China Power | Diplomacy | East Asia

What the Engagement Debate Misses: Visiting China Is Not the Same as Understanding It

When U.S. policymakers visit China, they encounter a curated performance, not a country. A different approach to engagement is possible – but it requires abandoning the comfort of the guided tour.

Rep. Adam Smith, leading a bipartisan congressional delegation to the People’s Republic of China, meets with China’s Premier Li Qiang on Sep. 25, 2025.

As the planned summit between Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping slides further into uncertainty, Jing Qian and Neil Thomas, both affiliated with the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis, argued in the New York Times that American policymakers urgently need to restore regular travel to China. They are right that the collapse of official exchanges since 2020 is a problem. They are right that navigating a rivalry without firsthand exposure to the rival is dangerous. But their argument rests on an assumption that deserves scrutiny: that visiting China and understanding China are the same thing. They are not. 

The gap between the two is purposeful. Beijing has spent decades perfecting the art of showing foreign visitors a China that is real enough to be impressive and yet controlled enough to be harmless. I know this because I have been on both ends of the arrangement.

I grew up in a small Chinese city that no foreign delegation has ever visited. I studied international relations at a Chinese university where the professors privately held views about Chinese politics they could never express in the classroom. I have seen how the system looks from the inside – not from a guided tour of a Shenzhen megafactory, but from a dormitory in Guangzhou where students competed over GPA rankings in a major that society had no structural use for.

I have also been on the receiving end of the curated experience. Last year, I participated in a delegation visit to a cross-border data transfer industry outpost in suburban Shanghai – a development zone far from the city center that felt less like a thriving hub than a ghost city. The skyline was impressive in the way that Chinese development zones always are: gleaming towers, wide boulevards, almost no observable human activity. We were guided through a vast, empty exhibition hall by a single employee who could not speak English, requiring members of the delegation to interpret the scene for each other. The tour consisted almost entirely of digitalized promotional videos, the kind that anyone who grew up in China instantly recognizes: no particular aesthetic sensibility, set to stirring music, heavy on statistics and slogans. The company’s videos were identical in form to the videos played at school assemblies and corporate retreats whenever leadership needed to project competence and vision. I wanted to ask why, in this supposedly thriving data industry park, there was exactly one employee present – and whether she, too, had been specifically brought in for the occasion. I did not ask.

This experience was minor, forgettable, and entirely typical. And it is precisely the kind of experience that Qian and Thomas’s argument fails to reckon with.

What a Visit to China Won’t Show

Consider the standard itinerary of a Western policymaker, think-tanker, or scholar visiting China. They fly into Beijing, Shanghai, or Shenzhen – likely the only Chinese cities they could name. They are received by well-mannered university students who volunteer as interpreters and speak fluent English. They attend an internal briefing at a prominent think tank where Chinese scholars, operating under institutional constraints the visitors may not fully appreciate, deliver talking points that closely track the official line – and where the two sides fail to genuinely engage with each other’s thinking. They speak at a high-level forum and receive enthusiastic applause but little substantive pushback. They visit a top technology company and are shown a polished presentation – data, market projections, a narrative of inevitable Chinese ascendancy rendered in PowerPoint. They return to a five-star hotel, often subsidized by the Chinese hosts. They fly home and write a column about how China broke their expectations.

There is a reason some Western hawks accuse these visitors of walking into an influence operation. The environment they encounter is genuinely disconnected from the China that ordinary Chinese citizens inhabit. The gleaming exhibition halls, the English-fluent student volunteers, the immaculately organized factory tours – these are real. But they are a small slice of China, and a curated one. 

The China I grew up in was not the opposite of this image – it was not a dystopia to set against the utopia of the guided tour. As always, reality is harder to cram into a clear narrative. 

I grew up in a small city whose economy ran on two industries that no official brochure would place side by side: a state-owned heavy industrial enterprise on the public ledger, and a thriving pyramid-selling scam economy on the private and illegal one. Both employed thousands. Both were understood by residents as facts of life. The city’s brightest young people studied 12 to 13 hours a day with a single ambition: score high enough to get........

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