In the big picture, my dilemma sounds like a ridiculously petty problem: Compared with the daily circus of the Trump administration, the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, even the dispute between China and the United States seems like another one of those international spats that matter little outside the navel-gazing world of China-watchers.
Not to sound maudlin, but people like me built our lives around a premise: that the world was interconnected and that it was a worthwhile calling to devote one's life to making other cultures a tiny bit more intelligible. And also that even if dedicating oneself to this life was not going to be easy or necessarily well-paid , it would be meaningful and was in some way safe: The world was not about to return to old-style blocs, where people from one camp could not enter the other's side.
But like many people who have devoted themselves to learning about another place, immersing myself in all things Chinese became more than a clever career choice: It became my calling. Yes, China had political oppression and air pollution and a million other problems, yet I came to love it - from the culture and the people to its can-do spirit and embrace of innovation.
The years added up, and one day I realised that I had spent more of my life in China than any other place on the planet - more than the 15 years in my country of birth, Canada, the dozen in the United States, where I moved during high school and became a citizen, or the decade in Germany. They started to pay attention to American politics, they put up with discrimination, and one day they realised that their children had not just been born in the United States but had grown up there. In some way, they were American, even if they still had Chinese passports.
What has changed are the strategies and tactics that the US now deploys to deal with China. Starting in the 70s, a bipartisan policy of engagement was pursued, with the idea that it would help bind China to the international order. But in practice, it gutted the American press corps in China. That is because only these media organisations, especially the Times and the Journal, had the staff and the budget to mount ambitious investigative reporting on sensitive issues there, such as the treatment of the Uighurs, the finances of senior leaders or the rise of digital surveillance.
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