When Two American Analysts Lecture The Economist About China

A reaction to the backlash against David Rennie’s Beijing reporting

David Rennie, the former Beijing bureau chief of The Economist and founding writer of its Chaguan column from May 2018 to September 2024, tweeted earlier today on his latest story:

Just spent week in Beijing talking to officials, scholars. Their msg: 2nd term Trump=opportunity for China. He’s not ideological, sees Xi as a peer, bungled his trade war and can stare down DC China hawks. But he’s unreliable, so a debate on how to use him https://www.economist.com/international/2025/11/11/beijing-insiders-plan-to-play-donald-trump

Dennis Wilder, “Sinologist, Professor Georgetown University & Texas A&M Bush School, former senior US official, former editor of the President’s Daily Brief (PDB)” quote-retweeted:

Why are Western reporters so quick to believe Chinese spin when they get “unique” access to a very few people in Beijing. Could it be that they are now only allowed to talk to those who parrot the party line?

David Rennie replied:

The column reports a line being delivered. Take it with all the salt you like, but messages are worth hearing, just as party newspapers are worth reading and speeches worth studying. I lived and worked in China for ten years in all so I am aware of the existence of a party line

Peter Mattis, President of The Jamestown Foundation and previously a long-time U.S. congressional staffer, injected himself into the discussion:

Dennis Wilder can speak for himself, but my concern is that that is nowhere in the article. These aren’t just analysts, academics, or scholars having a conversation with a reporter. You know it; I know it. But the avg Economist reader does not. It is important context often omitted. This is not to pick on you, because authors & editors the world over cut this kind of context (including in gov’t). If an analyst is from CICIR, shouldn’t we just write that they are an MSS officer with a job to influence? Same for a CFISS/CIISS “analyst” as PLA intelligence?

Before going further, it’s worth acknowledging the limits of Twitter/X as a medium. Posts there are short, reactive, and often written in the heat of the moment. People don’t always think through every implication in 280 characters, and nuance inevitably gets lost. So any interpretation of what was said should come with that important caveat.

And I may well be making a mountain out of a molehill — and may be tarred and feathered for it — but perhaps some hills are worth climbing.

To be fair, I don’t mean to dismiss either man’s background. Dennis Wilder, in particular, has years of experience, and his scholarly work has often added useful perspective to U.S.–China discussions. As for Peter Mattis, his writings have been widely circulated, and I acknowledge the breadth of his output in that domain.

My disagreement here, however, concerns the assumptions revealed in this particular exchange, not their broader professional records.

1. If one thinks David Rennie—or The Economist as an institution—would ever pull any punches when it comes to the Chinese government, they probably haven’t read them, especially its China coverage.

2. Both Dennis Wilder and Peter Mattis appear convinced that Rennie’s report reflected “Chinese spin” and “party line.” If it weren’t for concerns about infringing The Economist’s copyright, I would have simply pasted the entire piece here. But let’s look again at Rennie’s tweet:

Their msg: 2nd term Trump=opportunity for China. He’s not ideological, sees Xi as a peer, bungled his trade war and can stare down DC China hawks. But he’s unreliable, so a debate on how to use him.

Which of these statements is supposed to be “Chinese spin”? That Trump is not ideological? That he sees Xi as a peer? That he bungled his trade war? That he can stare down Washington’s China hawks? That he is unreliable? None of these are controversial judgments—they’re arguably mainstream assessments in the sane parts of Washington itself.

3. It seems premature for Dennis Wilder to conclude that Rennie spoke only to “a very few people” who parrot the party line, which underestimates the professionalism of a veteran correspondent who has led The Economist’s Beijing bureau for six years. As for Peter Mattis’s comment

   These aren’t just analysts, academics, or scholars having a conversation with a reporter. You know it; I know it. But the avg Economist reader does not. It is important context often omitted. This is not to pick on you, because authors & editors the world over cut this kind of context (including in gov’t). If an analyst is from CICIR, shouldn’t we just write that they are an MSS officer with a job to influence? Same for a CFISS/CIISS “analyst” as PLA intelligence?

   unless he somehow tracked Rennie’s entire itinerary hour by hour, that level of certainty suggests a confidence that few outside the room could reasonably have.

4. Both watch China from across the Pacific. Yet they seem to believe they possess superior judgment about interactions on Chinese soil than someone who has lived here for 10 years, 6 of them most recently as a correspondent.

   This kind of distance—observing China largely from afar and drawing conclusions about those who actually live and report here—illustrates a broader gap in understanding.

5. Beyond the tone of certainty, what stands out in Wilder’s and Mattis’s reactions is a kind of reflexive suspicion — an instinct to assume that anyone speaking to a Western journalist must be a conduit of state influence. To illustrate the reflexive suspicion I’m describing, I’ll borrow a century-old metaphor familiar to Chinese readers - a famous line by Lu Xun, one of China’s greatest writers:

On seeing a woman in short sleeves, they immediately think of white arms, naked bodies, genitals, sexual intercourse, promiscuity, and bastards — Chinese people’s imagination is capable of such great advances in matters such as these.

Forgive the crude analogy, but Lu Xun’s satire—so deeply ingrained in Chinese cultural memory that it functions purely as a metaphor here—captures perfectly a mindset that leaps to the most cynical conclusion imaginable. For some who focus intensely on questions of “Chinese influence,” every interaction risks being read as a plot, every conversation as an act of manipulation.

6. I don’t deny that many - but not all - Chinese interlocutors now often choose their words carefully when talking to Western media. Some are increasingly cautious, and yes, access for foreign journalists has grown much more limited and bureaucratically constrained.

   But it is a grave error to extrapolate from this reality that all Chinese people who speak to foreign reporters do so under prior government or Party approval, or that their words are pre-censored scripts. That line of reasoning dehumanizes Chinese voices altogether, reducing them to mere instruments. It betrays an inability—or unwillingness—to believe that there can still be sophisticated, candid Chinese individuals out of 1.4 billion people.

   At a deeper level, this also seems to reflect a certain narrowing of empathy — a tendency I’ve noticed among some China watchers in recent years. Withholding the benefit of the doubt toward Chinese interlocutors is something I’ve come to understand, even expect. Yet when skepticism hardens into an assumption of bad faith — a reluctance to allow that any interaction could be genuine — it risks becoming an intellectual constraint rather than a safeguard.

7. There is another layer of condescension and self-importance at play. The underlying logic of their critique seems to suggest that Beijing would go out of its way to court, influence, or hunt David Rennie and The Economist in a week to implant a “party line.” With all due respect, this vastly overestimates the centrality of a Western narrative, albeit an influential one, about China and Beijing's supposedly obsessive focus on it.

8. The tone of both pushback tweets — their binary framing, their air of certainty, and their limited willingness to see either an experienced journalist as a professional or his Chinese interlocutors as independent thinkers — reflects a confidence that has become all too familiar.

Photo by Samuel Regan-Asante on Unsplash