Studying China in the Absence of Access: Rediscovering a Lost Art

Summary: As our access to Chinese data sources becomes increasingly constrained, and the political atmosphere narrows opportunities for informal collaboration, many China scholars outside China have been scrambling to find new and innovative ways to mitigate these trends. One promising—but rarely mentioned—avenue is dusting off the tools Sinologists utilized from the 1960s through the 1970s, when it was impossible to contemplate the access that many of us have been able to take for granted, but which allowed these scholars to get so many things about China right. What are these skills—the analytical tools and the strategies to deploy them—and how might we be able to adapt them to the current research climate (and the foreseeable future)? This paper combines SAIS China Research Center presentations from 2021 on this subject by four eminent Pekingologists – Joe Fewsmith, Tom Fingar, Alice Miller, and Fred Tiewes – into a single document designed to help us (re)develop our research tools to meet this challenges of this constrained access.  Our colleague, Anne Thurston, provides a preface that provides a historical and a contemporary context for this endeavor.