The Breakdown in Sino-US Relations, 2003-2023: Explaining PRC Dissatisfaction with the Power Transition Using STMs

Description

 Almost all specialists agree that Sino-US relations are now at their rockiest in decades,perhaps going all the way back to US President Richard Nixon’s groundbreaking visit tothe People’s Republic (PRC) in February 1972. From the perspective of power transitiontheory, which is used frequently to model Sino-US relations, growing trouble in therelationship between any dominant power and rising power is to be expected when twoconditions are met: (1) the rising power is nearing the point of parity with the dominantstate in comprehensive national strength; and (2) the rising power’s elites, especially thegoverning elites, are dissatisfied with the international order over which the dominantpower presides. In a worst-case scenario, tensions between the dominant state andrising challenger fueled by the structural change and the challenger’s dissatisfactioncould escalate to war. Despite the pivotal role the rising power’s satisfaction/dissatisfaction plays in powertransition theory, the dissatisfaction variable is woefully understudied. Some analystshave provided useful indicators for measuring degree of dissatisfaction after it appears,but not for explaining the circumstances under which it might arise and then take root.There is solid evidence to suggest that Chinese Communist Party (CCP) elites havebecome increasingly dissatisfied with the US-led liberal international order during thepast 15-20 years. The question is: Why, exactly? The issue of concern is not simply everyday policy disputes. There are already anynumber of excellent treatments chronicling the key issues and events in the Sino-USrelationship’s breakdown. The issue is: From a conceptual point of view, what is theunderlying structure of CCP elite dissatisfaction? Is there a root or core abstractconcern which drives all the others? The guiding hypothesis in this research is that a persistent and growing CCP aversion topermanent decentering in world history and international relations is the root factorstructuring Chinese dissatisfaction. To test this proposition, the research will use the bigdata analysis tool of structural topic modeling (STM) combined with rigorous discourseanalysis to examine what PRC elites are actually writing and saying about the US-ledliberal international order in news propaganda (the People’s Daily) and quasi-academicIR journals (Xiandai Guoji Guanxi and Guoji Wenti Yanjiu). Because STM isexceptional at uncovering latent topics in a discourse which researchers did notanticipate existed, even if the guiding hypothesis proves limited, the structure of PRCdissatisfaction can still be uncovered.