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Abstract
All major theoretical approaches that explain the growing rivalry between the United States (US) and China share a common prediction: as tensions develop, the US and China will each construct a master narrative emphasizing zero-sum interests, the efficacy of coercion, and the perceived blamelessness of the Self for the Other’s aggressions. However, the concrete process by which these narratives emerge has been neither explicitly theorized nor measured in practice. We theorize that in the digital media age, narratives emerge when ‘memes’—discrete, widely circulated images/descriptions of the Self or Other—are connected into coherent stories that eventually coalesce into a master narrative of rivalry. We therefore argue that tracking the speed and spread of memes provides a useful indicator of security dilemma dynamics. To this end, we note that in the United States the US–China rivalry is associated with a prominent meme that describes China as ‘challenging the international rules-based order’ (RBO). We use qualitative and quantitative text analysis, including network and plagiarism analysis, to track the spread of this meme. We provide preliminary evidence that the RBO meme and the ‘revisionist China’ narrative may be crowding out other, less malign narratives about China’s rise.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Karl Gustafsson, Linus Hagström, Björn Jerdén, Dirk Nabers, Nicola Nymalm, Hal Roberts, Kevin Rudd, Brandon Stewart, Ethan Zuckerman, participants in the conference on ‘The Power of Narratives in East Asian International Relations’ (Swedish Institute of International Affairs, December 2017) and a number of former US government officials who must remain anonymous.
Notes on Contributors
Adam Breuer is a PhD Candidate in the Harvard University Department of Government. His dissertation focuses on network theory and machine learning, and in particular, on how to identify individual-level effects of communication on the organization of collective economic actions. He is the recipient of the NSF GRFP fellowship and the NSF DDIG dissertation grant. Email: [email protected].
Alastair Iain Johnston is the Gov. James Albert Noe and Linda Noe Laine Professor of China in World Affairs in the Harvard University Department of Government. His current work focuses on the effects of identity on foreign policy choice and on social media and inter-state conflict. Email: [email protected].
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 To be sure, early in the post-Cold-War period, some commentary on China’s foreign policy noted or implied revisionist characteristics. But this narrative was not so much about China challenging the ‘international order’ as it was about China being outside this order. Bringing China inside the ‘order’ was a goal of the engagement strategy of the Clinton and Bush administrations. But even this narrative of China being outside the order was challenged in 2005 by the Bush administration in a major foreign policy speech by Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick. He claimed that China was already a stakeholder in this order, but that it needed to be more proactive in supporting it—China needed to be a ‘responsible stakeholder’. Thus, the recent official declaration that China is a revisionist state challenging the liberal order is a relatively new master narrative.
2 This paper is part of a larger project that will next examine similar processes in China, focused mainly on the meme of the US ‘containing’ or ‘blocking’ the rise of Chinese power. By focusing on the US side in this article we do not mean to imply that the role of social media in security dilemma dynamics is solely a US phenomenon.
3 We posit that the US–China relationships can be essentially characterized as a security dilemma. Detailed analysis of Chinese foreign policy across a range of domains (or orders), for example, suggest a complicated mix of basic support for norms and institutions in some domains or orders (general support for reducing trade and investment barriers, support for institutions based on sovereignty and territorial integrity such as the United Nations, support for major nonproliferation and arms control agreements and reducing greenhouse gas emissions) with opposition or ambivalence towards others (the protection of civil and political human rights, responsibility to protect, elements of maritime law). The US approach to different domains or orders is similarly complicated. Neither case can be reduced to a facile binary of revisionist versus status quo state (for more on revisionism and the status quo, see Turner and Nymalm [Citation2019] and Gries and Jing [Citation2019]). That both sides perceive the other as challenging their core or vital interests is separate from whether they are challenging an international order. On the theoretical and empirical incoherence of the idea of a cross-domain Chinese challenge to a single liberal order, see Foot and Walter (Citation2011), Zhang (Citation2016), Katzenstein (Citation2018), Feigenbaum (Citation2018), Johnston (Citation2019) and Mazarr et al (Citation2018).
4 There are, of course, commonalities between Shifman’s definition and that of others. An important one is that memes are copied and imitated, often with minimal cognition (Seiffert-Brockmann et al Citation2018). Imitation can, of course, be rationally motivated. Mimicking what others do is a useful starting point for novices in a social situation to figure out what is socially acceptable and what is utility maximizing. But often imitation and transmission of memes can occur without much self-reflection.
5 Or perhaps a folk ‘power transition’ argument about how dissatisfied states invariably challenge the dominant rule-maker.
6 These findings might extend to the effects of violent or conflictual memes on nationally based partisanship, for example, nationalism, and thus on international polarization.
7 The ‘assertive’ meme was not so much about China’s challenge to the so-called liberal order as much as it was a critique of in-your-face behaviour that challenged specific US policies. Interestingly, according to Factiva searches, there are very few instances where ‘China’, ‘assertive’ and ‘rules-based order’ all appear in the same text relative to instances where either ‘assertive’ or ‘rules-based order’ appears.
8 The phrase was in use by in the late 1990s, though often in reference to trade and the global economy (see Hart Citation2003; Elek Citation2004).
9 Rudd’s first use of the term appears to have been in 2004 when he was the Labour Party’s shadow foreign minister (see Boey Citation2004).
10 For other official references to the RBO as aspirational see Campbell (Citation2012) and Clinton (Citation2014).
11 This evolution of the content of the RBO underscores that memes do not necessarily take on an unchanging meaning from the outset.
12 Our database contains the full text and raw html of 3.85 million unique articles on the web that contain the word ‘China’, which constitutes all articles containing this word that were crawled before July 2016 by an industrial crawler performing a multi-year exhaustive crawl of the web (similar to Google’s indexing). By subsetting articles based on whether or not they contain this word, we hoped to avoid the fraught process of determining whether a source or an article constitutes foreign policy news and instead focus on all possible sources of web-based meme transmission. While the data span back to the early days of the internet, more recent publication dates appear with higher frequency in the dataset, which corresponds both to the fact that earlier articles are more likely to have been taken down and also to the fact that the daily volume of online articles in general and the volume of articles on China in particular have both increased markedly in the last few years. For the RBO analysis, given the relative infrequency of the term in this four-million-item dataset, we relied on almost 900 texts that contained ‘RBO’ and ‘China’ in the same sentence(s) appearing between 2010 and mid 2016.
13 In some cases, the short time available to produce online output may play a role as well.
14 For a critique of metaphor analysis for relying too heavily on linguistic analysis and not enough on behavioural response data (how do people actually deploy and react to the use of metaphor?), see Steen (Citation2011) and Steen et al (Citation2014). We are sensitive to this critique. Often the ordinary use of certain terms does not mean that these terms are read the way cognitive linguistic analysts might read them. But we present here some metaphors that elite officials in the US have used in thinking about certain memes in US–China relations.
15 As one example of media affirming Trump’s characterization of Chinese cunning see the editorial in a local Colorado newspaper: ‘The Chinese state has a cunning way of taking the best US ideas and processes to drive its corporate prowess, violating World Trade Organization practices in the process’ (The Daily Sentinel Citation2017).
16 Marco Rubio tweet, 7:42, 19 May 2018.
17 Perhaps this is why the overwhelming majority of academic and policy discussions of international order assumes there is only one order.
18 The conclusion that China’s challenge to RBO is constitutive of its identity as a revisionist state currently cuts across think tanks with different ideological orientations (see Center for a New American Security [CNAS] Citation2018; Heritage Foundation Citation2018; Hudson Institute Citation2018; Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments Citation2017).
19 The difference between hits for ‘China within n words of revisionis*’ and ‘revisionis* within n words of China’ is that in the former the first reference to China comes before ‘revisionist*’, while in the latter it is the reverse. Of course, there may be some overlap in hits between the two, as it is possible (albeit relatively rare) for a phrase to meet both of these conditions.