This is part of Global Research Workshop series: Developing an Interdisciplinary Research Platform Toward ‘Next Asia’ co-sponsored by Stanford Global Studies.

It is often asserted that the U.S. and China have entered, are now entering, or will enter a new Cold War shortly. But is this assertion empirically accurate? To answer this question, we adopt a historical-comparative approach that contextualizes current U.S. elite discourses on China (2009-2021) with ones on the USSR (1947-1959) and Japan (1981-1993). By applying computational methods to over 41,000 congressional speeches spanning 36 years, we argue that the current US-China rivalry doesn’t mirror the Cold War dynamics in three aspects: First, Cold War debates historically focused on two primary themes—ideological expansion and military aggression—with ideological expansion being the dominant concern. Second, current ideological concerns about China emphasize human rights more than outward ideological expansion, while military concerns focus on budgetary issues rather than the direct confrontations that defined the Cold War. Lastly, the U.S.-China rivalry shares more similarities with the U.S.-Japan economic rivalry of the 1980s, where economic competition and domestic agendas take precedence over ideological and military concerns. With these findings, we establish the empirical baseline for defining the current U.S.-China relations and call for policy attention to the unfortunate consequences of the misleading label of a new Cold War for both China and the U.S.  

Presenter:

Xinru Ma is an inaugural research scholar at the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab housed in the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, where she leads the research track on U.S.-Asia relations. Her work primarily examines nationalism, great power politics, and East Asian security, with a methodological focus on formal and computational methods. Empirically, a common theme of her research challenges prevailing assumptions that inflate the perceived risk of militarized conflicts in East Asia, offering original data and analysis grounded in local knowledge and regional perspectives. Her work is published in the Journal of East Asian Studies, The Washington Quarterly, Journal of Global Security Studies, Journal of European Public Policy, and edited volumes by Palgrave. Her co-authored book, Beyond Power Transition, is published by Columbia University Press.

Discussants:

Rory Truex is an Associate Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. His research focuses on Chinese politics and authoritarian systems. His work has been published in the American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Perspectives on Politics, and The China Quarterly. His research and commentary has been featured in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Hill, South China Morning Post, and The New York Times.  In 2021 he received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, the highest teaching honor at Princeton. 

Michael McFaul is the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in Political Science, Director and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, all at Stanford University. He served for five years in the Obama administration, first as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House (2009-2012), and then as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation (2012-2014). He was also the Distinguished Mingde Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Center at Peking University in the summer of 2015.

McFaul authored and co-authored several books, including, most recently, the New York Times bestseller, From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia. His current research interests include great power relations between China, Russia, and the United States, the relationship between democracy and development, and American foreign policy. He received his B.A. in International Relations and Slavic Languages and his M.A. in Soviet and East European Studies from Stanford University in 1986. As a Rhodes Scholar, he completed his D. Phil. in International Relations at Oxford University in 1991.