洞察 dòngchá – see through clearly, have insight into, investigate

Welcome to dongcha.org.

China and America have a long history punctuated by misconceptions, false hopes, and a deep cultural divide. With one country as the world’s largest superpower, and the other as it’s fastest rising one, their fates are intertwined.

Oddly, over some 150 years of interaction, misconceptions between both countries, despite being corrected in some areas, have only gotten subtler and more egregious in many others. This website is dedicated giving Westerners the information–and, more importantly, the analytic tools–they need to better understand China.

What you will find here:

The Dongcha draws upon history, culture, and current events to present a picture of China that is neither blinded by rosiness nor inanely hawkish. The resources we marshal to do so include interviews, book reviews, news commentary, and original investigative reports.

What you won’t find here:

Platitudes, political agendas and “Orientalism”. Dongcha’s authors are not Sinologists, nor are they partisan commentators or policy wonks selling you something about China and East Asia. We don’t get excited about the idea of one billion customers, or lose sleep over threats of Chinese economic or military invasion. What matters at Dongcha isn’t a Ph.D. in Asian Studies, but clear reasoning skills and an aspiration to that golden standard of objectivity.

In a sense, it all comes back to our name–dongcha. Dongcha isn’t taken from Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” or from one of Mao’s speeches, it’s simply a word that means “to see clearly”, with the implication that, to do so, one must intuit the truth. In the current environment, that’s what the rare individual that really wants to understand China has to do: see through all the distortion of what people in both China and the U.S. are trying to sell and intuit what’s really happening. It’s an imperfect method, to be sure, but it’s also the only one we’ve got.