Alice Miller, one of America's greatest China hands, on the enduring value of propaganda analysis to the study of elite PRC politics.

"Regrettably, in these days tender analysts have lost sight of the eternal Way of media analysis and so succumb to the irresistible charms of the sirens of uncertain insight, the Beijing rumor mill and the Hong Kong China-watching press."

Many "do not cite their sources [and] appear to be derived from the reporters’ contacts among friends, relatives, and acquaintances among low- to mid-level officials. If that is the case, it is reasonable to ponder what people at these levels (and even officials much higher) actually know about the activities of the top leadership, much less their political machinations. Anecdotally, my own learned bias has been to presume that those among my own contacts who say that they know what’s going on in Zhongnanhai actually don’t, while those whose decline to talk about what they know likely do...

Many accounts narrate and explain events in terms of a factional struggle approach that more closely resembles politics in the late Mao era rather than the style of leadership politics that seems to prevail in Beijing today."

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