From the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan, China, in January 2020, to the reopening of China in early 2023, personal interactions between China and the United States virtually ground to a halt over the three-year period (Sliver et al. 2021). This was unlike anything we had seen in the past five decades of Sino-U.S. relations since President Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. The lack of in-person contact made it easy for politicians, academics, and media experts to overlook finer details when assessing and discussing each other. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, Sino-U.S. relations had been deteriorating for a few years, with both sides viewing each other in an unfriendly light. During the pandemic, both sides attributed some of their own countries’ challenges to the other. After the Wuhan outbreak, Chinese citizens expressed anger with the U.S. decision to ban Chinese people from entering the country, as well as the use of derogatory terms like “Wuhan virus” by U.S. officials to refer to the outbreak. Likewise, due to the substantial human and economic toll of the COVID-19 pandemic, instances of discrimination against Chinese or Asian individuals increased within the United States (Human Rights Watch 2020). The pandemic severely impacted President Trump’s re-election campaign, leading to a series of highly antagonistic policies toward China in 2020 (Economy et al. 2020).

In the context of isolation and tension between China and the United States, both countries held contrasting views of themselves and each other. In China, the notion that “the East is rising and the West is declining” (Dong Sheng Xi Jiang) gained popularity, signaling a shift in global power dynamics with China leading the ascent of the East, while the United States represented the decline of the West. Conversely, in the United States, the narrative of “Peak China” (Brands and Beckley 2022) gained attention, suggesting that China faced significant internal challenges and that its trajectory was either reaching its conclusion or slowing significantly.

This article argues that during the pandemic, both China and the United States created echo chambers, where policymakers, analysts, media, and the general public were primarily exposed to information and opinions that reinforced their existing views. This phenomenon is often referred to as an “Echo Chamber Effect.” Like an individual in an empty room hearing only their own voice and its echoes, people within these chambers tend to believe that everyone shares their perspective. This reinforcement of existing beliefs and attitudes resulted from the lack of in-person communication during the pandemic, causing China and the United States to form separate echo chambers. Each country’s population adopted polarized viewpoints within their own communities. Relying on such oversimplified perspectives, both countries risk making harmful policy decisions that could worsen tensions in their relationship.

The East Rise and the West Decline?

The notion of “the East is rising and the West is Declining” got noticed in China even before the pandemic. Chinese scholars began to discuss the concept at least in 2019 (Zhu 2019; Gao 2020; Wei 2021). It’s evident that this perception stems from China’s rapid economic growth over the past three decades. When simply comparing economic size, the relative “decline” of any country in the world in comparison with China can be observed.

The pandemic dramatically popularized the term “the East is rising and the West is declining.” For example, Chinese President Xi Jinping mentioned this concept in a speech at the Central Party School on March 1, 2022 (Xi 2023). China successfully controlled the virus within its borders during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in 2021 and 2022. In contrast, Western countries struggled with implementing strict societal controls, resulting in widespread virus transmission and much higher infection and mortality rates. This situation has ignited a debate in China about the governance system’s superiority or inferiority when compared to Western societies.

However, toward the end of 2022, the global COVID-19 landscape was disrupted by the Omicron variant, posing significant challenges to pandemic containment. In 2023, China faced pandemic response difficulties, culminating in a significant outbreak by year-end. The Chinese government subsequently adapted its pandemic prevention strategies, ultimately emerging from the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic. In retrospect, it’s valuable to reevaluate the concept of “good governance in China and chaos in the West.” China’s political and social system initially demonstrated effectiveness against the Alpha variant but encountered challenges with the highly infectious Omicron variant, despite its lower fatality rates. Both China and Western countries grappled with containing the virus. Notably, Western countries’ governance models enabled more agile adjustments to pandemic policies, resulting in a swifter and smoother recovery compared to China. The governance models in China and Western countries are deeply rooted in their respective political and social traditions. Rather than debating the superiority or inferiority of these models in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, it may be more beneficial to assess their strengths, facilitate mutual learning, and address common challenges in areas like public health and artificial intelligence development.

The concept of “the East is rising and the West is declining” requires a more nuanced perspective. Firstly, it lacks a clear time frame: Is it discussing past changes in global power dynamics or a concept for the future? Secondly, the terms “the East” and “the West” are not well-defined. While “the West” generally refers to Western countries, including the United States, Canada, the European Union, Japan, and others, it is less clear what “the East” refers to. Does it encompass emerging markets and developing countries represented by BRICS nations, “Far East” countries like China, Japan, and South Korea, along with Middle Eastern nations like Saudi Arabia and Iran, or socialist countries like China, Vietnam, and Cuba? The concept’s lack of clarity complicates its interpretation. Lastly, “rise” and “decline” can pertain to changes in economic size or broader aspects of national power and authority, with the latter being a more complex and vague notion. While it’s easier to compare relative changes in economic size, there’s no universally accepted standard for gauging a country’s overall national power and authority in international discourse. Therefore, reaching a consensus on whether a country is rising or declining in these broader terms is quite tricky. Just like the “Peak China” argument, any assessment regarding long-term trends must be approached with great caution. Changes in a country’s relative position over the short and medium term can be relatively certain, but long-term trends are difficult to predict. Few scholars in the 1980s could anticipate Japan’s relative decline and the subsequent resurgence of the United States relative to Japan, highlighting the need for caution when making medium-to-long-term forecasts today (Table 8.1).

Table 8.1 The share of some economies in global GDP (Unit: %)
Full size table

If we simply use a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a proportion of global GDP to measure its rise or decline, there is validity to the concept of “the East is rising and the West is declining” to some extent. If we consider developed countries as “the West” and developing countries as “the East,” over the three decades from 1992 to 2002, the share of global economic output represented by developed economies, typified by the OECD, decreased from 84% to less than 60%. Correspondingly, the economic size of global middle-and low-income countries increased from 15% to 38.6%, representing a shift of more than 20% in each direction. This can be seen as compelling evidence for the concept of “the East is rising and the West is declining.” However, middle-and low-income countries form a highly diverse group and is not a meaningful international political player. When we examine individual countries or economic entities on a global scale over the past 30 years, only China and India have consistently expanded their economic size. While India is in the early stages of its rise, it is primarily China that has experienced a remarkable ascent. It’s also hard to claim that other emerging major nations have seen similar growth. Excluding China and India, the combined economic size of the other three BRICS countries has grown over the two decades after the Cold War. However, their share has declined in recent years and is currently back to the level of 1997. Among developed countries, Japan and the European Union have experienced consistent declines over the past three decades. In contrast, the United States’ share of the global economy has fluctuated but eventually returned to historical norms after a significant post-Cold War increase. U.S. economic share peaked in the early twenty-first century, then declined in the first decade of the century, only to show noticeable growth in the past decade. By 2022, the U.S. economic share in the global economy had nearly returned to the level of 1992 when the Cold War ended. Over this thirty-year period, the United States has remained relatively stable, while China and India have continued to rise, and the EU and Japan have experienced continuing declines. This situation is intricate and cannot be simply summed up as “The East is rising and the West is declining.”

Peak China?

Over the past 20 years, the idea that China’s economic size will eventually surpass that of the United States is widely recognized. Scholars used to debate on when China will surpass the United States. This viewpoint also forms the basis of the “Thucydides Trap” (Allison 2017) concept proposed by Graham Allison. However, American scholars Michael Beckley and Hal Brands challenged this perspective in their book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China published in August 2022. In their book, these scholars argued that China’s economic growth has already peaked, and that a slowing China may be more inclined to take risks, potentially leading to a conflict with the United States earlier than expected. This perspective quickly gained traction in the United States and the Western world, probably stimulated by China’s highly controversial decision to lockdown major cities like Shanghai. By the end of 2022, the COVID-19 spread in the country with an extremely rapid speed, followed by social unrest in some parts of China. On May 11, 2023, The Economist featured “Is Chinese Power About to Peak?” as its cover story, bringing more attention to the concept of “Peak China” in the mainstream media. China’s slowing economic growth might pose a greater danger to the international community than rapid growth. Concerns about China’s economy encountering significant trouble or even collapse have become quite prevalent in Western media in recent months. President Biden even referred to the Chinese economy as a “ticking time bomb” (Bose and Mason 2023).

It’s obvious that China’s path to economic prosperity faces significant hurdles. It’s widely recognized that China’s shrinking population is a substantial long-term challenge. Another issue in China’s economy is the challenge of making domestic consumption the main engine of growth. The specter of local debt looms large, potentially leading to debt crises for local governments and businesses, which could drag down the national economy. Moreover, during the fierce pandemic, the Chinese government implemented controversial economic policies that undermined confidence among private enterprises in the nation’s future. These factors influence the speed of China’s economic recovery, as well as its pursuit of accelerated growth.

The criticisms aimed at China’s economy, as mentioned earlier, carry substantial validity. After 4 decades of rapid growth, it’s quite natural that China’s economic expansion gradually slow down. It’s fairly certain that China would not return to the previous era of high-speed growth exceeding 8%. However, whether these factors signify that China’s ascent has already “peaked” remains a subject open to debate. To find out whether China’s economy has reached its peak and if it’s larger than the United States’, we need to rely on long-term economic forecasts, not just recent yearly or quarterly data.

One of the fundamentals of the Chinese economy is that China’s population is over 1.4 billion, more than four times the size of the United States. The contraction in population size will be a long and slow process. According to the United Nations (UN 2022), regardless of whether we consider high, medium, or low scenarios for China’s future birth rates, the population is projected to remain above 1.2 billion by 2050, still about four times the size of the United States’ population. Moreover, a more significant decline in China’s population is foreseen in the latter half of this century. Furthermore, China’s adoption of artificial intelligence, automatic manufacturing, policies like postponed retirement, and other measures have the potential to mitigate the pace of population decline. Moreover, China’s per capita GDP currently stands at around $12,000, which is approximately 20% of that in the United States. This statistic underscores that China still holds substantial potential for long-term economic growth. Additionally, various challenges within China’s economic landscape can be effectively addressed or alleviated through prudent policy measures. While local government debt remains a pressing concern, the cautious monetary policies of the People’s Bank of China offer significant flexibility for the central government to manage this issue. Despite restrictions imposed by the United States and other Western nations on China’s high-tech sectors, it’s important not to exaggerate the impact of these restrictions in relation to the overall scale of the Chinese economy. Moreover, Western sanctions and constraints might even stimulate China to foster indigenous innovation in specific high-tech domains. In short, the long-term development trend of China’s economy is an issue that is difficult to judge now, and everything is far from certain.

What’s more, whether China’s economic scale exceeds that of the United States is not a very meaningful topic of discussion in international relations. If calculated based on purchasing power parity, China’s economic size actually surpassed that of the United States in 2014. Some scholars, such as Krugman (2023), have noted that the choice of standards for measuring a country’s economic size and how the results affect its international influence and war capabilities are quite complex. Likewise, shifts in GDP comparisons do not inherently lead to direct changes in the dynamics between nations. Calculated based on the current U.S. dollar exchange rate, China’s economic size is roughly about 70% of that of the United States. This is a number that has caused great concern in the U.S. strategic community. In other words, if China has a confrontational and hostile strategy, maybe China’s capabilities is already enough to pose existential threat to the United States. Regardless of our outlook on China’s future economic growth, whether the ratio of China’s economic scale to that of the United States rises to 100%, 120%, remains at the current 70%, or falls to 50%, both China and the United States have the capacity to create challenges for each other. Therefore, in terms of the impact of national capabilities on state relations, whether China’s economic scale has peaked actually has not that big an impact on Sino-U.S. relations.

Building upon the concept of “Peak China,” American and Western viewpoints often suggest that China’s foreign and military policies may adopt a more assertive stance (Brands and Beckley 2022). Furthermore, in recent years, there has been a prevailing belief in the Western world that China’s potential resort to military action to reunify Taiwan by 2027 (Davidson 2021) is seen as another manifestation of “Peak China,” indicating increased assertiveness in China’s foreign policy. However, if we carefully read the various documents of the CPC and the Chinese government, there has never been a statement that the Chinese Mainland will reunify Taiwan in 2027. The CPC announced at the 20th National Congress that it would achieve the “centennial goal of PLA” by 2027, but the Chinese authorities have never announced the specific connotation of this goal. Finally, the U.S. official (Lagrone 2023) also gradually adjusted his statement, indicating that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army aspires to have the capability to reunify Taiwan by force by 2027, without implying any intention or plans to achieve this goal.

All of these statements are based on the premise that a weaker China might resort to external assertiveness or military actions to manage conflicts, potentially escalating the situation. However, there are two significant issues with this argument. First, it’s challenging to conclusively determine whether China will indeed become weaker. Second, even if China were to experience a decline in power, it doesn’t necessarily imply a more aggressive stance. Scholars like Taylor Fravel (2023) have noted that historically, while China may be more responsive to foreign challenges during domestic difficulties, it hasn’t shown a consistent pattern of using foreign conflicts to address domestic issues. Fravel argues that due to China’s unique political system, Chinese leaders don’t automatically employ external strategies to manage domestic conflicts.

The Foreign Policy Influenced by the Echo Chamber Effect

The echo chamber effect impacts people’s perceptions and naturally influences the foreign policies of various countries.

The echo chamber effect reinforces attribution bias in both China and the United States. In international interactions, people and nations often explain their actions based on their circumstances while attributing their counterparts’ actions to inherent traits. For instance, one side’s policies are linked to their nature, such as viewing the United States as a hegemonic power or China as a communist nation. Conversely, actions taken by one’s own side are typically seen as responses compelled by the situation, essentially reactions to the other side’s perceived aggressiveness. During the COVID-19 pandemic, both China and the United States held a strong victim mentality, believing their policies were defensive reactions to the other’s perceived aggressiveness. The narratives of “Peak China” and “the East is rising and the West is declining” further solidify the perception that one’s own side is right and the other side is wrong, providing a more solid moral basis for attribution bias.

When Chinese leaders perceive significant governance challenges and deep-seated issues within the United States’ political system, they naturally assume that American policymakers have made numerous mistakes in recent years. This is particularly evident in their view of the policies pursued by the Trump administration during the COVID-19 pandemic, which China regards as irrational and even absurd. For instance, the Trump administration made scientifically questionable statements about the pandemic and implemented policies like restricting the entry of the members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) into the United States, which appeared irrational and ineffective. They also attempted to ban Chinese apps such as WeChat and TikTok in the United States. Based on these perceptions, Chinese government officials have urged the U.S. government to “change its approach” and “correct the wrongs.” Wang Yi, a member of the CCP’s Politburo, emphasized that “correcting the misunderstandings in Sino-U.S. relations requires dismantling the high barriers built by misguided perceptions of China.” This viewpoint is widespread in China.

In recent years, the idea of “strategic stalemate” has gained acceptance in China. This concept is often viewed as a reflection of the “righting the wrongs” perspective within the context of “the East is rising and the West is declining.” The term “strategic stalemate” can be traced back to Mao Zedong’s wartime strategy during World War II, where he divided the war between China and Japan into three phases: “strategic defense,” “strategic stalemate,” and “strategic counteroffensive” (Mao 1952). Looking at it from this perspective, after the Trump administration initiated a trade and technology war against China in 2018, China can be seen as entering a “strategic stalemate” phase. As the United States gradually adjusted its policies, shifting from full decoupling to selective decoupling and risk reduction, China also moved progressively into this “strategic stalemate” phase. The current trajectory suggests that if China maintains its current approach, it may eventually transition into a “strategic counteroffensive” phase.

On the other hand, U.S. government officials, as highlighted by Campbell in 2022, believe that China should be the party to revise its policies, pointing to China’s flawed domestic and foreign policies. Furthermore, American decision-makers perceive the Biden administration’s “strategic competition” strategy against China as successful and advocate for maintaining the current approach, which involves exerting pressure on China. This stance sharply contrasts with China’s expectations. In essence, the echo chamber effect may lead both sides to hesitate in taking proactive steps in the bilateral relationship, instead favoring a wait-and-see approach. This reluctance arises from both sides seeing themselves as right and just, while perceiving the other side as being in a challenging position.

When difficulties strain the bilateral relationship to a significant extent and compel one side to take measures to stabilize Sino-U.S. relations, the other side often interprets these actions as a sign of weakness and an admission of past errors. They may perceive these efforts to stabilize relations as indicative of the weaker side’s position. Within this psychological framework, even if one side observes the other taking such actions, they tend to adopt a wait-and-see approach. This implies that the other side’s actions haven’t yet fully reversed their prior policies and are unlikely to do so. However, this wait-and-see response can lead to frustration for the side that initiated proactive measures, possibly prompting them to discontinue their conciliatory actions.

In summary, misperceptions between China and the United States can lead to a classic trap in international political psychology. This mechanism operates as follows: Initial confrontations heighten tensions in bilateral relations. In response, one side takes conciliatory measures, raising unrealistic expectations from the other side. When these high expectations aren’t met, it leads to even greater disappointment and anxiety for the proactive side. Faced with little response to their conciliatory efforts, the proactive side becomes vulnerable to criticism and attacks from domestic groups advocating a tougher stance. The challenging circumstances faced by both sides may drive them to adopt more confrontational policies.

In November 2022, leaders from both China and the United States convened in Bali, Indonesia, where they jointly committed to stabilizing the bilateral relations. However, in February 2023, an unexpected incident involving balloons had a detrimental impact on U.S. efforts to ease tensions. This incident became the subject of intense political debate on social media, ultimately prompted the U.S. government to take an unconventional approach by shooting down the balloons. On the other side of the Pacific, the Chinese government, which had hoped for reconciliation, witnessed the U.S. side politicizing this accidental event, resulting in renewed anger and disappointment. The momentum for rapprochement between China and the United States was disrupted until the summer of 2023. This incident stands as a typical example of how the echo chamber effect can escalate tensions in the relationship. While Sino-U.S. relations have since entered a phase of reconciliation, these underlying psychological mechanisms persist and could continue to influence future reconciliation efforts.

To address this issue, China and the United States must take action during the upcoming reconciliation period to mitigate the echo chamber effect and its impact on their foreign policies. They should prioritize increased official and scholarly exchanges. While both nations have already initiated joint working groups in diplomacy and economics since the summer of 2023, the specific operational details and meeting frequencies of these groups remain unclear. More frequent and institutionalized meetings would enhance the effectiveness of dialogues. Scholarly exchanges between the two countries are gradually resuming, aiding in a more accurate understanding of each other’s motivations. However, these exchanges face disruptions due to factors such as limited international flights and security concerns. It is imperative for both sides to take government-level actions to collaboratively remove these obstacles hindering people-to-people exchanges. In summary, normalizing government and scholarly exchanges can help mitigate the echo chamber effect and align foreign policies with reality. While returning to a constructive path in their relationship may be challenging, both sides should work to prevent disruptions caused by misconceptions and allow policy flexibility for their respective governments.