America Against America
The attempt to assassinate presidential candidate Donald Trump and the replacement of Joe Biden with Kamala Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket are the starkest examples of the latest tumult. But for decades the United States has been riven by polarization and fragmentation that divides citizens into political camps and internet tribes, with little communication and understanding among them. Even the country’s political leaders now speak of a democracy that is fragile and contested.
The trends seem not to bode well for the United States’ future. Outsiders with limited knowledge of the country could quickly conclude that American democracy is on its last legs. Some, in fact, did this decades ago. In 1989, Wang Huning, then a professor at China’s Fudan University, did just that in “America Against America”, which offered an analysis of US society and its internal contradictions.
The book, however, is a fundamental misreading by China’s elite of their greatest rival. But its importance has nevertheless grown since its publication more than three decades ago, and it remains highly relevant today for providing insight into the foreign-policy thinking of Beijing’s leadership at a time of heightened and growing great-power competition between the United States and China. That is because Wang Huning left academia and now occupies a position near the apex of Chinese political power from which he is shaping his country’s political perceptions of the United States. It is an ominous development. The flaws in his thinking, which represent a gross underestimation of American resilience, could lead Beijing’s leaders to miscalculate the implications of an outbreak of conflict with Washington.
A Stellar Rise
After writing the book, Wang Huning became a senior adviser to China’s top leaders. In 1995, he entered the inner circle of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), advising general secretaries Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. Today, he is Xi Jinping’s chief ideologist, number four in the CCP hierarchy, and a member of the ruling elite in the 24-person Politburo. He is said to have been the mind and pen behind the “Xi Jinping Thought”, an ideological doctrine combining state control and Xi’s one-man rule with Marxism, which has been incorporated into the Chinese constitution. Wang Huning is also renowned for having composed the “China dream”, a collective vision of Chinese national strength that contrasts starkly with the individualistic American dream. He maintains a low profile, which has earned him the moniker “gray eminence”. He is a Chinese Richelieu, whose power and pen are wielded backstage.
“America Against America” continues to be widely read in China. It has also been impactful. Since the 2008 financial crisis, the notion of US decline has been a crucial part of the Chinese leadership's assessment of the global balance of power. Beijing believes that American political polarization and fragmentation reinforce that perspective.
Renewed interest in the book, and its perceived insight into an inevitable US downfall, blossomed among Chinese readers after the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol. Collector's editions sold for as much as $18,000 in China at the time.
Shortly afterwards, Xi launched his concept of “the East is rising, the West is declining”. Wang Huning undoubtedly played a role in the wordsmithing.
His book offers a fascinating lens on a Chinese scholar’s reading of the United States after extensive travel to big cities and small towns around the country. He worked for a short time in Congress, impossible to imagine today for a Chinese communist, engaged with think tanks such as the Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation, spent time in the Boston suburb of Belmont and at Harvard University and MIT, and visited Coca-Cola’s Atlanta headquarters, among other stops. He tracked the 1988 Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns, and attended the Bush-Quayle inauguration.
Learning From and Surpassing the United States
Wang Huning set out to understand how the United States, a relatively young country, could be so much more economically successful than China, a millennia-old civilization. He also wanted to know how his country could emulate that success, even if it meant setting economic, if not political, orthodoxy aside. He found part of his answer in unexpected aspects of American society such as sports. He observed that “football … embodies the American spirit of using strength to get there fast.” He was also fascinated by “the four C's”: cars, calls, computers and credit cards, all symbolic of American success and absent from Chinese society at the time.
Wang Huning adopted a posture of academic aloofness when addressing Americans' fundamental belief in freedom, democracy, and equal opportunity. He wrote, somewhat ironically, that Americans see “future presidents … in all barefoot children”. He also expressed astonishment at the willingness, in Fulton, Missouri, the site of Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech, to finance the rebuilding, brick by brick, of St. Mary’s, a ruined English church. The bewilderment reflected Wang Huning’s failure to understand the values that motivate a democratic society and the bonds, forged in war, between the United States and the United Kingdom.
Instead, the author championed the experiences of Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea, where economic booms occurred without political change (though the latter two subsequently democratized). His undogmatic line extended to Taiwan, which he did not reflexively describe as part of China. This contrasts with today's neuralgia, which requires almost any Chinese person who wants to keep their job to affix to any mention of Taiwan its status as an inseparable part of the motherland.
Wang Huning acknowledged the importance of capitalism as a mode of production in the United States. He wrote favorably about the “invisible hand” of the American economy, albeit without crediting Adam Smith for the concept. The US capitalist system transfers resources more easily than a planned economy, he observed. He saw this when he received competing offers from travel agencies in San Francisco.
Wang Huning devoted a long chapter to understanding the US personal income tax system in detail. China at the time had no such system, and he concluded that one provides the state with another mechanism for controlling its citizens. His prioritizing Communist Party social control shines through these observations. No problem if taxes, rather than a planned economy, can achieve this.
In another chapter, he examined innovation, which he identified as the secret sauce that elevated the United States to its global leadership position. He tried to understand the formation of linkages among academia, business, and innovation while visiting MIT. His takeaway was that China needed to emulate the process.
On education, Wang Huning described the US system as having a dual function: to fulfill national and international vocations. Nationally, elite education is part of the American dream, in theory accessible to everyone, including the aforementioned “barefoot kid”. He concluded from this observation that any political system striving for global recognition must educate its best and brightest, and noted that the United States projects power more successfully through its education than its deployment of the Seventh Fleet. In these lines, the blueprint for Beijing’s ambition to carve out a leading role in research and innovation, and establish Confucius Institutes for exerting soft power worldwide, becomes clear. Wang Huning prophesized that “to overwhelm the Americans, you must do one thing: surpass them in science and technology.”
In recent years, China’s quest to dominate these fields has been on display. Chinese engineers have landed a probe on the unexplored far side of the moon and sprinted ahead with international patents in key technologies such as artificial intelligence. Wang Huning noted that the United States was shocked by Japan’s rise in the 1980s, the time of his writing, and he accurately predicted that a similar challenge from China would arise in the 21st century.
Wang Huning also cross-examined political America. He dismissed the two major political parties for falling short of being genuine political groupings since he perceived them, unlike the CCP, as lacking an ideological core. He saw them only as unifying election platforms that cover a wide range of popular opinions. Yet his fundamental interest in the US political system was its smooth transfer of power, which the events of January 2021 now place in doubt. This has bolstered the perception of US decline, which is reflected by Xi’s continued talk about “great changes unseen in a century” and his smug recitation of that phrase in his March 2023 meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Chinese leader added that the two autocratic leaders were driving the changes.
Mine is Bigger Than Yours
Wang Huning visited the Sears (now Willis) Tower in Chicago, the world’s tallest building at the time. The Shanghai Tower now stands almost half again as high and is one of several in China that overshadow American skyscrapers. Beijing is sending a signal with all the construction. Chinese companies are, too. One, Hisense, follows the philosophy of “Never Settle for No. 2 Globally”, a message it splashes in its sponsorships.
Such examples showcase a Chinese leadership striving for global eminence while expecting the United States to cannibalize itself. Yet Wang Huning and Xi suffer from confirmation bias, misreading the signs of American decline, and paying attention only to perceptions of domestic fragmentation and international withdrawal formed by cherry-picking the Biden administration’s Afghanistan policy, Congress’ fitful support for Ukraine, and Trump’s transactionalism.
They could, therefore, well be wrong. The United States’ freedom-based values, which Wang Huning never fully grasps in his book, provide enormous resilience. The highly contested 2020 presidential election, for example, saw a surge in voter turnout.
The Chinese leadership is not alone in its faulty thinking. The United States can be similarly myopic in its hope that China’s autocratic system is in terminal decline. Talk of “peak China” and a focus on the country’s ailing economy as a result of a population downturn, housing busts, and lack of domestic growth drivers have led some US policymakers and commentators to believe that China is coming apart at the seams. Thinkers such as Gordon Chang, author of “The Coming Collapse of China”, published in 2001, are again in vogue.
Great-power competition between the United States and China will certainly dominate the 21st century. The real danger, however, is that Chinese and American decision-makers succumb to hubris. Misreading one another as excessively weak could lead to conflict, a contradiction of the Thucydides trap logic that stipulates fear of a rising power triggers conflict, as it did between Athens and Sparta.
Wang Huning's book warns us that overconfidence and a fundamental miscalculation of an adversary's weakness could spark great-power conflict.