‘Hawkish’ interpretations rise as US, China discourse gets lost in translation
In an echo of the Cold War, mistranslations are testing already strained nerves in Washington and Beijing
The study, titled “Stabilising the US-China Rivalry”, accuses a number of influential China hands – all proficient in Mandarin and drawing on Chinese-language sources in their arguments – of a “hawkish” distortion of Beijing’s terminology.
These “respected authorities” fuelled an increasingly common view that Beijing had “well-established, specific and uncompromising intentions that make almost any form of effort to create a meaningful equilibrium on specific issues pointless”, the study said.
Preliminary framework agreed ahead of Trump-Xi meeting
The policy research organisation’s analysts gave numerous examples in the 115-page report to support their argument that prominent China watchers “sometimes rely on a narrow subset of sources and take these sources out of context”.