Fear the fear: the historical analogies of COVID-19 in US–China relations

The impacts of the novel coronavirus (hereafter COVID-19) pose one of the greatest crises of our generation. The policy decisions that the US and Chinese governments take will shape the current order of international relations, the global supply chain of medical supplies, and US–China relations. The COVID-19 crisis leads to the empirical puzzles: how do the two great world powers construct their narratives on the global pandemic and toward each other? What are the meanings, if any, of fear in US–China relations? This study explores the narrative of fear that is constituted in the US and China discourse. The historical analogies, such as the Boxer Indemnity, sick man of Asia, and Pearl Harbor attack, offer great examples to the political construction of the "fearful” other through specific representations amid the outbreak of COVID-19. Specifically, they have become the "cultural scripts” that define how they interact and who they are. The article proceeds as follows. First, this study examines the current literature of realism, constructivism, and discourse analysis. Second, it proposes a comparative framework for understanding the expressions of fear and threat perceptions for both countries. Specifically, the "Pearl Harbor Moment” from the US, and "the Boxer Indemnity” from the Chinese government substantially shape the landscape of US–China relations. Third, it highlights how the political elites appropriate these historical analogies in constructing their political identities and offers insights into the future of US–China relations. Finally, this article concludes with thoughts on the studies on the struggle of great powers and implications for pandemic politics.

China in 2022: Political Power, Zero-COVID Policy, and Economic Slump

In 2022, president Xi Jinping's prolonged one-man rule was formalized, further concentrating political authority in the Communist Party of China. Unemployment increased sharply because of the continued zero-COVID policy, and the economy declined significantly, generating pain and dissatisfaction and leading to anti-government protests and demonstrations in several cities. At the end of the year, the Party recognized the crisis and eased the preventive measures. Internationally, the United States maintained its technology blockade, hampering China's economy.

Arresting COVID-19: Perspectives from a Sino-US Joint Venture University

The tumult produced by the onset and spread of the COVID- 19 virus has had a demonstrably chilling effect on the nature of Sino-US relations. American and Chinese leaders have hurled multiple accusations about the origins of the virus across the Pacific;US officials have been particularly dismayed by the lack of transparency by their counterparts in China during the initial advances of the coronavirus in Wuhan and Hubei province. Remarkably, however, in contrast to the initial mishandling of the COVID-19 virus by PRC officials at the national level, the situation within the Sino-US joint venture universities, e.g. Duke Kunshan University, was quite the opposite, with both sides cooperating and moving in tandem to protect the safety and well-being of the students, staff and faculty. This win-win experience highlights the potential mutual benefits of a more collegial, highly collaborative US-China partnership if and when both sides choose to work together with a set of shared goal and objectives. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020.

The moral filter of patriotic prejudice: How Americans view Chinese in the COVID-19 era.

About one in six Asian Americans have fallen victim to anti-Asian racism during the COVID-19 pandemic [J. Lee, K. Ramakrishnan, aapidata.com/blog/discrimination-survey-2022/]. By examining anti-Asian racism in the United States primarily as a domestic issue, most prior studies have overlooked the connections between shifting US-China relations and Americans' prejudices against the Chinese in China and, by extension, East Asian Americans. This study investigates the patterns and perceptual bases of nationality-based prejudices against Chinese amid the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Our nationally representative online survey experiment reveals that Americans assess a hypothetical Chinese person in China as inferior in multiple social and psychological characteristics to an otherwise identical Japanese person in Japan or East Asian American. Furthermore, subjects who perceive China as more threatening to America's national interests assess Chinese more negatively, especially in terms of trustworthiness and morality, suggesting that perceived China threats propel Americans' negative stereotypes about Chinese. A contextual analysis further indicates that counties with a higher share of Trump voters in 2016 tend to perceive all East Asian-origin groups similarly as a racial outgroup. By contrast, residents in predominantly Democrat-voting counties tend to perceive Chinese in China more negatively relative to Asian Americans, despite broadly viewing East Asians more favorably. Overall, this study underscores the often-overlooked relationships between the prevailing anti-Asian sentiments in the United States and the US-China geopolitical tensions and America's domestic political polarization.

Non-Traditional Security and China-US Relations

This essay discusses setbacks to societal level of interactions between the United States and China resulting from the Trump administration's turn to comprehensive confrontation. Bilateral cooperation in areas like public health, technology trade and development, law enforcement, and trade in food and energy has been severely curtailed. Future efforts to repair damage to bilateral relations will have to begin with these and related areas that indisputably have a direct impact on individual welfare in the two societies.

The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Estrangement of US-China Relations

This article assesses US-China relations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, the US-China trade war created an atmosphere of bitterness and mistrust in bilateral relations and also prompted the Chinese leadership to seek to enhance its "discourse power" through "wolf warrior" diplomacy. This atmosphere hampered US-China communication and cooperation during the initial phase of the pandemic. The unleashing of "wolf warrior" diplomacy as the pandemic spread round the world, especially in the United States, has exacerbated US-China relations and served to accelerate the transition of US policy toward China from constructive engagement to strategic competition.

The Rise and Fall of the US-China Health Relationship

US-China health cooperation reaches back to the signing of the bilateral Science and Technology Umbrella Agreement, their first agreement after normalization of diplomatic relations in 1979. Bilateral cooperation has shaped the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) and produced some of the world's finest epidemiological research over the last thirty years. US-China research and technical cooperation has covered the full range of health-related topics, with no area given more attention than research and technical cooperation on emerging infectious diseases. In the wake of the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the United States ramped up the staff presence of its Center for Disease Control (CDC) in China. Although this changed in the Obama years, as China's epidemiological capacity developed rapidly, the dramatic shift occurred with the Trump administration, whose cuts, just as COVID-19 arose as the largest epidemiological threat to the world in a century, left only a skeleton staff in place, and the US government without eyes and ears on the ground. Nonetheless, there is a reservoir of mutual respect and willingness to cooperate among the health professionals in both countries. If there is political will, this could become the foundation for a next-phase bilateral health relationship.

US-China Higher Education Links in Crisis: Behind the Curtain of Suspicion

Has America's complex academic relationship with China been a largely positive experience, or has it eroded our national security by enabling Chinese Communist academic espionage and influence operations to take root at US colleges and universities? For almost forty years beginning in 1978, US-China education links were widely considered a clear benefit to both countries. Today, academic relationships have become a focal point of the current crisis in US-China relations. A web of suspicion has come down over Chinese students and scholars in the United States, as well as Chinese scientists and entrepreneurs. Some members of the Trump administration have even talked about cancelling all Chinese student visas. This article focuses on Chinese students and scholars in the United States. It examines the flashpoints of academic espionage and China's influence operations on American campuses, looks at how American institutions are responding, and closes with recommendations and reflections.

The Twin Chessboards of US-China Rivalry: Impact on the Geostrategic Supply and Demand in Post-Pandemic Asia

This essay offers a small state perspective on US-China rivalry in the post-COVID-19 era. After tracing the emergence of the "twin chessboards" of big power rivalry, namely, high and low politics competitions, the essay assesses the impact of these competitions on the post-pandemic Asian order, with a focus on Southeast Asia. I argue that while US-China competition has been rising rapidly in high politics (that is, in the military field), the increasing importance of low politics—infrastructure and connectivity development, technology, trade, finance, public health, and other functional areas—is shaping the prospects, pace, and patterns of the onset of Cold War 2.0. The intensified US-China animosity across the twin chessboards is widening the scope of the competition, increasing the number of players, and mounting pressure on all smaller states. Arguably, however, it is also providing these smaller states with more maneuvering space. These developments reshape geostrategic supply and demand in Southeast Asia. Accordingly, the smaller states are developing additional layers of partnerships with actors near and far, thereby broadening their hedging options in an increasingly uncertain and high-stake environment.

Fear the fear: the historical analogies of COVID-19 in US-China relations

The impacts of the novel coronavirus (hereafter COVID-19) pose one of the greatest crises of our generation. The policy decisions that the US and Chinese governments take will shape the current order of international relations, the global supply chain of medical supplies, and US-China relations. The COVID-19 crisis leads to the empirical puzzles: how do the two great world powers construct their narratives on the global pandemic and toward each other? What are the meanings, if any, of fear in US-China relations? This study explores the narrative of fear that is constituted in the US and China discourse. The historical analogies, such as the Boxer Indemnity, sick man of Asia, and Pearl Harbor attack, offer great examples to the political construction of the "fearful" other through specific representations amid the outbreak of COVID-19. Specifically, they have become the "cultural scripts" that define how they interact and who they are. The article proceeds as follows. First, this study examines the current literature of realism, constructivism, and discourse analysis. Second, it proposes a comparative framework for understanding the expressions of fear and threat perceptions for both countries. Specifically, the "Pearl Harbor Moment" from the US, and "the Boxer Indemnity" from the Chinese government substantially shape the landscape of US-China relations. Third, it highlights how the political elites appropriate these historical analogies in constructing their political identities and offers insights into the future of US-China relations. Finally, this article concludes with thoughts on the studies on the struggle of great powers and implications for pandemic politics.

From soft power to reputational security: rethinking public diplomacy and cultural diplomacy for a dangerous age

This paper identifies four rhetorical strategies used during the COVID 19 pandemic by communicators associated with nation states to either enhance their own security through protecting or improving their reputation or to diminish that of a competitor or rival. These strategies are: praising the self;criticizing the other;engaging others through gifts and a strategy of multilateral cooperation. The examples cited come chiefly from March and April 2020 revealing how early the key communication strategies solidified. The piece notes preliminary evidence of reputational impact with slippage in the standing of the USA and a major drop in the standing of China visible in the Nation Brands Index and other polls. It concludes with an endorsement of cooperation/collaboration as the optimal strategy to use not only against COVID but in the face of other transnational challenges too.

China in 2021: A New Normal in an Abnormal Time

The year 2021 saw unceasing power concentration in China and inside the ruling Communist Party. China persisted with a zero-COVID policy, but at considerable social and economic costs. The investigation of the origins of the pandemic triggered new sparring between China and Western countries. US–China relations continued to sour as the Biden administration kept on with most of the existing China policies and started building a new security network in the Indo-Pacific region. China tightened its control of Hong Kong’s political life, but its effort toward “complete reunification” faced strong resistance across the Taiwan Strait.

From Globalization to Regionalization: The United States, China, and the Post-Covid-19 World Economic Order.

The Covid-19 pandemic has intensified the debate among optimists, pessimists, and centrists about whether the world economic order is undergoing a fundamental change. While optimists foresee the continuation of economic globalization after the pandemic, pessimists expect localization instead of globalization, given the pandemic's structural negative consequence on the world economy. By contrast, the centrists anticipate a "U-shaped" recovery, where Covid-19 will not kill globalization but slow it down. The three existing perspectives on Covid-19's impact on the economic globalization are not without merit, but they do not take sufficient temporal distance from the ongoing issue. This article suggests employing the historical perspective to expand the time frame by examining the rise and fall of economic globalization before and after the 2008 global financial crisis. The authors argue that economic globalization has been in transition since the 2008 financial crisis, and one important but not exclusive factor to explain this change is the evolving US-China economic relationship, from symbiotic towards increasingly competitive. The economic restructuring in US and China has begun after both countries weathered the 2008 crisis and gained momentum since the outbreak of trade war and Covid-19. The article investigates this trend by distinguishing different types of production activities, and the empirical results confirm that localization and regionalization have been filling the vacuum of economic globalization in retreat in the last decade.