All of this stuff used to bother me, but I’ve now taken it as the flip-side of the talking-dog effect that made my Chinese blog popular in the first place: one is either a lovable foreigner (It’s so clever! It can speak Chinese!) or a mean-spirited China-basher, and there doesn’t seem to be much of a middle ground for those of us who do more or less have a grip on what’s going on, but don’t necessarily fall all the way into either camp. It isn’t a criticism that gets leveled at Chinese dissenters, though: I don’t think anybody would claim that Qin Hui doesn’t understand China, or that someone like Gao Zhisheng is a China-basher. They get accused of other things.

I’m not sure exactly what it means to understand a country, but it sounds like a pretty big claim to make. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t “understand China.” Hell, I don’t understand America either, and I’m from there. I also don’t understand Ireland, though going by some of the arguments I’ve heard about, e.g., ABCs or Singaporean Chinese, my ancestry should predispose me to doing so.

I absolutely agree about having lines – but here is where understanding really does come into play: I think democratic elections and rule of law are pretty cool things that every country ought to have, but even a superficial understanding of the realities of present-day China may make one sympathetic to explanations of why they aren’t possible for China right now. On the other hand, it tends to make one much less sympathetic to arguments that China shouldn’t have them.

Sorry – very disorganized comment. I’ve been meaning to do a brain-dump on the subject at some point, but I promise, I won’t do it here.