Sino-American Mutual Perception and Misperception

Notes for a Panel on Sino-American Perceptions and Misperceptions
Watson Institute , Brown University

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Providence, Rhode Island    May 8, 2025

There is now an effective American ideological blackout on Chinese realities.  The default American position is hostility to a China that mostly exists only in our imaginations.

People believe what they hear.  And all they hear about China is highly prejudicial.  None of the three branches of the U.S. government now has active exchanges with China.  Members of Congress pretend to know all about China without ever having visited the place.

All sorts of false or unsubstantiated statements are now taken by Americans as axiomatic.  Official policy reflects these distorted perceptions, to include:

  • A supposed Chinese desire to emulate the late, unlamented USSR by imposing its rule on its neighbors and its authoritarian ideology on the world or the United States.
  • The assertion that, because the Chinese system doesn’t resemble our self-described democracy, it is inherently illegitimate and is regarded as such by the Chinese people, whom we should support in efforts to engineer regime change in Beijing.
  • Charges that it’s China rather than the United States that rejects the institutions and rules governing international economic and political interaction and scoffs at or ignores the UN, WTO, and international treaties and conventions and that it is China that takes a scofflaw position on everything from genocide to the laws of war.
  • Various evidence-free ideological conceits. For example, the notions that
    • Constitutional democracy is a prerequisite for scientific and technological innovation,
    • the gangsterish idea that every adversary has a breaking point or one at which its subordination can be bought, and
    • “Democratic peace theory,” which asserts that countries that practice Western-style democracy are peace-loving while other regime types are not.
  • Attributing U.S. manufacturing job losses to Chinese competition rather than to steadily increasing productivity achieved through automation and to U.S. corporate decisions to outsource labor costs instead of retaining and retraining workers.
  • Treating China’s development of increasingly formidable self-defense capabilities as a threat to the United States rather than a challenge to American amour propre and military domination of the other side of the Pacific.
  • Extrapolating a threat to third countries’ sovereignty and territories from Beijing’s efforts to pressure Taipei to negotiate a resolution of the unfinished Chinese civil war.
  • Dismissing China’s claims to land features in the South China Sea out of hand while championing those of other countries with equally dubious claims.

Intemperate Chinese reactions to American diatribe about these and other matters have reinforced mutual animosities.  Congressional grandstanding on these issues has deeply offended Chinese.   Mike Pompeo’s patriotic invective epitomized this.  Meanwhile, former Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian totally turned off Americans with his equally chauvinistic and counterproductive “wolf warrior diplomacy.”

China’s militant defense of its claims to islets, rocks, and reefs in the South and East China Seas has led to occasional confrontations with the U.S. Navy, while its escalating pressure on Taiwan has been answered with escalating American violations of the Sino-American agreements that had kept the peace between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait for five decades.

China foolishly ignored widening complaints about intellectual property theft and unfair trade and investment practices.  Whatever the merits of these complaints, they cost China the support of the American political elite and much of the U.S. business community.

Beijing did itself no favors by first tyrannizing, then pitching out most of the Western press, which now reports on China from Taipei, Seoul, and other places remote from Chinese realities.  When China denies anyone remotely critical of it a visa or participation in a dialogue it violates its own “united front” theory.  Beijing’s security agencies have in effect gone out of their way to turn foreign media against it and to give foreigners real axes to grind.

These actions by China aside, there are many more self-referential American reasons for our delusional view of it:

  • Despite official information warfare and unprecedentedly shallow reporting by U.S. media, an increasing number of Americans are aware that China is rising while we are not.
  • China’s rapid return to wealth and power is psychologically hard to take because it not only challenges U.S. primacy but also refutes the core beliefs of laissez-faire capitalist ideology.
  • The rise of China and other shifts in the world’s balances threaten American primacy. Despite the disappearance of the circumstances that originally justified them, the United States seeks to retain global and regional economic, diplomatic, and military privileges and prerogatives
  • Hostile attitudes toward China that carried over from the era of “containment” during the Korean and Vietnam Wars persist.
  • Paranoia replicating fears of “Japan as number one” in the 1980s has translated into equally psychotic fantasies about a rising China in the 21st
  • Today’s xenophobic racism echoes the era of the “Yellow Peril” and the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II.
  • The demise of the USSR deprived Americans of a credible challenge to the warfare state and our military-industrial complex. Our cure for the resulting “enemy deprivation syndrome” was to designate China as the default enemy.  China helpfully provided and continues to furnish the perceived high-tech threat needed to sustain the warfare state.
  • Americans have embraced xenophobic protectionism as an imagined cure for our domestic ills. A China that is beating us at our own capitalist game is the ideal bête noire.
  • Popular American stereotypes about “Communist Parties” substitute presuppositions for empirically observed realities. They lead to the culturally illiterate conclusion that, if you’ve seen one Communist, you’ve seen them all.  In fact, few of the politicians pontificating on this subject have ever met a member of any Communist Party other than the Vietnamese (about whom they say nothing on the grounds that they are presumed to be anti-Chinese).

Americans now exhibit an odd combination of self-doubt, complacency, and hubris.  The decay of constitutional democracy in America, the increasing decadence and culture wars affecting American society, and the diminishing capacity of the U.S. government to meet the expectations of its citizens have combined to produce a lack of self-confidence that feeds truculence.

Ingrained mutual hostility has ended diplomatic dialogue worthy of the name with Beijing, by contrast with Moscow during the Cold War.  There is no dialogue between the political elites of the two countries beyond the performative.  But there is intimate dialogue with Taipei, which remains determined to enlist the United States in its resistance to cross-Strait negotiations and its pursuit of expanded independence from the rest of China.

We live in an era in which the weird has been normalized.  Some of the truly weird theories we now have invite comparison to those attributed:

  • to the dark fantasies and charlatanism of Rasputin as Czarist Russia collapsed,
  • to the socioeconomic lunacy of Mao Zedong’s attempts to make China great again in the “Great Leap Forward” or the Cultural Revolution, or
  • to Pol Pot’s self-destructive animosity to the Cambodian administrative state.

Among the more deranged theories now guiding American policies and opinions are:

  • The idiosyncratic economics of Peter Navarro. He has persuaded our president that prosperity is best achieved by reducing the exchange of things we have for things we don’t.  This is an approach that has begun to leave our Treasury with abundant little green paper portraits of dead presidents while depriving ordinary Americans of the stuff they used to get in exchange for them.
  • Stephen Miran’s plan to balance the U.S. trade account by persuading China and other countries to stop buying the Treasury bonds that finance chronic U.S. budget deficits while somehow preserving the dollar as the global reserve currency.
  • The Trumpian notion that Americans can use our waning economic power to strong-arm allies, friends, and adversaries into funding continuing U.S. global hegemony.
  • The claim that our president has the power to force China, the EU, and others to capitulate even as he quails before the sovereign might of El Salvador and Israel.

Enough, already.

Americans need to get a grip on reality.  Daniel Patrick Moynihan wisely observed that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but that no one is entitled to their own facts.  We have now reversed that.  Everyone is entitled to their own facts while no one is entitled to an opinion that differs from the prevailing political narrative.

Our problems result from things we did to ourselves.  Picking fights with China will not cure our problems.  We need to do that.

Written by

Ambassador Freeman chairs Projects International, Inc. He is a retired U.S. defense official, diplomat, and interpreter, the recipient of numerous high honors and awards, a popular public speaker, and the author of five books.