Stephen Gowans (author of the banger 'Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom') made a blog post. I critiqued what was pretty stupid analysis of China ( see comments ) and in response he kind of said 'no, you're wrong' and then proved me right. Am I missing something? This feels very strange.
No, it's not just personal experience, but also mastery of the language, understanding the political system (both in terms of direct experience and impersonal analysis), knowing people who were born and raised in China, understanding Chinese philosophy, especially political philosophy, understanding Chinese history (and not just the brief decade of the GCPR, but all 5000 years of it), and so on. Not everything pertaining to Chinese society is going to be written in English. Most things, understandably, would be written or spoken exclusively in Chinese. And this is not getting into the poor state of English translations of Mao's works where they use some unholy union of half Gades-Wiles/half postal romanization to romanize Chinese words.
The vast majority of Chinese people outside the diaspora would understand all this by virtue of receiving a Chinese education. Non-Chinese people who know what the fuck they're talking about tend to either spend significant amounts of time in China or are academics who specialize in Chinese studies. And I don't think Mr. Gowans is any of those things. He probably just read a few bad translations of Mao and briefly skimmed over The Governance of China to cherry-pick the parts where Xi sounds like a revisionist.