As Xi Jinping’s long-awaited State Visit to Washington got underway, I was in Singapore where I had been invited, long before the summit had been scheduled, to moderate a panel on AI safety and give a talk at NUS’s East Asia Institute. Here’s an adaptation of that talk. Regular readers and listeners will have heard some of this before, but I couldn’t assume the audience would be at all familiar with any of my work, so please bear with the re-runs.
I have a confession to make. After many long years watching the U.S. and China descend into ever-deepening acrimony, recrimination and mistrust, for the last 11 months or so I’ve felt stirrings of hope, and a near-term optimism that has only deepened as I’ve subjected it to closer scrutiny. That it should be happening under this particular American administration is hard to process for me. But here we are: Despite all the admonitions of wise analysts whose opinions I usually trust, I’ve come to a different read, based mainly on discernible changes in the American mood. I’m sensing that the fever has broken and the patient may live on a good bit longer.
Unsettling as it is that it should be happening during the Trump presidency, what’s more unsettling still is that it’s happening in part because of the presidency of someone as feckless, petty, and obtuse as Donald Trump. I’m not finding that easy to come to terms with. Yet when I take honest stock of the current state of the U.S.-China relationship, I’m compelled to admit to considerably more optimism than I’ve felt since the first Trump trade war began back in 2017.
Yes, I know that it’s entirely possible things could turn again, and quickly — that Trump is above all things mercurial. And let me assure you that I’m not ignoring or discounting the many structural factors that have combined to drive the U.S.-China relationship toward deepening competition, toward more adversarial postures. From interests to ideology, from the shifting balance in comprehensive national power to fundamental systemic differences, I realize these things aren’t going to go away.
But some of the superstructural drivers, and I’ll get into what those are, do seem to be subsiding, and I want to make the argument that cooling temperatures, a lowering of the blood pressure spike that both sides have experienced, is allowing the heat generated from friction — friction arising from the more irrational drivers of conflict — to abate and to dissipate, leaving both Washington and, I hope, Beijing, better positioned to manage rationally those more stubborn structural drivers. It buys us all time to take a deep breath.
The second of what could very well be four leader-level meetings this year is now finished, and things did not, at least, go terribly awry. This will mean we can hit snooze for another sixty days on that alarm sounded last October — the Trump administration’s threat to massively expand the Entity List through the Affiliate Rule, and China’s threatened retaliation on rare earth elements.
My expectations were low, and I didn’t anticipate we’d see much beyond relatively minor Chinese purchase commitments, and some announcements intended to make it look as though the Board of Trade and Board of Investment had some substance. China’s tightening of controls on fentanyl precursors in the days ahead of Xi’s visit, clearly meant as a goodwill gesture, were encouraging. I didn’t expect to see a joint statement committing to a slowdown on frontier AI models (and now, with Trump explicitly rejecting it, that seems even less likely than it did before the summit), but at least the two sides are now talking about AI safety with a vocabulary that overlaps a lot more today than it did even a year ago. There is at least some mechanism — even if it’s just Scott Bessent and He Lifeng swapping mobile numbers — for notification in the event of an AI safety incident.
That the two sides were able to sit down at all is because, in part, the fever has broken. The long night of abject moral panic in the U.S., this spasm of fear brought on by the sudden falling away of American national confidence, has been moving into a different, less dangerous phase.
Again, I get that we’re not out of the woods. I know how fickle both Donald Trump and, let’s be honest, the American electorate truly are. So I’m not betting on this to endure. But the shifts I’ll talk about have bought some precious time, during which hackles can come down and the paranoia of panic can finally abate.
Even to have gotten to this point feels like a win.
How we got here
I’ve spent much of the last decade trying to figure out exactly what went wrong: what was it about China’s rise, beyond the simple dynamics of the playground, that truly explains the deep psychological discomfiture that China’s rise caused in the United States. I won’t rehash all of the reasons that I’ve concluded were at the heart of this, but suffice to say for now that China’s meteoric ascent undermined several important pillars of American exceptionalism — beliefs that had become axiomatic in the American understanding of its place in the world and why its primacy and hegemony were natural and inevitable, and should endure indefinitely.
There was the American belief that a functioning free market economy was only possible under the auspices of political democracy — the first pillar of exceptionalism to fall, as China marketized while remaining a single-party, tightly controlled state.
There was the belief that technology possessed a kind of volition, and that it was inherently emancipatory and especially with the advent of social media would free people living under authoritarian rule — recall how the U.S. media gleefully named various “color revolutions” and Arab Spring uprisings after American social media products, thus, “the Twitter Revolution,” the “YouTube Revolution,” the “Facebook Revolution.” Then somehow we went from believing in tech as the death knell of authoritarianism, to believing tech was authoritarianism’s trusty handmaiden.
There was another idea that linked technology and political systems: the belief that political freedom was a necessary condition for genuine technological innovation. China, in this imagining, was incapable of real innovation — just imitation, or outright theft. While I’m glad to see that this idea has perished — because for one thing it was simply never true — I’m worried about the strange overreaction, that China now appears in the American imaginary as this invincible technology juggernaut.
Two more pillars have fallen recently, too — both related and both very much in connection with China. The U.S. has always been in outward denial about the efficacy of industrial policy (even as it practiced it in quiet), until China’s challenge seemed to have completely upended things and we saw the U.S. under both Trump and Biden openly embrace industrial policy in form if not in name. From the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act to the Trump admin actually taking shares in Intel and other American companies, we’re now in an age of American industrial policy, without as far as I can tell having had a real national conversation about it.
And of course, related to this is the longstanding American belief in free trade, which endured for 70 years or so from the end of the Second World War and was another pillar of our exceptionalism. It’s now been eroded to the point where politicians on both sides of the aisle now champion even quite robust forms of economic protectionism.
I believe that as these pillars have fallen away, and as the collapse has in each case been directly attributable in the American mind to China, the U.S. experienced a dizzying crisis of confidence. Moral panic — threat inflation, demonization if you prefer, scapegoating — were the result.
The height of this moral panic took place during the early months of the COVID epidemic, when Donald Trump released the hounds, as it were: the full-court press of the spring and early summer of 2020, when he directed nearly every government agency to go hard after China. As I watched this happen, I was struck by how much it resembled something happening in the U.S., domestically, at precisely that same moment: the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the death of George Floyd, and specifically, the reaction to those protests from conservative whites. What I saw was the white man in America staring down the demographic reality that within his lifetime he would live in a majority minority nation, and his response to this was to lash out in a spasmodic, inchoate, often violent paroxysm. Zoom out from this microcosm to the global macrocosm and we see the U.S., the global “white male” who had enjoyed primacy for so long, coming to the recognition that America’s day in the sun, too, might be coming to an end. The reaction has been the same: an inchoate spasm, embodied in the person of Trump and his MAGA movement, directed primarily against China.
As 2020 came to an end, Biden won, and I thought that perhaps the worst was over. I don’t need to go through how thoroughly disappointed many of us were — those who wanted to see a rapprochement, or at least a détente, between the U.S. and China, to see the damage that Trump had wrought deliberately unwound and salved. Instead, we saw tariffs remain in place, even more aggressive moves to starve China of key technology exports, and an explicitly ideological framing of the relationship: Democracy vs. Authoritarianism. Alliances with “like-minded nations” were restored, with China often in mind: NATO, in need of a new mission before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, began looking east. AUKUS, the Quad — from my perspective, despite having voted Democratic all my adult life, this was even worse: it was deliberate, not stochastic. The FBI continued to racially profile ethnic Chinese researchers. And especially after the so-called Sullivan Doctrine kicked in in October of 2022, my sense was that we’d reached a real nadir in the relationship.
And then, of course, Donald Trump returned to the White House in January of 2025, this time having won the popular vote and not just the Electoral College. There was no evidence that his biliousness toward China had lessened in the least. There were inveterate China hawks everywhere in his administration: Marco Rubio, Mike Waltz, Elbridge Colby, even Peter Navarro was back. And so I buckled in for what I assumed to be an even bumpier ride.
The fortnight that started it
But even before the first gilding could be applied to the furnishings of the Oval Office, two major triggers for a surprising and welcome shift happened in rapid succession, within days.
TikTok, as you’ll recall, went dark the night of January 18, two days before Trump’s inauguration, and the protest migration to Xiaohongshu (aka RedNote) — very tongue-in-cheek, very satirical — was already underway in the lead-up to it. Then DeepSeek R1 dropped on January 20, on inauguration day itself. You might remember that Nvidia shed roughly $590 billion on January 27.
Everyone reached for “Sputnik moment,” but where Sputnik produced fear and mobilization, the one-two punch of Xiaohongshu and DeepSeek (though the latter did produce some of the anxiety, especially for investors with a lot of money in Nvidia) produced curiosity, and among the young, something like delight.
The Xiaohongshu episode is something that those of us who are older and less online somehow failed to appreciate. It was almost tailor-made for a big, passive Chinese PR win. At a moment when American anxiety about inflation and affordability were spiking, suddenly a whole cohort of disaffected Gen Z Americans opens a portal into a world they could hardly believe existed: the world of the affluent, fashionable, cosmopolitan urbanites who populate Xiaohongshu. Was this a look into the “real” China? Well not really. But it wasn’t a Potemkin village, either: It was a glimpse into the nicest parts of a real village. Good-looking professional women in Shanghai and Guangzhou in their late-20s and thirties, with adorable pets, cute outfits, excellent English, stylish apartments, and the warmest of welcomes — what TikTok refugee wouldn’t have been won over?
There were, of course, a lot of questions that these Americans — I have, after all, described them as disaffected — had for their new friends on Xiaohongshu. Do you have to work two jobs to pay rent? What, by the way, are you paying for that 180-square-meter gorgeous apartment? How much is health insurance? What is that crazily futuristic electric car you’re driving?
The impact was by no means limited to the several hundred thousand Americans who opened accounts on Xiaohongshu during the days and weeks that followed. (Estimates range up to close to a million new accounts, but it’s unclear how active most of these were.) But it spread on Instagram and Twitter, and the phenomenon was widely reported in mainstream U.S. media. It was only a matter of time before the Chinamaxxing meme would be born.
And then came the wave of influencers: iShowSpeed, and Hasan Piker, and many others known to their followers if not to me — people who’d made their name on YouTube or Twitch, with enormous audiences and that much-prized American political quality of perceived “authenticity.”
Already, by February of 2025, it was clear to me that there was an attitudinal change underway in America — something that began as not much more than a “vibe shift,” but which as I’ll argue could prove, perhaps even has already proved, to be quite consequential.
The windfall to China’s image that the near-simultaneous TikTok Refugee wave and the advent of DeepSeek was by no means the entirety of what drove the broader changes in American posture toward China, though they did prove important. These events, combined with the influencer inundation and the whole “Chinamaxxing” trend, added up to a collective sense, especially in Gen Z (those born between 1995 and 2010) that they’d been collectively gaslighted (or gaslit, if you prefer) about China: That the American media and multiple American administrations had misrepresented fundamental truths about China. Obviously there was already a deep well of distrust of media; that’s well-attested. But this was rare, in that it felt like someone else’s successes had been withheld from view.
Yes, a lot of this is silly internet memes. But I’ve often noticed that cultural detritus — silly internet memes — will often register mood shifts before formal discourse does. Perhaps it’s always been so, and that’s why Chinese rulers way back in the Spring & Autumn and Warring States periods seem so obsessed with the songs and rhymes chanted by children.
But it’s how this shift has played out in American politics that is of chief interest to me. What follows is partial. It’s not always easy to figure out the direction of causality, or even to establish real causality between and among the observable phenomena, but this all does add up to a meaningful shift, and I hope, will prepare Americans for a much-needed reckoning with the reality of a risen China — a reckoning I sincerely hope will be calm, constructive, edifying, and above all peaceful.
What changed
Let’s start with the public, and with some of the polling that we’ve seen. Pew released a poll in March 2026 that showed favorable views of China among Americans nearly double the low point of only 14% back in 2023. People characterizing China as an “enemy” was down in just two years from 42 to 28 percent. Meanwhile the Chicago Council’s 2025 poll showed that 53% of Americans supported friendly cooperation, which was up from 40% the previous year — and the first time since 2019 that a majority favored “friendly” cooperation. Chicago Council just updated this last week, and the percentage favoring friendly cooperation has now hit 57%.
Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, announced in early April 2025, seem to have landed poorly with Americans. A Chicago Council-NPR-Ipsos poll taken about a year after “Liberation Day” showed 66% saying tariffs hurt the economy, with 62% opposing “decoupling” if it meant higher prices. That was a complete inversion from 2021, when about that number supported decoupling even in the face of higher prices.
The Chicago Council put out a report in August titled “Gen Z Isn’t Concerned About China,” which aligns closely with what I’m arguing. Only 34 percent of Gen Z and 43 percent of Millennials see China’s rise as a critical threat, against 62 percent of Boomers and 56 percent of Gen X; and in the 2025 survey, 59 percent of Gen Z favored friendly cooperation, up from 38 percent a year earlier.
The Pew global attitudes survey from July of this year showed that a very large majority of countries surveyed viewed China more favorably than the U.S.
The obvious question is, how much of this change — among Americans, as well as views by people around the world of the U.S. and China — can be accounted for by things that China has done, and how much of it is simply about America’s slide? The answer for me at least is that it’s both, and that sometimes it’s hard to tweeze the two apart: When Beijing responds admirably, with spine and resolve, to some move by the U.S. — a massive tariff hike, for example — are changes in perception out of admiration for China’s good response, or contempt for a feckless American policy? There’s no question that both U.S. domestic and global attitudes are shaped by both. I won’t pretend I can assign a percentage to each. But let me suggest that at the level of how a shift in popular attitude has ended up changing presidential posture toward China, and thus the policy choices that have flowed, so far, from it, it doesn’t matter all that much.
I am — I hope it goes without saying — unimpressed with Trump’s intellect, or his morality, or character, or even his business acumen. But I will grant that he possesses a low animal cunning, and a keen sense of smell when it comes to subtle chemical signals in the political winds. In this Trump is something of a master. And I wouldn’t doubt that he caught a whiff of this particular change long before it showed up in the polling data. Nor would it have been lost on him that it was happening most conspicuously in the younger generation that helped him back to the Oval Office in the first place. My sense is that he concluded that bashing China — something he never shied from in his first presidency, or on the campaign trail three times now — is no longer a good electoral strategy. Perhaps he has seen the polls — like the Pew poll from March 2026 that showed of 18-to-49 year old members of his own party, the Republicans, only 32 percent call China an “enemy” — far more than Democrats in that age range, but still, relatively low compared to the 55% of Republicans over 50 who say they regard China as an enemy. Maybe he saw the Carnegie poll from a couple of months earlier showing that only 27% of 18-29-year-olds think their lives will get worse should China actually overtake the U.S., against 52% of seniors.
And it’s for that reason, I suspect, that the China Hawks who once filled the halls of the White House, the State Department, the Department of Defense/Department of War have been sidelined. Trump has become, as many well-placed people in Washington have told me separately, “his own China desk officer.” Whether they’re in temporary eclipse or full retreat remains to be seen, but the absence of overt belligerence is striking: Voices like Elbridge Colby, who loudly and singlemindedly advocated for an end to American support for Ukraine and a shift away from Europe, away from the Middle East, so that U.S. force could be focused directly and exclusively on China over a military move by Beijing against Taiwan, have now gone quiet.
It’s very likely that Laura Loomer, the MAGA firebrand known to have Trump’s ear, had a good deal to do with the purge of China hawks. That the visit to the Oval Office that appears to have set the purge in motion took place on April 2, 2025 — Liberation Day — was I suppose a nice irony. Within just days, six NSC officials were out. Mike Waltz and Alex Wong were gone by May, with Wong smeared by Loomer in explicitly ethnic terms. David Feith and a number of career China hands — including the people who staffed State’s “China House” — were swept out in the State Department’s reorganization. The lesson people inside Trump World drew was simple: proximity to the hawk network became a liability rather than a credential.
It fits the isolationist or restraint-oriented foreign policy preferences of his base, and Trump is surely aware that he runs a deficit with the many in that base who are chafing over the Iran War.
And then there’s the policy record. You’ve all heard about the TACO Trade: Trump Always Chickens Out. You buy the dip after Trump raises tariffs sky-high, then sell once the rebound crests when, as he always does, he backs away. While this isn’t just about China, his most conspicuous TACO meals were served to him by Beijing. From the 145 percent tariffs to the Geneva climbdown in May, to further compromises when U.S. and Chinese trade representatives met in London in June and Stockholm in July, to the big one — Busan, on the sidelines of APEC in October 2025 over China’s deployment of the rare earths weapon — that’s a lot of TACOs no matter how you slice it. By the way, Trump rated the Busan meeting “a 12” and adopted “G2” language, and then not long after cleared Nvidia H200 to Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, and JD in December 2025.
Trump also appeared to give ground significantly on China’s big red line issue, Taiwan. After the DPP’s failed “Great Recall” effort against KMT legislators in the summer of 2025 — first one in July, second in August — Trump seems to have punished the “loser” by declining a transit request by Taiwan’s Lai Ching-te, and cancelling a national security pow-wow between a Taiwan Ministry of Defense delegation and the Pentagon. And of course after his official state visit to Beijing, Trump paused a $14 billion arms package to Taiwan, and spoke confidently of his belief that China does not intend to invade.
Chinamaxxing was, I suppose, somewhat inevitable. It’s something that only really got going about a year ago, when people on TikTok and Instagram started talking about the “very Chinese time in their lives,” marinating in Chinese infrastructure porn and obsessing on Chinese technology, from EVs to high speed rail to Huawei tri-fold phones. But for Trump and much of the MAGA movement, it’s axiomatic that politics is downstream of culture. They know full well that they’ve won elections not on specific, detailed policy recommendations but on vibes, on a kind of crude authenticity, on steering well clear of the kind of morality-driven politics and virtue signalling that, in their mind, are the hallmark of those who criticize China for its failings in human rights. For these younger Americans, 1989 is a distant memory, as hard as that might be to believe for older generations still so haunted by it. American concern for human rights, however earnest and well-intentioned, just doesn’t land as well with younger Americans for whom the hypocrisy has been laid bare — by American support for Israel in Gaza, chiefly.
It’s interesting to me that the kind of reckoning I’ve been calling for — a sober recognition of China as a risen peer that attained modernity on its own terms and by following its own, distinctly non-western path — that this reckoning seems to have arrived as a vibe first: the attitudinal revisions leaked out through memes before they show up in white papers.
By the way, it’s not just the MAGA right that’s found itself drawn in unexpected ways to China. To my great surprise, in recent years China seems to have a growing appeal, again especially with younger Americans, across the political spectrum. How can the Abundance movement, whose originators were Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, and which may well be one of the more vital political forces in the Democratic Party today, not look at China with a kind of envy? No housing shortage — quite the opposite problem, as is the deflationary pressure felt in China. China’s relatively new infrastructure — its State Grid, fed increasingly on renewables (and just this year, China reached 50% of added generating capacity from renewable energy), its subways and superhighways and of course its high speed rail — is a source of inspiration and doubtless of envy by an Abundance movement whose bête noire is a bureaucracy helplessly tangled in red tape. China has become a kind of poster child for abundance. Sure, China has its problems. But we would do well to remember that one man’s overcapacity is another man’s abundance!
What drove it
I’ve talked a bit about some of what China did that proved attractive to some Americans, though as I’ve said it’s sometimes difficult to tweeze things apart. I think of it as two families of causes: attraction — that is, the things that China does right, and that inspire some admiration — and the things that America has botched, that you could classify under repulsion. The increasingly repellant things about America.
Here are some of the things I think China’s done well.
There’s the post-COVID reopening (2023) and the unilateral visa-free rollout to many countries. This turned a three-year black box back into a place people could see. Hence the travel-vlog boom and all that infrastructure porn.
iShowSpeed’s spring 2025 tour is maybe the key artifact of that genre: unscripted, tens of millions of views, an audience with no prior China frame at all. The Xiaohongshu TikTok refugees trend and Speed together are the moment Gen Z acquired direct, unmediated impressions.
Chinese tech beyond DeepSeek continued to turn heads. Qwen, Kimi, Zhipu and the open-weights wave, Manus, Unitree humanoids at $16,000 against Tesla’s projected $25,000, BYD and the EV push into Europe, Mexico, Southeast Asia, Latin America, the spectacular drone shows, the September 3, 2025 parade hardware, and the images of solar energy at Chinese scale have really cemented in the American mind this idea that China is advancing rapidly in technology, and as I said earlier has helped knock down this pillar of American exceptionalism that says political freedoms are a necessary condition for innovation.
Technocratic competence as the thing Americans found themselves envying. The Abundance agenda (Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson) which I’ve mentioned made “China builds tens of thousands of miles of high-speed rail while California fails to build hundreds” a mainstream Democratic talking point. “America invents, China builds” entered the vocabulary. Admiration for China arrived through the back door of domestic reform politics. Dan Wang’s Breakneck and its catchy if simplistic “engineering state versus lawyerly society” frame helped cement this.
Then there was the rare earths card. The April 2025 controls turned the Liberation Day escalation into a Geneva retreat within six weeks. Mutually Assured Disruption; the end of America’s monopoly on weaponized interdependence. TACO was the FT’s coinage, I believe, but the underlying pattern is one that was recognized quite widely: Trump threatens, Beijing holds, Trump folds, repeat.
Iran, 2026. China entered the Hormuz shock with something like 1.3–1.4 billion barrels stockpiled while the U.S. SPR sat at a 44-year low; Beijing managed to cut imports by roughly 3.5 million barrels a day, drew down rather than panic-bought, and its growing EV fleet was already displacing about a million barrels a day of demand. Meanwhile, Americans paid $4 gas all August. There was a growing recognition that China had become an “electrostate,” and it contrasted well with Trump’s America, entrenching itself as a fossil of a petrostate. Meanwhile, by CSIS’s count the U.S. burned through half its THAAD inventory and nearly half its Patriots, the exact categories a Taiwan contingency needs, on a war of choice.
Then there’s the “repulsion” family: the ways America made the comparison for them.
Liberation Day and TACO: From pretty much wherever you sit in the world, this had to look like a competence demonstration in reverse for the U.S. Meanwhile Beijing came out of it looking principled and, unlike the many countries that just acquiesced or came to grovel obsequiously, looking like Xi Jinping actually has a spine.
The scandal-and-corruption ambient noise of the second term. Luxury jet gifted by Qatar. All the stupid crypto stuff. He’s easily the most corrupt president in U.S. history but somehow it just becomes background noise. But a country cannot lecture about governance while looking like that.
Gaza quickly became a bipartisan issue, and it matters most for the young: Biden’s support, then Trump’s, drained whatever moral authority the “democracies versus autocracies” frame still had. For Gen Z this is arguably the single biggest driver of the “we were lied to” sensibility, and it predates and prepares the ground for the China revision. It was never hard for people to connect what happened on October 7, and the Israeli and American response, to the outcome of the Michigan Democratic Primary, and thence to prohibitions on the import of Chinese EVs. This was very clearly a sop to the United Auto Workers to try to salvage a state with a very large Muslim population, that had defected from Biden.
Now Trump’s own foreign policy preferences seem to have acknowledged Chinese parity, and this can’t be lost on the voting public.
First, there’s this whole retreat into a Western Hemispheric “Sphere of Influence” that we’ve seen in the major policy documents. I was listening recently to a talk by Singapore’s former Minister for Foreign Affairs George Yeo, and while I may have a bit more faith than he does in what remains of American institutions of political constraint to prevent Trump from, say, actually attempting to annex Greenland and heaven forbid Canada, it’s clear to me from the National Security Strategy and the National Defense Strategy that his priority is the Western hemisphere, and that a drawdown in the Western Pacific is part of that. Whether he’s actually entertaining something as drastic as what Jennifer Kavanagh has recently suggested (a withdrawal of American commitments from the first island chain, to include Taiwan) I’m skeptical, but all that he’s said on Taiwan, and to Japan and Korea, mean at least for this administration the “Pivot to Asia” is a dead letter.
And of course there’s Trump’s personal admiration for Xi: Trump’s obvious preference for leader-to-leader dealmaking, his monopolization of all decision making when it comes to China. Add to this his aversion to blinking first again, his growing sensitivity to affordability, his clear desire to avert any more foreign entanglements with Iran going so poorly — this is all contributing to a clear sense that Trump now thinks in terms of sharing power with Xi — something, ironically, Beijing opposes at least officially.
So what?
So what are the longer-term implications of all this? What if Gen Z, and younger millennials, and perhaps Gen Alpha too are all “China-pilled” to a degree many older Americans can’t quite relate to? I’m a bit hard pressed to think of an analogy or a precedent for this. As I said, I’m not blind to the fact that the architecture of competition is still standing, and no one’s really moving to dismantle it — not in Washington, and perhaps even less so in Beijing. We still live in a world of export controls, outbound investment regimes, entity lists, and quite aggressive force postures.
The median Republican is still not a dove. Still two-thirds of self-identifying Republicans regarded China as an adversary as recently as a year ago. Generational replacement may come, but it’s still a couple of decades off. And in China the feelings are mutual: the Carter Center data has 73 percent of Chinese respondents seeing the U.S. as a security threat, 17 percent as a friend, with favorability falling in late 2025. A détente driven from one side is fragile by construction. Now, my own sense is that China will be quick to reciprocate any appreciable decline in hostility, but so far that isn’t showing up in the survey data.
And there’s the fact that the same faculty that made Trump the first in Washington to register the shift makes him the first who will register — and then go on to accelerate — its reversal. A weathervane doesn’t hold a heading. A Taiwan Strait incident, an attributed cyber operation, a Nvidia backlash, a perceived slight from Xi, and the wind turns; when it does, Trump turns with it, and the hawks come out of the shadows and welcome their president back overnight. The personalization of policy that produced the détente is exactly what can unmake it. The most reliable instrument for reading public mood is, by definition, the least reliable guarantor of policy.
Sputnik made Americans afraid of a rival; Xiaohongshu and all the influencers peddling infrastructure porn made them curious about a neighbor. And as Americans peer in growing numbers over the fence, many seem convinced that China — despite its notoriously flaccid demand, despite the continuing property slump and the persistent youth unemployment problem — is getting something right that their own country isn’t.
Something else is happening, too, as affordability has moved to the center of American political consciousness. For decades it was an article of faith among China watchers — anyone who has sat through a China panel in the last twenty years can recite it — that the Party’s legitimacy rested on performance, on delivering the goods, while America’s rested on process: on elections, on courts, on the consent of the governed. What I think we’re seeing now is the weight shifting from one leg to the other in America itself. Process legitimacy is carrying less of the weight; performance legitimacy — can you build the thing, can you keep the lights on, can a young person afford an apartment — carries more. And if that is the yardstick Americans are now reaching for, then: Advantage, China.
The question that this mood shift poses but cannot really answer is this: What would dealing with China “as an equal” actually require of American institutions, not just American feelings? Feelings have moved, and the trend continues. Institutions, force posture, the tariff floor, the expertise base, and the Chinese public so far, have not. But despite the assaults American electoral democracy has endured in the last decade, my faith in its ability to transform popular attitude into policy remains (selectively) intact.
Xi’s visit was the first real test of whether the second list starts to follow the first. Feelings, after all, are cheap; force posture is not. But every détente I’ve ever read about began the same way — with someone, somewhere, deciding that the other side wasn’t quite the monster they’d been told it was. This time, perhaps that someone is a twenty-four-year-old on Xiaohongshu asking about the rent.