U.S. paranoia about China can only result in self-harm

Editor's note: Radhika Desai, a special commentator on current affairs for CGTN, is a professor of political studies at the University of Manitoba in Canada. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

In 2023, China-U.S. relations first nosedived over the "spy balloon" incident and then appeared to improve. The resumption of military dialogue and cooperation on narcotics control bide well. Will 2024 bring further improvement? One hopes so. However, there is a peculiar U.S. political dynamic that is bound to make things difficult simply by preventing U.S. lawmakers and leaders from accessing the best available information with which to make their judgement. This dynamic is deeply rooted in the history of U.S. foreign relations.

The oft-repeated adage that the U.S. always needs an enemy was proved particularly correct in the early 1990s. Having lost its Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union, the U.S. quickly conjured up another. Rhetoric about terrorism and the rogue states that support it (and harbor weapons of mass destruction) was already rife well before 9/11. And well before the resulting long war on terrorism ended with the U.S.'s ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan, China had emerged as the new bugbear.

This need for enemies can be attributed to the U.S.'s ceaseless expansionism, now made more desperate and intense thanks to its fast-dwindling abilities, and its inevitable result, the U.S.'s infamous military industrial complex, which cannot make its fat and effortless profits without enemies popping up reliably and regularly.

Or one can, with one of the U.S.'s most important historians, Richard Hofstadter, see it as a matter of the "paranoid style of American politics." He was trying to understand McCarthyism, in which paranoia about the Soviet Union metastasized into a vicious and destructive search for "reds" under every bed within the U.S. Today, it's beginning to look as if a very similar process is about to begin, this time in relation to China.

One indication of the scale of the paranoia surrounding China is the hyperactivity of Congress on the China front. One observer estimated that the 116th U.S. Congress proposed no fewer than 550 anti-China bills and the 117th and 118th Congresses have continued this anti-China mania.

Compare this with a total of 130 proposals for anti-terrorism legislation in the 107th U.S. Congress in the wake of 9/11. There is no doubt that, like the drive to the U.S.'s proxy war against Russia, a large, possibly overwhelming, proportion of these legislative proposals is the work of the think tanks funded by the military industrial complex. 

One major result of Congressional hyperactivity has been the Innovation and Competition Act of 2021. Its entirely laudable aim of recharging U.S. innovation to revive U.S. manufacturing is entirely eclipsed by a far less creditable one, a desire to counter China in every which way possible, whether by scrutinizing its investments in the U.S. and elsewhere or by "reshoring" production outsourced to China in better times or countering its influence in the major capitals of the world.

One of the more notable of these ways is to counter China's "Malign Influence." Under this heading, the U.S. government has already expanded funding under a number of envelopes including increasing funding to an Obama-era outfit called the Global Engagement Center, funding a "Countering Chinese Influence Fund" and creating "China Censorship Monitor and Action Group."

This aim has been widely criticized. The Union of Concerned Scientists had already warned of a series of malign effects including enabling racial profiling of Chinese Americans, enabling Orwellian government behavior, illegally dictating to allies, wasting precious resources, permitting a paranoid and lobbyist-infested Congress undue influence on foreign policy and making cooperation with China, whether on nuclear or climate issues, more difficult.

On very similar grounds, The Nation called the Act "nothing more than a dangerous escalation in a multipronged offensive against China … [which] leverages industrial policy to ratchet up U.S. militarization and potentially instigate global conflict – all while hindering the global fight against climate change."

These critics are, however, likely overlooking the worst effect: that on U.S. politics itself. 

The Act, and the larger paranoia of which it is a part, is already creating a new McCarthyism. It promises to vitiate the "information environment" in the U.S. itself, in its media as well as in its scholarship, so badly that U.S. political and government leaders can no longer be sure they have access to the information they need to govern effectively.

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