The Economist, a leading British weekly, enjoys wide global readership. It recently covered the thoughts and written work of two scholars, both Chinese, one now government-based, in Beijing and the other based in an academic institution in the US. Only the former, was branded as an “ideologue” however. Paraphrasing Professor Julius Sumner Miller: Why is this so?

In mid-February, Chaguan, the (pen-named) Economist columnist based in Beijing, reviewed a new book by Professor Minxin Pei, who was introduced as an academic based at Claremont McKenna College in California. You can read the introductory paragraphs of this review here. Chaguan is, in real-life, David Rennie, the son of a former MI6 Director. He is the Beijing Bureau Chief for the Economist. He has previously written as a columnist for this prominent weekly as Charlemagne, from the EU, Bagehot, from the UK, and Lexington, from the US.

Professor Pei’s book is entitled, “The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China”. The book is reviewed in detail and favourably – but more on this in a moment.

A week after the Pei book review, the Economist’s US-based Lexington column ran a review of the work of another Chinese academic, Wang Huning, who is now a senior leader in the Communist Party of China (CPC). You can read the introductory paragraphs of this review here. In real life, Lexington is a widely........

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