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Some weekend reading: going through the Ladanyi Foundation's website, which has an amazing archive of China News Analysis. For decades this work of the Hungarian Jesuit Laszlo Ladanyi was the must-read for China-watchers. Ladanyi died in 1990. http://www.ladanyi.ch/lazlo-ladanyi/
I really liked this series of "ten commandments" for China watchers; still relevant today. I love the last one: "Read the fine print!"
Also well-worth rereading this @nybooks essay by Simon Leys on Ladanyi's analysis of the CCP: "The Communist Party of China and Marxism, 1921-1985: A Self-Portrait." Reminds us of how important it is to actually read CCP material and not lazily write it off as "propaganda."
This goes back to the 10th commandment: "Read the fine print." In other words, there's no substitute for putting in the time, for reading what the party tells us it's doing. This is true whether you're analyzing the Party itself, or its plans for China.
I'm often amazed that people write articles or books about a place or project in China and either forget or lazily ignore the fact that the Party has usually produced reams of information on this place. Of course these documents are the Party's spin on the issue.
But it's beyond me how people claim to be writing about China while not paying attention to the Party. Here's the URL to Leys' essay. You can also find it unpaywalled on the @Chinafile NYRB archive https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1990/10/11/the-art-of-interpreting-nonexistent-inscriptions-w/
If you want to appreciate what Ladanyi meant to the China-watching community, go to the Special Commemorative Issue of Nov 1990, a kind of Festschrift/obit, with contributions by Frank Ching, Jürgen Domes, Robert Elegant, and others. http://www.ladanyi.ch/china-news-analysis/
