Why do People Considered "Experts, get China so wrong too?

I was asked a question a while ago and I'm afraid I didn't record who asked it but his name was Terry, and if you see this Terry, I apologise for not recording your handle like I usually do when I respond to a question. I was travelling at the time and thought it was well worth coming back to so I recorded my answer for a future video, the question was, how come people like Kevin Rudd, who is highly influential, experienced and well educated on China always so wrong about what China will do.

For anyone who doesn't know Kevin Rudd, he's a former Prime Minister of Australia, I actually respected and admired him once, I even voted for him once as he was in Brisbane where I lived at the time he entered parliament. A long time ago, he worked in China as a diplomat, he speaks mandarin, has many Chinese connections and is currently the Australian ambassador to the United States.

We should be able to expect that people such as him, would get things right. But he often talks about threats from China, China's coercion and other aspects of China in a negative way, he's written a book on how Xi Jinping thinks and, although I haven't read the book, I've seen a couple of his interviews and couldn't disagree more. I live in China, worked many years here, travel often and travel widely but hold very different opinions.

I'm not a psychologist but I do have qualifications in psychology, I also have qualifications in cross cultural change management and I have more experience living in China than Rudd has ever had.

I'm not advised by public service advisors and I don't rely on think tanks to form my opinions, I don't pay for advice on China from people who live, work and are educated outside of China, I ask Chinese people what they think. I'm not connected to any ambassador, or anyone else who works in the diplomatic arena, nor am I living in an ex-pat bubble in a rich suburb of Shanghai, Shenzhen or Beijing, I live in a small apartment in a tiny city (by Chinese standards) and, when I travel, I usually do so by train or by bike. When I travel by train, I often choose the slow trains, this is where we meet ordinary Chinese people, and this is where we talk with people, the high speed trains are great, i love them but they're very like airplanes, we get on, we sit down and we switch off our external communications and sit quietly for the few hours it takes to whiz across China.

So, with that background, that experience and those qualifications, I have opinions that are worth listening to. However, in government, in Australia, the USA or the UK and Europe, not one person will bother to ask me because they will say, my experience is biased, I like China too much and that is true, I do.

However, I'd argue vehemently that bias can be both negative and positive, but my positive bias should, if we want world peace, if we want global trade and if we want what the Chinese like to call a harmonious society, be the one we give greater consideration to.

Negative bias is usually formed by negative experiences - I'm willing to bet people like Rudd, who did live in China for many years, had no negative experiences here. It's a wonderful place to live and the people he met here would have been welcoming and friendly, so how is it that he's formed these negative impressions of China over the years? It's because of who taught us - Rudd was a diplomat, his education was through other diplomats, he's taught by "experts" who are usually foreigners, and by that I mean they aren't Chinese - where they are taught by Chinese people, the people who teach them have been through vetting and approval processes to ensure they have the "right attitude", they are often Western educated too and they have perceptions given to them and learnt from their experiences, which are very different to those experiences of the family I chat with on the slow train.

He would have lived in a compound with other diplomats, he might even have been advised not to fraternise with the locals, he might have felt oppressed, watched or under suspicion as a member of a foreign diplomatic corps, but he would only have been protected, not oppressed, that's how China works, they protect and care for people but for us foreigners, we can sometimes feel that we are under surveillance, rather than being protected.

I was taught almost everything I know about China by ordinary people who live in China, they love China and understand it deeply, most of them acknowledge the great contributions of people like Mao and Deng, without the biases instilled in us by reading Western written analyses of the Cultural Revolution, or works of fiction written by people who never met them - I learn from real experts, people who would never claim expertise, but who have lived experiences that have shaped who they are and where they are going. Diplomats and politicians learn from people who might claim expertise but have been taught, not always correctly and then pass that information on to other diplomats and politicians, again, not always correctly and always with their own biases. It's very hard when your teacher teaches you that Chinese people will think or act in one way, to realise that this is how we would think and act, not how people born into a different culture, with different backgrounds, different hierarchies and with different experiences would act and this is where behavioural psychology is so important - we do things because they are expected of us in our society, different societies will do things differently, it's true the world over and is often the cause of misunderstandings, even leading to wars.

John Lander is the only diplomat I know alive today, Dennis Argall, who sadly passed away a couple of years ago was another who really deeply understand China as they were the first Australian diplomats to come to China. Look online for interviews with John and for Dennis's written work, he was prolific. When these people worked in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, or the Diplomatic Corps, Australia was heading in a very different direction. Australia opened relations with China before the USA did, Gough Whitlam, one of Australia's most popular Prime Ministers, came to China before Kissinger and Nixon did. He was well advised, he was knowledgeable and he was open to long term mutually beneficial relations with China, which he started the moment he was elected into office.

Whitlam, once elected, pulled out of Vietnam, something the US didn't like at all, he also threatened to curtail US influence in Australia and close down one of the CIA's most important sites at Pine Gap in Australia's Northern Territory, it's not a conspiracy theory to say that he was removed from office in a combined action by the CIA and the British Monarchy it's actually a documented fact.

I never got to interview Dennis Argall but he was something of a mentor to me as I was setting out to speak about China in the public arena, he discovered my online writing and connected with me. He introduced me to some important people such as John Menadue of Pearls and Irritations, as well as John Lander himself. His writing is on a par with Paul Keating, another former Australian Prime Minister who knew, and still asserts = that Australia needed to work with, not against China. Dennis Argall, John Lander and Paul Keating understood China because of the people who advised them - if you look at Keating's generation and the generation of politicians before him, you'll see a very different perception on the same China.

It really isn't China which has changed, it's the perception of China and that perception has been shaped by the US funding into consultancies, academia and think tanks providing misunderstood intelligence guided by biases and by misinterpretation of facts by people who have an instilled bias - Rudd is no exception, Albanese, the current Prime Minster of Australia is not. We can't expect him to know anything at all about China it's not his fault that he's being badly advised, his defence minister Christopher Marles, too is completely in the thrall of US intelligence and his Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong has no idea that China could actually Australia's friend because the intelligence community is telling her differently. She would argue that it's not US Intelligence telling her, it's Australian intelligence but where are they getting it from, the sources are the same biased and ill-informed and mostly Washington funded sources.

It's hardly a surprise that Kevin Rudd and I have difference of opinions, all opinions are formed by experiences, his are very different to mine and although many would say, I don't have access to the higher levels of Chinese governance, nor do I have access to the same intelligence reports he has therefore I'm not getting the full picture, I'd argue that if I were to have access to the same intelligence reports, I'd spend my life refuting them and correcting them as I know they'd be wrong. None of those intelligence sources have access into China's high level of governance, the only people who know what's going on in the Politburo of China are the politburo of China and the people they tell when they come out of heir meetings, it isn't like the White House where when the president farts, they make a press announcement, or when they make secret decisions, they feed it to the media. Beijing isn't a sieve, no one knows what goes on there except people authorised to know - which is why, when I want to know what's happening in China, I ask Chinese people, I read Chinese media, I look for Chinese government information sites and I understand what China is thinking, what they're planning and how they hope to achieve their goals.

When Washington, Canberra or Whitehall want to know what's going on in China, they pay people in Washington, Canberra or Whitehall to make up reports that fit a strategy they'd like to employ.

And that's really why highly influential, well-educated and intelligent people keep getting China wrong. As to why fools like Gordon Chang and Adrian Zenz get things so wrong, that's another video I'll make if there are enough people who want to watch it. Please let me know in the comments and, as usual, don't forget to like, share widely and subscribe to my channel for more of my slightly more accurate reports on China than you'll get through ASPI and the like.