About Beijing Baselines

Beijing Baselines

Beijing Baselines is an English-language Substack newsletter publishing regular translations from across the spectrum of thinking in the People's Republic of China. Written by Daev Keli, it is organised around a distinctive intellectual project, stated in its own words as a guiding mission: to identify new measures of "rationality" and "sincerity" in the People's Republic of China, concepts it pursues not only in formal doctrine but in daily life, thought and history. Its posts range from translations of contemporary Chinese essays on self-deception and social credit to reprinted scholarship on sincerity and authenticity in late Ming poetry, and from Confucian canonical texts to a foreword by the novelist Qiu Xiaolong on T. S. Eliot. The Newsletter Insights directory lists it as a single-author, pre-monetisation publication with no paid tier and around a thousand subscribers, in the Politics category, hosted on Substack at beijingbaselines.substack.com. After two and a half years of publication its New Year post restated the mission and presented a full translation of Lü Jiajian's essay on the psychological mechanisms of self-deception — and the newsletter was still publishing years later, announcing in 2026 a deep study of literati values in the late Ming.

The mission: rationality and sincerity as axes

Most China newsletters organise themselves around news. Beijing Baselines organises itself around two concepts. In an early programmatic post, "Where rationality meets sincerity", Keli proposed a quick definition of sincerity as "the disposition not to mislead", observed that Chinese thought, including but not only its Confucian brand, "was in love with sincerity very far back, way further back than Shakespeare", and asked how sincerity and rationality relate — whether they can provide the X and Y axes of the Chinese ethical and political world. The New Year post that surveyed the newsletter's first two and a half years repeated the formulation: the guiding mission was to identify new measures of rationality and sincerity in the People's Republic of China, terms which, as well as dry formal definitions, find vibrant expressions in daily life, thought and history, with deep expression in Chinese tradition and contemporary politics. The "baselines" of the title are those measures: reference points against which contemporary Chinese discourse — about honesty, credit, self-knowledge and public values — can be read.

Sincerity: the concept of cheng

The newsletter's central term is cheng 誠, sincerity. A post titled "Without sincerity, neither things nor selves exist" restated the Confucian claim that "the beginning and end of all things is sincerity; without which nothing can exist", and argued that while the core of Confucianism is often said to be ren 仁, benevolence or humanity, cheng-sincerity is its fundamental world outlook: truth in the sense of objective existence, its attributes and laws. Self-completion, the post explained through the classical text, is ren; completion of things is zhi, knowledge; and sincerity thereby becomes equivalent to "truth" in the modern sense, evoking the unity of nature and man. The same post traced the character's afterlife in Japanese, where cheng is read makoto, truthfulness, one of the seven core values of bushido, its kanji composed of the radical for speech and the element meaning to accomplish or succeed. The New Year post anchored the inquiry in the Daxue 大學, The Greater Learning, one of the Four Books venerated by Zhu Xi (1130–1200), which states: "To be 'sincere' is not to deceive oneself" — making self-deception, as the newsletter put it, a boundary condition of sincerity that has been on a special trajectory in Chinese culture for millennia.

Rationality, Weber and social credit

The companion axis, rationality, was explored through Max Weber's distinction between instrumental and value rationality. The newsletter argued that China's Confucian elite could only allow themselves value rationality: quoting Charlotte Furth's The Limits of Change — "making one's heart sincere was never something that an individual could undertake in a spirit of utilitarian calculation" — it concluded that to opt for utilitarian calculation was to forfeit any claim to be sincere. From classical theory the posts moved to contemporary policy, identifying China's social credit system as an arena where rationality and sincerity clash. The explicit aim of social credit's technology, above all its algorithms, is to make people more "honest" — and the usual Chinese expression for honest, the post noted, is chengxin 誠信, whose first character is cheng itself, while xin ranges across trust, faith, belief and credit; its negative, shixinzhe 失信者, names "the untrustworthy", and the post presented a translation of 2017 background writing on what is to be done with them, observing that the topic had not, to its knowledge, been translated before. Translation, Keli warned, is "a spaghetti junction" for this subject: there are few one-to-one equivalents, and everything is many-to-many — a methodological caution that runs through the whole publication.

Self-deception: the Lü Jiajian translation

The newsletter's New Year post, surveying two and a half years of work, presented what it called a deep dive into the metrics of self-deception: a full translation of Lü Jiajian's essay "Psychological mechanisms of unknowing self-deception and conscience sealing", also provided in parallel-text format for readers who wanted to work through it in detail. The post supplied a brief biography of its author: Lü Jiajian, born in Guangdong on 11 November 1954, a teacher, academic and essayist who graduated in Chinese literature and language from Guangxi Normal University, whose works include a co-authored Theory of Chinese Regional Culture, writings on cultural criticism and linguistics and law, and translations or engagements with works including Beyond IQ, The Logic of Lies and Evolutionary Psychology. Lü's essay distinguishes the irrational self that deceives from the rational self that is deceived, and treats moralised judgements — of generosity, love, justice, equality — as forms of self-deception when their standards go unexamined. The newsletter framed the translation's relevance broadly: the need for metrics of self-deception seemed, it wrote, to pop up everywhere, from American politics to the Israel-Hamas and Russia-Ukraine wars to gambling on real estate in the PRC.

Poetry, Eliot and Qiu Xiaolong

Beijing Baselines treats poetry as evidence in its inquiry, on the grounds it stated in a post titled "Enter Eliot": poetry is indispensable for Chinese culture, and its ancient claim to be a privileged mode of presenting oneself is amplified in Chinese tradition by further claims to transcendent rationality and sincerity. The post reprinted, with thanks, the foreword Qiu Xiaolong wrote for a new collection of T. S. Eliot's poetry, posted in April 2022. Qiu — the celebrated author of detective stories whose detectives are Eliot buffs — recalled first encountering Eliot's name in a scathing review in a Party-controlled magazine during the Cultural Revolution, later writing a thesis on the personal and the impersonal in Eliot's early poems under his advisor Bian Zhilin, and translating the poems into a comprehensive collection including Four Quartets, published by Lijiang Press in 1985 and reprinted five or six times. Keli framed the foreword with characteristic economy: Eliot has a deep hold over Chinese literary folk, something to do with his apolitical style, and a lot to do with official Party disapproval of him, as of Nietzsche, Einstein and Freud.

The late Ming study

The newsletter's later work extended the sincerity inquiry into scholarship. A 2026 post announced that, the Xi-Trump summit coverage having had its fifteen minutes of fame, the newsletter would proceed with its promised deep study of literati values in the late Ming, reprinting with permission an article by Leigh Jenco, Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics, originally published in Oriens Extremus in 2024, on validity and the cult of qing (emotion) in late Ming poetic criticism. The post situated Jenco's reading of validity and authenticity as directly adjacent to the newsletter's interests in sincerity and rationality, noted that Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity appeared in Chinese translation rendering "authenticity" as zhen 真, and defined the late Ming as running from the Wanli Emperor's accession in 1572 to the fall of Beijing and the Chongzhen Emperor's suicide in 1644 — an era of cultural florescence whose obsession with authenticity, in the reprinted argument, raised enduring questions about how literature validates the reality it claims to convey. The choice of material is characteristic: a contemporary Chinese-studies debate, routed through a centuries-old Chinese literary argument, in service of the newsletter's two axes.

Form, scale and model

Beijing Baselines is a single-author publication. The Newsletter Insights directory records its author as not formally specified in its data, but its posts are bylined Daev Keli, and the directory classifies it as having high key-person dependency, high platform dependency on its Substack subdomain, and a pre-monetisation revenue model: it has no paid subscription tier, in a field where 38 per cent of similar-size peers do. Its subscriber count is around a thousand, below the median for its category size — small numbers that reflect its nature. This is not a news product competing for the China-watching market but a long-running translation-and-essay project, publishing when it has something to translate or reprint, in parallel text where that helps, and building an archive that moves from Xu Chenggang on scientific rationality and Qin Hui's aphorisms to Confucian canon, social-credit policy documents and Ming-dynasty poetics.

Place among China newsletters

Within the English-language ecosystem of China newsletters — dominated by news briefs, policy analysis and media criticism — Beijing Baselines is an outlier, and its directory description captures why: "Regular translations from the gamut of PRC thinking", organised not by topic but by two philosophical measures. Where translation newsletters such as Reading the China Dream or ChinAI select texts for what they reveal about contemporary Chinese politics or technology, Beijing Baselines selects for what texts reveal about rationality and sincerity, and is as likely to reach for the Daxue or a Ming poet as for a contemporary essayist. For readers of this directory, its significance is as evidence of the breadth the Substack China ecosystem reached: alongside the briefs and the analysts sits a one-person, unmonetised, years-long inquiry into whether the oldest concepts in Chinese thought can serve as baselines for measuring the newest — social credit algorithms, self-deception research and the language of trust in the People's Republic today.