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Workshop

A New Cold War? A Computational Analysis of Congressional Discourse on U.S. Rivals with the USSR, Japan, and China

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

ABSTRACT of the research paper presented:

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, Research Scholar in the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab, Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University

Discussant: Rory Truex, Associate Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University

Discussant: Michael McFaul, Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in Political Science, Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, all at Stanford University.

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