INTELLIGENCE OBSERVERS OFTEN REFER to the Communist Party of China (CPC) as “the world’s largest secret society”.
Barring
brief periods of relative openness in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the closed
decision-making system of the CPC has presented Western intelligence analysts
with cascading intractable enigmas for over half a century. This problem has
become even more pressing under the decade-long leadership of Xi Jinping,
during which the imposition of rigorous counterintelligence measures have
turned China into a text-book hard intelligence target.
How does
one manage to monitor developments in the inner sanctum of the Chinese state in
the face of such formidable obstacles? According to two intelligence experts,
it is still possible to gather and analyze actionable intelligence on China, by
adopting the right approach. In their article “Beijingology 2.0: Bridging the ‘Art’ and
‘Science’ of China Watching in Xi Jinping’s New Era”, published on Monday in
the International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence,
Bjørnar Sverdrup-Thygeson and Stig Stenslie outline the main contours of such
an approach. China specialist Sverdrup-Thygeson is Senior Research Fellow at
the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. Stenslie is Research Director
and Head of the Centre for Intelligence Studies at the Norwegian Defense
Intelligence School.
From
Beijingology to Beijingology 2.0
The two
authors explain that the Chinese intelligence riddle is not new. In fact,
China-focused intelligence practitioners have long referred to their work as
“Beijingology”. The term refers to the art (as opposed to science) of studying
the Chinese closed political system, based on widely divergent sources of
intelligence. These range from “rumor mills among Beijing diplomats” and
speculations on social media, to social-science-based quantitative studies.
Sverdrup-Thygeson and Stenslie explain that the two extremes of Beijingology
are invariably disconnected from what is actually happening on the ground in
China, and are thus of limited value.
The key,
they argue, is a well-balanced mixture of approaches, which they term
“Beijingology 2.0”. This approach combines traditional Beijingology methods
with a host of advanced and innovative tools in social science research, such
as discourse analysis and textual analysis of official Chinese government
documents. The latter “offer one of very few windows into Chinese elite-level
political dynamics” and thus cannot be ignored. Like all bureaucratic regimes,
the Chinese political system produces copious amounts of official information
in the form of public documents, speeches, and CPC-authorized statements. Such
sources include daily editions of the People’s Daily (the CPC’s official
media organ) and the People’s Liberation Army Daily.
Given the
increasing information restrictions imposed by the Xi regime on elite Chinese
political circles, publications such as these are absolutely indispensable.
Moreover, the authors claim, they can be effectively utilized for purposes of
intelligence analysis by employing novel social science tools. Among these is
advanced text mining, which can discover information patterns within large
volumes of textual data. To be effective, such an approach requires analysts with
fluency, not only in Mandarin, but in Chinese “officialese”, i.e. “the
particular linguistic tropes that set official [People’s Republic of China]
political documents apart from everyday Chinese”.
The
Elite Studies Approach
The authors
propose combining the deep-level textual analysis of Chinese government-issued
communications with tools provided by the social science field of elite
studies. The latter focuses on the study of authoritarian political systems by
“tracing the general dynamics of power brokers, formal and informal, [and]
looking at the mechanisms for elite circulation and integration”. This is done
by, for instance, “tracing when and where key personnel are present, and when
and where they are absent”, in order to map intraparty factions and intrigues
within the governing elites, especially when significant policy changes are
underway. Coupling the elite studies approach with in-depth biographical
knowledge of key figures within the CPC can illuminate “how are future leaders
recruited, on which basis, and through which channels may they be identified”,
the authors claim. This, in turn, can allow intelligence analysts to trace
people and networks within the hard intelligence target that is the CPC, with a
significant degree of accuracy.
In conclusion,
Sverdrup-Thygeson and Stenslie recommend a careful bridging of art and science,
through the integration of machine tools and research methodologies from the
social sciences. The resulting Beijingology 2.0 approach may be a timely
catalyst for the West’s understanding of Chinese policy and politics in our
time, they argue.
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