funds” (Inside China)?

We must look for direction. “Under the conventions of Chinese official reporting, formulations such as ‘the meeting emphasized’ and ‘the meeting pointed out’ are generally understood to derive primarily from the remarks and judgments of the highest-ranking participant. They are then issued in the name of the meeting, turning those judgments into its collective consensus and institutional outcome.”

Adjectives can be momentous. “In official Chinese language, the addition of gaodu, or ‘highly,’ is not merely rhetorical decoration. It raises the political weight assigned to a problem and tells officials that it requires closer attention. The April Politburo meeting acknowledged ‘some difficulties and challenges’; July instructed the Party-state to pay ‘great attention’ to them. The tone has plainly changed.”

I am a lawyer. I know that words matter. But this level of opacity is mind-blowingly muddy. Even in English translation, we need a glossary, a flowchart comparing new statements to those prior, and better yet, a good codebook to help us interpret official China. And we need more people who dig through the code and more people to listen to what they say in order to help us understand how China speaks and what it means.