The cost of China's information vacuum

Reduced access for foreign experts is making it even harder for governments to understand decision-making in Beijing

Kathrin Hille In the summer of 1963, Jan Berris was sitting in an office half an hour outside Washington and converting a series of codes into English text. A student of Chinese at the University of Michigan, she was on a summer internship at the National Security Agency (NSA).

In theory, Ms Berris' task was translating and analysing telegrams from China. But instead of the original Chinese message, all she got to see was a four-digit code for each word.

In 1971, she joined the National Committee on US-China Relations (NCUSCR), just as ties between the two countries were beginning to thaw. She spent the next five decades at the non-profit organisation promoting mutual understanding between the United States and China - from organising the ping-pong diplomacy that helped break the ice to bringing hundreds of delegations of fledgling US scholars and policy analysts to China.

As China has grown into a superpower, the knowledge and expertise about the country accumulated by a generation of scholars, diplomats and businessmen has become more important than ever.

Yet many of those sources are now running dry. Under Chinese leader Xi Jinping, censorship has been tightened, power has become more concentrated at the top and access for foreigners has been sharply restricted.

Deprived of many of the insights and personal contacts that the expert community had developed, it is becoming even harder for governments to understand what is really going on in China, which is adding to the greater sense of unpredictability about Beijing's decision-making.