Unmasking hidden enemies: US–China relations and the global illiberal turn

As the US–China relationship has disintegrated in recent years, a common refrain among elite commentators on each side has been the need for a newly sober appraisal of the character and intentions of the other. What often follows is the claim to have exposed a previously hidden threat, coupled with an insistence that prior beliefs in international comity and convergence have now been revealed as naïve illusions.

Such a narrative of the relationship’s breakdown, this presentation will argue, obscures the deeper forces driving the growth of distrust. Even as commentators on both sides increasingly characterize the two countries as fundamentally different and incompatible, political dynamics in both have moved in a similarly illiberal direction toward coercive nationalism and a more robust role for the state. Likewise, a zero-sum, nation-centered social epistemology is eclipsing the earlier liberal framework for conceptualizing international relations, and US–China interdependence now appears as vulnerability and menace. Rather than taking bilateral frictions at face value, this presentation proposes a global and domestic social analysis to understand the return of great power conflict and to pursue alternatives.

About the speaker

Jake Werner is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Global Development Policy Center, Boston University. He is currently completing a book manuscript examining the rise of the masses as a form of social life in Shanghai across the twentieth century and is undertaking research on the emergence of great power conflict between the US and China following the 2008 financial crisis.