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- Published: 19 July 2023
Studying the narrative of US policy towards China: introducing China-related political texts in Congress
- Yiwen Zhang ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9094-2450 1 &
- Fan Wang 2
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume 10 , Article number: 431 ( 2023 ) Cite this article
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A Correction to this article was published on 31 July 2023
This article has been updated
How the United States pursues its decoupling policies towards China is an essential topic in studying U.S.‒China relations. Although the U.S. policy orientation towards China can be examined from several perspectives, this study uses a text-mining approach by extracting the China-related legislation in the 115th–117th Congress to observe the activities of the U.S. Congress regarding the affairs of China. Our analysis shows that Congress has seen a surge in China-related legislation since the introduction of decoupling policies. At the same time, it has not improved its negative view of China and maintained a competitive attitude in the economic, scientific and technological, and military fields after party rotation. It is worth noting that Congress under the Biden administration has placed greater emphasis on ideological competition, requiring allies who share common values to work together to counter the ‘Chinese threat’ in various areas. In this article, it is found that congressional legislation, as important political texts, conceal value judgements and institutional orientations that guide and constrain diplomatic practice. Political texts, ideology, and power are intertwined and shape the current U.S. congressional diplomatic strategy towards China.
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Introduction.
The U.S.‒China relationship has undergone profound ups and downs since the Trump administration. Ongoing trade disputes and ideological confrontations have reshaped high-level perceptions of threats to each other in both countries. As the dominant player in the existing international order, Washington is on high alert for the rise of its adversary, believing that China has transformed itself from a regional to a global challenger, projecting its influence beyond the Indo-Pacific region to global supremacy (Lippert et al., 2020 ). This vigilance and concern have made U.S. foreign policy towards China more competitive and aggressive. Not only does the U.S. list China as a “strategic competitor”, but it has also introduced a series of restrictive policies and regulations to deal with China as a challenger to the neoliberal international order (Glaser, 2019 ). At the same time, China emphasized that it would no longer submit to the U.S. bullying and demanding that the U.S. stop “political manipulation” against China (Jaworsky and Qiaoan, 2021 ). If it is because of President Trump’s pragmatism and strong leadership style that has exacerbated the standoff between the two countries, but Democrat Biden who resets multilateralism has not changed the tone of the strategic competition between China and the United States (Greve, 2021 ). Although President Trump’s pragmatism and strong leadership style exacerbated the standoff between the two countries, Biden, as a Democrat who supports multilateralism, has not changed the tone of the strategic competition between China and the United States (Greve, 2021 ). At the first high-level diplomatic meeting between China and the Biden administration, the U.S. Secretary of State accused China of threatening the “rules-based order that maintains global stability”. At the same time, China countered that the US was “full of cold war thinking, inciting other countries against China” (Greve, 2021 ). Undoubtedly, the blame game between the two major powers has deepened the uncertainty in international politics. Moreover, with the frequent clashes of policy goals and ideological confrontations, the Peloponnesian War and the Thucydides Trap have become popular topics of discussion in the international community (Ling and Lv, 2018 ). In short, this broad strategic rivalry has become the new paradigm of international relations in the last few years. It has shaken the international order, involving third parties passively in geopolitics. The Economist commented on this, noting, “There is less trust between Washington and Beijing than at any point since 1979” (“There is less trust between Washington and Beijing than at any point since 1979,” 2020 ).
With an important role in the U.S. system of separation of powers, Congress is deeply involved in the design of the containment strategy against China. Among other things, members of Congress exert substantial influence on U.S.‒China relations through legislation. As Wildavsky’s “two presidencies” thesis describes, Congress is another president in the U.S. political system that is exclusively responsible for domestic legislation and foreign policy (Fleisher et al., 2000 ). The article argues that congressional legislation is a window to observe U.S. diplomatic intentions: on the one hand, reviewing congressional bills helps to understand the changing perceptions of U.S. senior leaders towards China in a dynamic way; on the other hand, as an essential political text, the bills conceal power relations and strategic intentions, which are of inestimable value in judging the direction of U.S.‒China relations.
The article’s main points are as follows. First, it is found in this article that there are relatively few studies that discuss power and ideology between China and the United States from the perspective of congressional legislative texts. Second, bridging the gaps in existing studies, the article conducts text mining in three dimensions of China-related bills: keywords, semantic network, and topics. It is found in this article that while the themes of the China-related bills during the Trump and Biden administrations are similar, the starting points differ. In addition, it is worth noting that the power and ideological tendencies hidden behind the bill as an essential political text are necessary evidence of U.S. strategic choices regarding China.
Congress: a key player in Sino-US relations
Currently, two types of mainstream U.S. foreign policy studies on China exist. The first is based on traditional international relations theories such as great power relations (Layne, 2020 ), geopolitics, and strategic games (Southgate, 2021 ) to examine U.S. strategic choices regarding China. The second type examines the role of the U.S. political system, and most studies in this category focus on the president and their ideological preferences and strategic choices, based on the argument that the head of state is the main protagonist of U.S. diplomatic activities. For example, some scholars have argued that the head-of-state meeting between Top Chinese and U.S. Leaders would provide a more pragmatic basis for U.S.‒China relations (Lye, 2017 ). In addition, some studies highlight that the realist turn of US foreign policy under the Trump administration has reshaped Sino-US relations and discuss whether a new Cold War can be avoided in the context of the pandemic (Feng, 2021 ). When scholars focus on the Biden administration’s policy towards China, they find that it continues President Trump’s hard-line approach, leading the two countries increasingly closer to war (Copper, 2021 ). Content analysis and discourse analysis have been popular research methods in recent years. Some researchers have chosen media reports (Boykoff, 2022 ; Liu and Yang, 2015 ), official Chinese discourse (Mochtak and Turcsanyi, 2021 ; Yang and Chen, 2021 ) and U.S. presidential tweets (Luo et al., 2022 ) as research materials to observe U.S. attitudes towards China and its strategic tendencies. Meanwhile, Congressional legislators are key players in diplomatic activities. The actual legislative process can allay presidential doubts and concerns about proposals and induce the president to sign and implement foreign affairs bills that are contrary to his or her intent, ultimately directly affecting the nation’s foreign policy (Tama, 2020 ). In addition, Congress can use annual appropriations bills to limit the administration’s policy discretion (Carcelli, 2022 ) and engage in foreign policy processes through intraparty factionalism, ultimately succeeding in influencing foreign policy in the long run (Lantis and Homan, 2019 ).
The U.S.‒China relationship is undergoing profound decoupling (Cha, 2020 ), while at the same time, Congress is a key player in determining the direction of the relationship between the two countries. In terms of the research scope, in the current exploration of China-related bills in the U.S. Congress, either all China-related bills are chronologically tracked over a while and their development trends and characteristics are observed (Chang-Liao, 2019 ; Guo, 2022 ), or a specific area of Chinese affairs is selected for in-depth analysis of congressional actions; such topics include the Taiwan issue (Lin et al., 2022 ), the Hong Kong issue (Liu and Cai, 2020 ), and the South China Sea dispute (De Castro, 2018 ). From the perspective of research methodology, there are two main approaches to studying China-related bills. One is based on traditional international relations theory, such as the “balance of power” theory, which analyses China’s strategic intentions and the power gap between the U.S. and China to explain the U.S.‒China policy debate in Congress (Chang-Liao, 2019 ). Another approach is to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to explore China-related bills in depth. For example, one study provides the number of anti-China bills and China-related resolutions in Congress, noting that the U.S. Congress is deeply involved in China-related matters (Guo, 2022 ). Other studies have used regression analysis to explore the factors influencing the output of China-related bills, particularly the two important variables of legislative-executive relations and the degree of congressional fragmentation (Lin et al., 2022 ). In addition, legislators’ voting records are important evidence to explain the process of enacting China-related bills (Seo, 2017 ).
It cannot be ignored that text mining is increasingly used in the study of China-related issues, especially for political texts. Most of the existing China-related textual materials are derived from U.S. media reports, with less focus on official U.S. discourse and even less on the role of Congress. Legislative texts are a window into congressional policy towards China. The article argues that one should focus on U.S. legislative activities and legislative texts related to China to understand Congress’s real intent towards China accurately. More importantly, conflicting interests and diplomatic dilemmas between merging power and existing great power can be found in the political texts. Moreover, in international relations, interactions between states form national identities, which define state behavior, and language influences the maintenance and development of identities (Carta, 2014 ). Therefore, as an important political corpus, the China-related bills of Congress not only contain the definition of the “self” identity of the U.S. legislature but also show how it constructs the “other” identity and how it takes political action based on identity perception. In other words, ideological tendencies and power claims can be constructed by interpreting political texts.
Overall, this paper is dedicated to exploring three research questions.
RQ1: What are the trends and characteristics of China-related bills in Congress after the U.S. decoupling from China?
RQ2: What are the similarities and differences in the themes of China-related bills introduced by Congress in different periods?
RQ3: How do the U.S. China-related bills shape the discourse-power-ideology triangle?
Data collection and methodology
Data collection.
As the official website of the U.S. Congress, congress.gov records every legislative activity of legislators and summarizes the content of every bill. The researchers searched Congress.gov for China-related bills from the 115th–117th Congresses (spanning Jan. 3, 2017–Jan. 3, 2023) using the keywords “China” and “Chinese” for a total of 2229 bills. On this basis, the researchers excluded two types of bills. The first category is amendments, with 477 bills, which modify or add to existing legislation and do not involve new legislative acts. The second category of bills, with content not directly related to Chinese affairs, such as protecting the culture of Chinese Americans, included 248 acts. After removing the above two categories of bills, the researchers finally obtained 1504 bills concerning China in the past three U.S. Congress.
Data analysis
The researchers extracted 1504 official summaries of China-related bills and built two corpuses. The first corpus is the China-related bills introduced during the Trump administration, i.e., the 115th and 116th Congress, with 646 bills. The second corpus is the China-related bills proposed during the Biden administration, i.e., the 117th Congress, with a total of 858 bills. The researchers conducted text mining on the two corpora separately. All work was performed in open-source R language packages and divided into two parts. Text word distribution and text topics were explored.
First, to identify the actual contents of the China-related legislation, the researchers used R Package to describe the high-frequency words of the two corpora separately. In this article, the semantic network was drawn based on the Jaccard coefficient after the keywords were extracted based on the TF-IDF algorithm.
Next, the researchers used topic modeling and latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to examine the distribution of topics in the two corpora of China-related bills. As a three-level hierarchical Bayesian model, LDA is an unsupervised learning algorithm that has been widely used in political text topic recognition and analysis. (1) The legislation texts were converted into a “corpus” and preprocessed, which included the removal of numbers, punctuation, and stop words. (2) In this article, two approaches were used to determine the optimal number of topics discussed in a corpus. The first one is based on the R* topic models package to calculate the LogLikelihood. The second is to write the four models “Griffiths2004”, “CaoJuan2009”, “Arun2010”, and “Deveaud2014” into the same code and observe the maximum and minimum values of the results to find the range of the best number of topics. Footnote 1 (3) The researchers combined the above two methods, tested the model effects sequentially within the available choices and finally determined the optimal number of topics to be 8. Footnote 2
Finally, the researchers ran the LDAvis code in R to model and visualize the topic modeling of the two China-related bill corpora.
Figure 1 illustrates the research process of this paper.
Article research processes.
Figure 2 illustrates the distribution of legislation by session and party affiliation. First, the amount of China-related legislation in Congress has increased dramatically since the U.S. abandoned the engagement policy, with 166, 480, and 858 China-related bills in the last three Congress, respectively. The number of China-related bills in the 117th Congress has increased more than five times compared to the 115th. Regarding party affiliation, the number of China-related bills proposed by the Republicans is much higher than that of the Democrats, with an average of 2.4 times more bills proposed by the Republicans than the Democrats per Congress.
China-related bills in 15th–17th Congress.
Figure 3 shows the division of the subject-policy area of all legislation on the official website of Congress. Nearly half of the bills involving China are in the area of international affairs, comprising 734 items. Foreign Trade and International Finance, Armed Forces and National Security were the next most important concerns of lawmakers, with 112 and 111 bills in that order. The remaining seven areas are Energy, Commerce, Health, Government Operations and Politics, Finance and Finance Sector, Immigration, Economics, Public Finance, Science, Technology, Communications, etc. The number of bills is balanced between 33 and 56.
Subject-policy area of China-related bills in 15th–17th Congress.
China and the U.S. emerged as the top two highest frequency terms in both corpora. The researchers removed these two terms from the high-frequency word list and did not display them. Figure 4 shows the top 20 high-frequency words in the China-related bills of the two administrations. In addition, the data show that “security”, “Taiwan”, “Russia” and “Entity” are high-frequency words shared by both governments’ legislative texts. In addition, “Hong Kong (184)”, “coronavirus (176)”, and “sanction (160)” are high-frequency words specific to the legislative texts of the 115th–116th Congress, and “economy (326)”, “defense (292)”, and “CCP (266)” can reflect three critical areas of concern in the 117th Congress.
Frequent words in 115th–117th legislation text.
Figure 5 shows the semantic network analysis of the corpus. Footnote 3 After the researcher debugged the data several times, we found that the semantic network of all China-related bills includes a total of 6 larger clusters. The core word of the first cluster is “Russia”, linked to the words “adversary”, “Cuba”, “North Korea”, “democracy”, “nuclear”, “missile” and “defense”, indicating that these countries are often mentioned together with China in the same bill and are often associated with the military field. The core word of the second cluster is “Taiwan,” and the connected words include “diplomacy”, “relationship”, “military”, etc., reflecting the U.S. Congress’ intention to strengthen economic and military ties with Taiwan. The third cluster has the central word “entity”, which has a high correlation coefficient with the words “trade”, “Huawei”, “cyber”, “sanction”, “company” and “finance”, indicating that the Congress often proposes bills related to China in the economic and technological fields. The central word of the fourth cluster is “security”, which maintains a high correlation with words such as “Hong Kong”, “coronavirus”, “alliance” and “telecommunication”, reflecting that national security is an important motivation for Congress to introduce various bills related to China. The fifth central word is “economy,” which is linked to the words “investment”, “energy”, “development”, “supply”, and “independent” to express that Congress’ concerns about supply chains, energy issues, and economic security are related to China. The core word of the sixth cluster is “prohibition”, and the related words under this cluster are “human right”, “property”, “transfer”, “impose”, “CCP”, “company”, etc. It can be found that the ban issued by Congress to China is multifaceted in reasons and areas.
Semantic network analysis in China-related bills.
In addition, the results of the semantic network diagram demonstrate that the congressional text involving China includes four categories. As shown in Table 1 below:
Figure 6 presents the visualization results of the topic models of the China-related bills of the two administrations. It can be observed that the distribution of circles is balanced, and there are differences in the positions of the circles between the two models, which indicates that the model is effective and interpretable. The visualization diagram of the topic model consists of three parts. On the left side is a topic distribution map consisting of 8 circles. Each circle is a topic, and a larger circle indicates a higher percentage of that topic in the corpus (how prevalent is each topic). The distance of the circles indicates the degree of similarity of the topics (how do the topics relate to each other). The right side of the model shows the terms under each topic in order of scale so that the researcher can summarize the topic’s meaning (What is the meaning of each topic) (Sievert and Shirley, 2014 ). The top left side of the model is the λ -value adjustment column. When observing the modeling results, the λ in the top bar of the right panel is used to rank the terms in a given topic. If the λ value is close to 1, high-frequency words will appear; if the λ value is closer to 0, it indicates a more specific and unique word under that topic (He, 2015 ).
LDAvis visualization in China-related bills.
Figure 6 shows the text-mining results of the two corpora separately. The top half of the image shows the distribution of topics in the 115th–116th Congress. Taking Topic 2 as an example, the high-frequency words under this topic include “Russia”, “North Korea”, “finance”, “intelligence”, etc…. The bottom half of the image shows the distribution of topics in the 117th Congress. Taking Topic 6 as an example, the high-frequency words under this topic include “economy”, “entity”, “arm”, etc.
The researchers obtained the terms under each topic in the LDAvis model by adjusting the λ values and eliminating nonsense words. Then, the terms were combined with the original text of the bill to obtain the topics of the bills related to China under the two administrations, as shown in Tables 2 and 3 . The first column of the table is the topic serial number, the second column presents the filtered terms, and the third column is where the researchers combined terms with political texts to summarize the labels.
Table 2 presents the results of topic model mining for the 115th–116th Congress. The study shows that the areas of China-related legislation in Congress during Trump’s term are mainly focused on economy, technology, and local Chinese affairs. Among them, resisting foreign governments in Topic 1, political value in Topic 4, and national security in Topic 6 reflect the legislative motives of Congress. Table 3 describes the text-mining results of the 117th Congress. The areas of China-related bills in Congress during Biden’s presidency showed greater similarity to the 115th–116th Congress, with technology and local Chinese affairs also being the focus of attention in the 117th Congress. In addition, the ideological field emerged more frequently than in the previous Congress, with an increase in the number of topics aimed at the Chinese Communist Party in particular.
As one of the most important bilateral relationships in the international community, the transition of US policy towards China from constructive engagement to strategic competition has been widely debated within academia. The continued deterioration of U.S.‒China relations has become indisputable, and academics have expressed concern that the two powers will fall into a Thucydides trap, which is part of traditional international relations theory. From the perspective of the history of international relations, some experts liken the great power rivalry between China and the United States to the Anglo-German rivalry in the nineteenth century (Wu, 2016 ). Based on this, they suggest that the United States should adopt a more sophisticated and fuller range of instruments to weaken its adversaries (Brunnermeier et al., 2018 ). Other scholars have used power transition theory to describe the state of strategic competition between China and the United States as the inevitable result of power shifts in the international system or the structural contradictions that result from narrowing the gap in total national power (Zhao, 2019 ). In contrast to traditional qualitative studies of national strategy, in this article, it is argued that, as an important pillar of the U.S. political system of separation of powers, Congress holds legislative power and uses it to drive domestic and foreign policy. Among them, congressional legislative texts are some of the most potent evidence for observing the orientation of U.S. policy towards China, and it is necessary to analyze the political texts in depth to observe the changes in congressional positions since the decoupling from China. The study attempts to further discuss official U.S. discourse.
From a party perspective, Republicans are more concerned about Chinese affairs than Democrats. In fact, Republican lawmakers created the China Task Force in the 116th Congress in response to the challenge from China, which impacted the legislative preference foreign policy outcomes of the Republican Party. As mentioned above, factionalism is a vital dependent variable in U.S. policy-making process. On the other hand, it cannot be ignored that the Democratic Party is also becoming increasingly involved in China-related issues, and the number of proposed China-related bills is increasing each year.
From the perspective of thematic content, our research reveals that the topics of China-related legislation in the two corpora have similarities. Tables 2 and 3 show that in some areas of national security and national interest, such as technology, intellectual property, and economy, the words “sanction”, “illicit” and “visa blocking” are often associated with China, which shows a conservative and competitive attitude towards China. Furthermore, ideological differences were often mentioned in the Congress after the declaration of decoupling from China. Specifically, the following points characterized similar China-related themes in the 115th–117th Congresses.
First, countries such as China, Russia, North Korea and Iran often appear in legislation as hostile states that are identified as threats to the United States and the liberal international order. Such legislative initiatives are consistent with the reality of the U.S. national strategic choices. The 2017 National Security Strategy report labeled China and Russia as “revisionist power” and “strategic competitor” that want “to shape a world antithetical to US values and interests” (House, 2017 ) The 2018 US Department of Defense stressed “the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition” with China and other rival states (Defense, 2018 ). On the diplomatic front, the U.S. Congress has proposed restrictions on economic, military, and technological cooperation against hostile countries. Congress’ belief that “entities that pose a cyber threat to the United States should be evaluated, including but not limited to that may be owned, directed, or subsidized by the People’s Republic of China, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or the Russian Federation.” (Congress.Gov, 2021c ).
Second, the U.S. continues to focus on Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Tibetan affairs, and the underlying motivation behind this is irreconcilable ideological differences (Zhao, 2019 ). In the key terms of Tables 2 and 3 , we find that the terms freedom, democracy, and human rights often appear together with these words. Congress’s perception of the confrontational power relationship between the United States and China is behind this ideology. It has long been reflected in foreign policy, such as choosing to strengthen economic and military cooperation with Taiwan (Congress.Gov, 2020b , 2021 h ), supporting political protests in Hong Kong (Congress.Gov, 2020a ), and expressing dissatisfaction with China’s governance in Tibet and Xinjiang (Congress.Gov, 2021a ).
Third, Congress has shown a solid willingness to decouple in the economic and technological spheres. Academics have long been concerned about the phenomenon and concluded that “the trade war between China and the United States has evolved into a technology war, and the intense competition in this field has reached the level of the Cold War” (Ferguson, 2020 ). This study shows that this “hard decoupling” has influenced U.S. foreign policy in the form of legislation. In the technology field, Congress legislatively prohibits transactions involving the information and communications technology of a foreign adversary (Congress.Gov, 2019a ), and advocates sanctions against Huawei and ZTE, particularly technology export restrictions (Congress.Gov, 2019b , 2019c ). On the economic front, Congress has increased the regulation and tracking of Chinese companies (Congress.Gov, 2021f , 2022a ). Moreover, the push to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. is one of the key tools Congress has used to implement hard decoupling in the economy (Congress.Gov, 2021i ).
On the other hand, through a comparison of the corpus of China-related bills during the Trump-Era and the Biden Era, it is found in this article that although there are certain similarities in the subject matter of the two, one cannot ignore that differences also exist at the same time.
First, the China-related bills in the 117th Congress emphasize the confrontation between China and the United States regarding values and ideology more than in the past two Congresses. Such confrontational discourse reflects how the United States defines self-identity and other-identity and how identity-defining differentiation affects congressional political behavior and legislative output. Specifically, the bill cites China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and Cuba as disruptors of the liberal international order and threats to U.S. national security (Congress.Gov, 2021d , 2021e ). Examining the corpus, the researchers found that in the 117th Congress, these hostile states were present in 108 bills compared to 100 bills in the 115th–116th Congress. The common feature of these bills is the expression of the discourses of democracy, freedom, and human rights. They propose political measures of condemnation, restrictions, and sanctions against China.
Second, the China-related legislation in the 117th Congress emphasizes allied cooperation, which means that Congress believes that allies who share values should cooperate on all fronts in dealing with the China threat. Such allies include Japan, South Korea, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the European Union, and other countries in the Indo-Pacific region. For example, Congress wrote in the legislation that authoritarian leaders have deliberately chipped away at the pillars of democracy, and the competition between democracies and autocracies has again become an animating feature of global politics (Congress.Gov, 2022d ). With the text of the legislation, Congress demonstrated its recognition of the identity and responsibility of allies, namely, that the United States and its allies are important pillars in maintaining freedom and peace (Congress.Gov, 2021g ). This legislative shift reflects that the Biden administration is ending the Trump-era unilateralist and isolationist approach. In contrast, they opted for a multilateralist Moreover, value differences appear increasingly frequently as necessary discursive expressions in congressional political texts, and ideological confrontation becomes a justification for decoupling. In the 115th and 116th Congresses, lawmakers introduced bills on the grounds of intellectual property protection and national security to require technology restrictions and shut down research exchanges for Chinese technology companies, such as Huawei and ZTE; in the 117th Congress, the reasons for this decoupling behavior were explained as ideological confrontation. For example, legislators argue that the Chinese government’s use of technology to monitor citizens’ behavior threatens the principles of the open internet, self-expression, and the rule of law (Congress.Gov, 2022c ). This is also implemented in diplomacy, with congressional lawmakers encouraging the world’s preeminent democracies that they must combat the forces that threaten market-driven economic systems and ensure that democracies lead in technology and innovation (Congress.Gov, 2022b ).
After comparing the similarities and differences between the two corpora, the researchers found that these acts constitute a triangular relationship among “political texts, ideology and power”. First, the value judgements and institutional orientations implicit in the political texts guide and constrain U.S. diplomatic practice. Next, the power relations and power struggles that emerge from the diplomatic process are again reflected in the political texts (Halliday et al., 2014 ). The result is that the U.S.‒China relationship is defined and shaped. In other words, the U.S. has defined its own identity in its diplomatic interactions with China. It has also tried to use an externally hostile state to bridge its internal differences, such as partisan polarization, leading to identifying differences and an ongoing power play between the U.S. and China (Nymalm, 2013 ). In this context, the bill’s content actually goes beyond the original meaning of economic and technological issues. It could reflect what Congress sees as America’s identity as the vanguard of liberal democratic capitalism and its perception of China as an illiberal and threatening player. This dichotomy of values shaped U.S. diplomacy of “the one” and “the other” and has determined its mode of competition with China.
The two corpora of China-related bills in the 115th to 117th Congress of the article involve the presidencies of Trump and Biden. On this basis, researchers compared and analyzed the two corpora from three perspectives: word frequency, semantic network, and topic modeling. It is argued in this article that a large number of China-related bills not only reflects the fact that China is a major concern in U.S. foreign affairs but also epitomizes decoupling.
The results demonstrate that the U.S. is systematically implementing a decoupling policy. The increasing number of China-related bills yearly reveals that Congress is pushing for decoupling from China on several fronts, including economic, technological, cultural and academic exchanges. Notably, this decoupling has not slowed down with Biden’s rise to power. In other words, whether the U.S. president chooses the “America First” dogma or multilateralism, US‒China relations may not improve substantially. Moreover, although there are similarities in the topics of China-related bills between the Congress under the Biden administration and the Trump administration, our results show differences in the discursive formulation of the two. On the one hand, the new Congress combines decoupling with anti-communism, using the phrase “against the Chinese Communist Party” rather than the traditional ideological dichotomy, and calls on allied countries to fight the threat of authoritarian states together based on democratic values (Congress.Gov, 2021b ).
Our research suggests that the U.S. Congress will practice a competitive model of diplomacy in the coming period, continuing to propose bills fraught with ideological confrontation in important areas. All legislation will significantly impact the future direction of U.S.‒China relations and will need to be tracked on an ongoing basis. Finally, some shortcomings of our study need to be noted. First, this study is concerned with only including congressional bills in the analysis, and further attention can be paid to other congressional activities, such as Committee Reports, Committee Publications, and Congressional Records, to enrich the research materials and examine congressional activities related to China more comprehensively. Second, this study discusses U.S.‒China relations from the perspective of congressional political texts. In future studies, the cooperative network of legislators can be used as one of the variables to discuss votes on China-related bills to more deeply understand the political attitudes and positions of Congress.
Data availability
The datasets generated by the survey research during and/or analyzed during the current study are available in the Dataverse repository, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/40C36R .
Change history
31 july 2023.
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-01956-9
Code Source: https://rpubs.com/MNidhi/NumberoftopicsLDA
Because China and the United States appear repeatedly in the bill, the researchers removed these two terms when building the topic model to avoid a negative impact on the effect.
The researchers removed some high-frequency but meaningless words such as “including” “bills” “China” “United States” “president” etc. to ensure a more effective and realistic semantic network analysis.
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Acknowledgements
This research is funded by The Program to Promote China-US Friendship, Trust, and Cooperation (Grant No: FDZMHX2108). We thank Zimeng Wang and Yutian Zhang from Fudan University for their contributions to collecting data for the study.
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Global Research Pulse: China
Ritu Dhand, Chief Scientific Officer, Springer Nature
I am delighted to introduce this Global Research Pulse report, which explores China’s development as a leader in global research.
It is the first in a new series of reports from Springer Nature to support our community of Editors, providing them with insights and tools to make informed decisions in a rapidly changing, diverse research landscape. China is now the largest contributor to global research output, a position that has been achieved through comprehensive and strategic investment in continuous growth of funding to its universities, state-of-the-art facilities, and active recruitment of global talent to their universities. 1 Engagement in emerging areas of research with real-world applications has fostered international collaboration and innovation. Meanwhile, China has also taken significant steps to increase research quality and manage research integrity issues.
In section 1, you will find data exploring China’s research growth, including indicators regarding its quality. Section 2 expands on the strategy underlying China’s accomplishments, including investment, and crucial policy shifts to increase research quality. Section 3 takes a closer look at how to identify world-leading institutions and high-impact researchers from the region.
Ritu Dhand Chief Scientific Officer Springer Nature
1. China’s growing research quality
China’s growth in research volume has been widely documented. In recent years, reports from the US National Science Foundation, 2 and Japan’s National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (NISTEP) 3 have described the growth in research articles from China, which surpassed the USA in research volume in 2017. In a 2023 report, Clarivate documented a five-fold increase in China’s publication output from 2009 to 2021, 4 outperforming the USA and several EU nations. These reports also highlight an increase in the volume of citable research over the past two decades. As one metric for quality, higher levels of research citations from China shows increased attention from the international research community.
Higher levels of research citations from China shows increased attention from the international research community.
Using Clarivate InCites, the analysis shows that China has experienced a rapid increase in the number of citable research papers, and now produces the highest volume of citable papers, 40% more than the USA. (Fig.1)
Figure 1: Comparison of citable research papers from China, the USA and EU-15 5 between 2000 and 2022.
Breakdown of chart data
Other recent reports present similar evidence. In 2022, NISTEP reported that Chinese research constituted 27.2% of the world’s top 1% most frequently cited papers, looking at yearly averages between 2018 and 2020. The USA accounted for 24.9% of papers in the same period. 6 To compare citation impact across fields, we can use Clarivate’s Category Normalized Citation Impact (CNCI), which shows that China’s research impact has been steadily increasing since 2000 and is now comparable with much of Europe and the USA (Fig.2). As Clarivate’s recent report also concludes, the annual average CNCI for China indicates that each year’s research is increasingly valued abroad. 7
China’s research impact has been steadily increasing since 2000 and is now comparable with much of Europe and the USA
Figure 2: Comparison of CNCI in China, US, EU-15, Canada and Australia between 2000 and 2022.
Clarivate’s Highly Cited Papers 2023 report also concludes that the global research community is increasingly taking note of China’s research: in several research fields, China now contributes as many or more Highly Cited Papers as the USA and other leading research nations. 8
China now contributes as many or more Highly Cited Papers as the USA and other leading research nations.
We looked at the most cited papers from 2021 in Clarivate InCites, comparing China against other countries with high research output. 9 We found that China has the highest proportion of papers in the top 10% most cited , with 29% having a corresponding author from China, compared to 20% from the USA and 24% from EU-15 (Fig. 3). It also has the highest proportion of papers in the top 1% most cited , with 32% from China, compared with 24% from both the USA and EU-15 countries. (Fig. 3)
Figure 3: Proportions of most cited papers from China, USA, Canada, Australia and EU-15. (A) Top 10%; (B) Top 1%.
Notably, a sizeable proportion of China’s publications are in the top 10% of all Highly Cited Papers (Fig. 4). As a percentage of total research output, 13% of China’s total research output sits in the top 10% of highly cited articles, on par with the USA (12%) and EU-15 (11%).
A large proportion of China’s publications are in the top 10% of all Highly Cited Papers.
Figure 4: Volume of papers in the top 10% and top 1%: China, USA, Canada, Australia and EU-15.
Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports’ quartile rankings (based on the impact factors of journals) provide another means to evaluate and compare journals. 10 Using the JCR impact factor for 2022, we found that 82% of papers from China are published in Q1/Q2 journals (the top 50% of all journals across all subject areas), higher than other major research nations (Fig. 5).
Figure 5: Papers published in 2022 per JCR impact factor quartiles: China, USA, Canada, Australia, EU-15.
Sub-disciplinary analysis of the global top 10% most cited papers shows China’s global standing in terms of citation impact, particularly in Engineering & Technology and the Physical Sciences (Fig. 6).
Figure 6: Contributions to top 10% of most cited papers published in 2021 by discipline.
In the Physical Sciences and Engineering & Technology, China's contribution to papers ranked in the top 10% most cited is substantially higher than other regions, being several fold higher than that of the USA and EU-15. China also continues to compete effectively in the Life Sciences.
Even in disciplines where China has a lower volume of research output, it is evident that its contribution to the top 10% highly cited papers is comparable to that of other regions as a proportion of total output. For example, in Clinical, Preclinical & Health (per Fig. 6), under 14,000 of China’s papers form part of the top 10% highly cited papers, yet as a proportion of its total output in this area, China’s contribution closely aligns with other countries at 12%. 14% of Chinese research outputs in Economics and Business and 19% in Social Sciences are highly cited, compared to 9% and 8%, respectively, for the USA. In Psychiatry & Psychology, 10% of Chinese research outputs are in the top 10% of highly cited papers, closely followed by 9% for the USA.
2. China’s rise in research
2. How China achieved its lead position in research In this section, we explore the drivers behind China’s growth, looking more closely at how China is building an infrastructure to support high quality research and innovation.
2.1. Investment in research China’s ambitions to become a world leader in research can be traced back over several decades. In 1978, it announced its ‘reform and opening up’ policy, involving a wide range of economic reforms including increased investment in innovation and technology. 11 Investment in research and development (R&D) has grown significantly in the region. Based on year-on-year tracking of gross domestic expenditures, China accounted for 22% (US $526 billion) of the world’s R&D expenditures in 2019, the second largest contribution behind the USA, which accounted for 27% (US $656 billion) (Fig. 7). 12
Figure 7: Gross domestic expenditure on R&D 2000-19.
Note(s): PPP is purchasing power parity. Data are for the top eight R&D-performing countries. Data are not available for all countries for all years. Gross domestic expenditures on R&D were revised from those reported in previous years of Science and Engineering Indicators . These data revisions were mostly due to 2020 revisions of the PPP estimates. See sidebar Revisions to Global Research and Development for more details. Source(s): NCSES, National Patterns of R&D Resources; OECD, MSTI March 2021 release; UNESCO, UIS, R&D dataset. Indicators 2022: R&D Breakdown of chart data
The 2023 Global Innovation Index (GII) also reported the rapid ascent of China’s investment in R&D, with China one of the five economies that spent the most on R&D. 13 China is now ranked as 12 th for innovation in the world, the only middle-income economy among the top 30 countries.
China is now ranked as 12th for innovation in the world, the only middle-income economy among the top 30 countries.
The GII also ranks the top countries for innovative capacity, identifying local concentrations of world-leading science and technology activity. From this analysis, it is clear that China has invested in developing science and technology clusters, seen as critical components to innovation by bringing together science, business, and entrepreneurs into a holistic ecosystem. The GII found China has the greatest number of science and technology clusters – 24 cities, ahead of 21 in the USA (Table 1).
Table 1: World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Top 15 Global GII science and technology clusters.
2.2. Introduction of policy reforms to drive up the quality of research
China’s commitment to becoming a world leader in science can also be seen in the shift in emphasis away from volume towards quality of outputs. More than 30 policies relating to research integrity have been introduced since 2018, 14 including two significant ministerial guidelines issued in 2020 to promote a healthier research and assessment culture. 15
More than 30 policies relating to research integrity have been introduced since 2018.
The goal of such guidelines is to actively promote high standards of ethical behaviour in research. They shift the focus of assessment and incentives from the quantity of publications, or the impact factor of journals, towards the quality and real-world impact of scientific achievements. There has also been an increase in the public disclosure of misconduct cases to deter unethical behaviours among researchers. 16 The guidelines published in 2020 also introduced an Early Warning Journal List, marking specific publications as untrustworthy, which has recently been updated. 17 A further initiative announced by the Chinese government in November 2023 called for a nationwide review of research misconduct, requiring all universities to declare retractions from English and Chinese-language journals and report on why they were retracted. Together, these policies have provided an overarching architecture for governing and promoting research integrity in China and show an ongoing commitment to fostering an environment of ethical and impactful scientific research. 18
2.3. Collaboration with and training in the West
There is an increasing number of students returning to China having studied internationally, helping to align the standards adopted in China with those of leading research institutions worldwide. Since 1978, over 5.2 million Chinese have studied abroad. 19 Between 2003 and 2018, 26,000 students trained in Western countries returned to China under its international doctoral program.
Geopolitical relations between China and the USA have in recent years impacted previous levels of collaboration. 20 However, Clarivate’s 2023 report found that despite a downturn in collaborations, the USA remains China’s most important international research partner, co-authoring over 40% of China’s collaborative output over the last decade. 21 Meanwhile, China has begun to establish partnerships with countries outside of the West, including in the Middle East and Asia, particularly Singapore. 22
2.4. Strength of innovation ecosystem
China's 14th five-year plan for 2021-2025 emphasises its goals for technological innovation, describing plans for lunar exploration, supercomputing, quantum information, and more. As part of its longer term vision for the years up to 2035, there are plans to establish national laboratories for fields including network communications, energy, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence. 23 As noted in section 2.1, China’s focus on building an infrastructure for innovation is also evident in the volume of science and technology clusters and investment in R&D. This investment is increasingly evident in the innovative nature of Chinese research. A 2023 study found that there were high levels of innovation in papers from China, a large proportion of which included cross-disciplinary research, 24 an approach recognised as helping to foster new perspectives. 25
A 2023 study found that there were high levels of innovation in papers from China.
Patents can be recognised as a further indicator of innovation. Statistics from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) show that in 2022 the highest numbers of patents in force were recorded in China (3.6 million), the USA (3.3 million) and Japan (2 million). 26 China’s patent filings have been rising steadily since 2000, with analysts suggesting that it is now global leader or level with the USA. 27
3. Navigating the Chinese research landscape
In this section, editors can find tools to help familiarise themselves with where the best research is being undertaken as well as dive deeper to find potential experts for peer review.
3.1. World-leading institutions 3.1.1. Top university rankings The Nature Index provides an international ranking of the leading research articles published in high-quality natural science and health journals, based on a list of journals chosen by a panel of independent researchers. In the most recent annual tables, half of the top 20 institutions were based in China. 28 Each of those Chinese institutions saw improvements in their adjusted share between 2021 and 2022, while every non-Chinese institution saw a decline. In the annual tables for 2023, 7 of the top 10 institutions were based in China (Table 2).
Table 2: Nature Index university rankings: institutional table 2023.
View the tables
The Shanghai Ranking Index is another database that facilitates comparison of world university ranking . It compares the top 1,000 research universities worldwide, with four Chinese institutions in the top 50. The Index also produces a Chinese university ranking, providing a deeper look at the performance of 594 institutions across China, including research output alongside other factors such as teaching quality and facilities (Fig. 11).
Table 3: Shanghai Ranking Index: Top ten Chinese universities 2024.
View the China university rankings
3.1.2. C9 universities
The C9 is an alliance of elite universities in China. The equivalent to the USA’s Ivy League, these institutions have consistently generated more than 20% of the nation’s output of journal articles indexed by Thomson Reuters and produced 30% of the total citations from published research. 29 All nine universities rank in the top 13 in China, including seven at the top of the 2023 Shanghai Ranking Index. Despite criticisms of university ranking systems, they are noted to have provided Chinese leadership with key benchmarks for their vision to achieve world-class status. 30 It is clear that these institutions are not only on a par with Western institutions but in some cases have even outpaced them, based on rankings.
Fudan University
Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Harbin Institute of Technology
Harbin, Heilongjiang
Nanjing University
Nanjing, Jiangsu
Peking University
Tsinghua University
University of Science and Technology of China
Hefei, Anhui
Xi'an Jiaotong University
Xi'an, Shaanxi
Zhejiang University
Hangzhou, Zhejiang
Further reading
University of Science and Technology of China (USTC): “exceptional achievements in research and education”
Over four decades, the university has fostered hundreds of successful scientists, researchers, and entrepreneurs, building strategic relationships with leading international research universities and institutes. Read more from THE rankings
Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS): “almost double the share of Harvard University, accounting for 2.8% of Nature Index”
CAS comprises a comprehensive research network with 110+ research institutes, a traditional merit-based academic society, and a system of higher education. Home to approximately 56,000 professional researchers, 22,800 are research professors or associate professors. CAS attaches much importance to international cooperation and has extensive and diversified partnerships with scientists all over the world. In the 2023 Nature Index, CAS was the fastest rising institution for output, with a 184-point rise in adjusted share from 2021–2022. Read more from Nature Index
Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech): “aims for high-calibre young scientists by offering internationally competitive tenure-track packages and state-of-the-art facilities”
SUSTech in Shenzhen was the fastest-growing young university in Nature Index in 2019. Established just 13 years ago, it has already risen to 24th in the world, thanks to rapid investment, international collaboration, and a heavy focus on attracting the best research talent. Read more from Nature Index
3.2. World-leading researchers
3.2.1. Highly Cited Researchers Clarivate’s 2023 report lists researchers who have demonstrated significant and broad influence in their fields. Mainland China has the second highest number of Highly Cited Researchers after the USA and has more than doubled its share of Highly Cited Researchers since 2018. Read more from Clarivate
Yunlong Cao
Nature ’s Ten people who helped shape science’ in 2022 features Yunlong ‘Richard’ Cao’s team and his COVID-19 predictor. Cao developed a high-throughput method which shows, in fine detail, how the virus could respond to antibody pressure. By characterising antibodies in detail, his team has successfully predicted many of the mutations that define emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants, helping researchers stay ahead of the virus Read more from Nature
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How to cite the report
Springer Nature (2024, August). China Impact Report
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1 Clarivate (October 2023). ISI Global Research Report: China’s research landscape. https://clarivate.com/lp/Chinas-research-landscape/ . 2 NSF (2018). The rise of China in science and engineering. National Science Foundation: Science and Engineering Indicators. https://www.nsf.gov/nsb/sei/one-pagers/China-2018.pdf 3 Matsuzoe, R. (2022). China tops U.S. in quantity and quality of scientific papers. Nikkei Asia. https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Science/China-tops-U.S.-in-quantity-and-quality-of-scientific-papers 4 Clarivate (October 2023). ISI Global Research Report: China’s research landscape. https://clarivate.com/lp/Chinas-research-landscape/ . 5 EU-15 countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom 6 Matsuzoe, R. (2022). China tops U.S. in quantity and quality of scientific papers. Nikkei Asia. https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Science/China-tops-U.S.-in-quantity-and-quality-of-scientific-papers 7 Clarivate (October 2023). ISI Global Research Report: China’s research landscape. https://clarivate.com/lp/Chinas-research-landscape/ 8 Op. cit. 9 Data sources: Clarivate InCites where we looked at articles and reviews from 2021 (dataset updated 25 August 2023), country based on corresponding author affiliation 10 Clarivate (2022). Journal Citation Reports: Quartile rankings and other metrics. https://support.clarivate.com/ScientificandAcademicResearch/s/article/Journal-Citation-Reports-Quartile-rankings-and-other-metrics?language=en_US 11 Lu, Y. et al. (2019). Forty years of reform and opening up: China’s progress toward a sustainable path. Science Advances 5 . https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aau9413 12 NSF (2022). The State of U.S. Science and Engineering 2022. U.S. and Global Research and Development. National Science Foundation. https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20221/u-s-and-global-research-and-development 13 WIPO (20 September 2023). GII Science and Technology Clusters: Tokyo-Yokohama tops ranking; China now home to greatest number. https://www.wipo.int/pressroom/en/articles/2023/article_0009.html 14 Yang, Y. et al. (2022). Progress and challenges of research integrity in China. Cultures of Science 5, 173-177. https://doi.org/10.1177/20966083221143545 15 Chinese Ministry of education, Ministry of Science and Technology: Guidelines on Standardizing the Use of SCI Paper-related Indicators in Institutions of High education, and Establishing Correct Evaluation Guidance; Ministry of Science and Technology: Measures to Eliminate the Adverse Effects of the 'Paper-Only' Orientation in Scientific Evaluation (Trial) 16 Yang, Y. et al. (2022). Progress and challenges of research integrity in China. Cultures of Science 5, 173-177. https://doi.org/10.1177/20966083221143545 17 Mallapaty, S. (2024). China has a list of suspect journals and it’s just been updated. Nature (6 March 2024). https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00629-0 18 Mallapaty, S. (2024). China conducts first nationwide review of retractions and research misconduct. Nature (12 February 2024). https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00397-x 19 Xinhua (30 March 2018). More Chinese students study abroad. http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-03/30/c_137077465.htm 20 Hua, S. & Hao, K. (2022). U.S.-China tensions fuel outflow of Chinese scientists from U.S. universities. Wall Street Journal (22 September 2022). https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-china-tensions-fuel-outflow-of-chinese-scientists-from-u-s-universities-11663866938 21 Clarivate (2023). Clarivate report reveals China challenging U.S research dominance, signaling future research ambitions. (31 October 2023). https://clarivate.com/news/clarivate-report-reveals-china-challenging-u-s-research-dominance-signaling-future-research-ambitions/ 22 Nature Index (9 August 2023). Mapping China’s shifting research collaboration. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02161-z 23 Woolston C. (2023). What China’s leading position in natural sciences means for global research. Nature Index (9 August 2023). https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02159-7 24 Wagner, C. (2023). China now publishes more high-quality science than any other nation – should the US be worried? The Conversation (10 January 2023) . https://theconversation.com/china-now-publishes-more-high-quality-science-than-any-other-nation-should-the-us-be-worried-192080 25 Cao, C. (2023). China must draw on internal research strength. Nature Index (8 November 2023). https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03445-0 26 WIPO (2022). WIPO IP Facts and Figures 2022. https://www.wipo.int/edocs/pubdocs/en/wipo-pub-943-2022-en-wipo-ip-facts-and-figures-2022.pdf 27 Kersten, A., Athanasia, G., Arcuri, G. (2022). What can patent data reveal about U.S.-China technology competition? (19 September 2022). CSIS https://www.csis.org/analysis/what-can-patent-data-reveal-about-us-china-technology-competition 28 Woolston, C. (2023). Annual Tables 2023: China tops natural-science table. Nature Index (15 June 2023). https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01868-3 29 Times Higher Education (February 17 2011). Eastern stars: Universities of China's C9 League excel in select fields. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/eastern-stars-universities-of-chinas-c9-league-excel-in-select-fields/415193.article 30 Allen, R. (2017). A comparison of China’s “Ivy League” to other peer groupings through global university rankings. 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