America First vs. a Community of Shared Future: The U.S.-China Competition for Hearts and Minds

Lindsay: Few, if any, observers thought that relations between the U.S. and China would improve during the second Trump administration, but few foresaw just how dramatically conflict would escalate. To unpack what’s happening, how China is responding, and what all of this means for the U.S. over the long-term, I’m joined by Rachel Hulvey, a postdoc fellow at the Columbia-Harvard China and the World Program, and the Harvard Belfer International Security Program.

Rachel studies China’s rise and influence on the international order, and beginning in the Fall, she will join the faculty at Indiana University. Rachel, welcome to Talking Policy.

Rachel: Thank you so much Lindsay, thanks for having me.

Lindsay: So to start off, what a time to be a scholar of Chinese foreign policy, China and the world. How are you feeling about it all? What’s the vibe check on your end these days?

Rachel: Well, you know, I think we’ve seen a lot of volatility in the U.S.-China relationship over the years. This is something where it’s not new that it’s tumultuous. We had Covid of course, and that was really rocky. Trump 1.0, and even the Biden administration, really continued this time of strategic competition with China. So we’ve always, as scholars of Chinese foreign policy, had fears about the nature of the relationship managing the potential for conflict and as a scholar, also some concerns about our continued ability to research China, to get to the field and actually go there.

But what’s new, I think, is this Trump 2.0 era that we’re in. We have concerns about the tariffs, the different policies that Trump is implementing. Will this push China too far, and ultimately close the doors on the relationship? That’s something that we’re all worried about.

And there’s a new twist to this, as well, of authoritarianism in America, where we have a constitutional crisis at home. We have attacks on liberal values. We see the administration attempting to control American universities: who they can hire, what they can teach, deporting students for what they say. Upending the global system of free trade. The list goes on. So, in the midst of this, we’re starting to see scholars of Chinese politics that have long researched authoritarian politics turned from exclusively researching projects within China’s borders, to now writing about the manifestations of authoritarianism in the United States. And I think this is something that’s really unprecedented and worth taking stock of the severity of democratic backsliding in the United States.

Lindsay: Yeah. Before we dig into what’s happening in China, what’s happening in the U.S., I want to talk a little bit about you. As we said in the introduction, you are a scholar of China foreign policy, China in the world. Where did this interest in China come from? Like going way back, what’s the origin story of what is now this really incredible career that you have launched?

Rachel: Well, I feel really lucky to be studying Chinese foreign policy. I actually grew up in rural Virginia, so I didn’t have much international exposure, and it really took a friend that introduced me to Chinese language. Actually, my friend’s family spoke Chinese and I just found it to be such a beautiful language, and so, it began as more of a hobby, just learning Mandarin, learning about Chinese culture. And it was when I began to study international relations that I really considered my interest in China more seriously as a career. I am fascinated by great power politics and China’s rise presented ways to gain new understandings about power and influence.

I wasn’t always in academia. I have taken some time to work in advertising after college, and this is where my interest in soft power and influence through ideas and narratives arose. So in my book project, I channel these two interests, my interest in Chinese foreign policy and also my interest in soft power, and I look at how China is shaping international order, flipping the analytical lens from China’s motivations—will it be a status quo or a revisionist country—to China’s activism on the world stage and looking at when China gains followers and when China attracts support.

Lindsay: Wow. Yeah, learning Mandarin as a hobby. If I had a nickel for every time I heard that.

That’s incredible. That’s really cool to learn more about your background. Yeah, working in advertising—I didn’t know that. But that’s interesting how you can kind of weave that now into your scholarly life. It’s all coming together.

Rachel: It’s all coming together, yeah. It wasn’t pre-planned, but it’s all coming together.

Lindsay: Okay, so a lot is happening, and I want to talk with you, kind of work our way through what’s going on in the world. Let’s talk about it in terms of two kind of really big buckets. Let’s talk about economic moves of the new administration here in the U.S. [and then] political moves here in the U.S. But let’s start with the economic side, since that’s really fresh in our minds, I think, with the headlines of the recent weeks.

So the Trump administration is pushing forward a sweeping economic agenda that includes tariffs, which we are by now very familiar with, if we weren’t already. China has been the foremost target of Trump’s tariff wars. The recent events have been pretty dramatic. Can you tell us what’s going on? Give us a little context, and how is China responding so far?

Rachel: Well, the tariffs are really, at this stage, quite unprecedented. It’s just an extraordinary level of tariffs of the Trump administration implementing 145%, Beijing retaliating with 125%, as of the time of this recording. And really, we’re not seeing much room for negotiation between the two sides, with tit for tat escalatory measures. And so China’s reaction to these moves, we really see China attempting to gain the upper hand among an international audience. And since I study discourse power and international competition, I’ve really been interested in three aspects of this dynamic.

First, how China is speaking to international audiences. Under General Secretary Xi Jinping, China has launched narratives that explain its vision of international order, and this is under the framework of a community of shared future. And this seems really ready-made to be a foil to the current Trump administration.

China is emphasizing the need for countries to come together for mutual benefits. They emphasize the message of win-win cooperation and their Ministry of Foreign Affairs has really sprung into action after Trump implemented a global round of tariffs, not just against China, but against other countries.

So the day that Trump announced tariffs, we see the Ministry of Foreign Affairs using social media and launching this really provocative video, where they asked, the main question was: what type of world do we want to live in? And they set up this dichotomy that opens with U.S. leadership. And they have different phrases and pictures that come on screen about bullying, hegemony, tariffs. And then it switches to an alternative. New music comes, and then you see a world under security for all, equality among nations, shared prosperity, barriers turning into bridges. China’s making this pitch to the international community that China is the country to lead in this moment, and that, under China’s leadership, the world will be a better place.

We see China making these statements, specifically to some members of the global South, presenting a dichotomy between the U.S.—“exploitation” is what they’ve been using, within some of the social media rhetoric—and contrasting that with, again, the “community of shared future” message, that China is aiming for mutual benefit and abiding by international rules.

We also see China speaking to domestic audiences at this time, where China is positioning the party’s leadership to its own people, the need for resilience, and showing that China is transitioning from a follower to a leader, whereas America is transitioning from a leader to a country that is now retreating and putting America first. There’s language about slapping allies in the face, conducting predatory practices that make global markets fall, and really setting up the domestic audience to resist and to be supportive of this resistance, no matter the cost.

So you see China, or at least the foreign policy apparatus, really springing into gear to shape global narratives, and to position China as a new option for global leadership during this time, and to really question the U.S.-led order, especially in the aftermath of the Trump administration’s imposition of tariffs.

Lindsay: The bigger context for these tariffs is a longer term, growing competition between China and the U.S. for global leadership, but especially in the area of emerging technology, which is an area that you have worked in.

The U.S. has tried to slow China’s progress in various ways, and as you mentioned, this precedes, you know, Trump 2.0. This is something we’ve seen across the different administrations over the last decade or more. I think back to the January release of DeepSeek, this chat bot that performed similarly to ChatGPT, released incidentally on Trump’s inauguration day, which, you know, stunned the world and the U.S. technology sector specifically, and raised questions over whether the U.S. really is leading in this race to be the world’s science, technology and innovation leader.

And it seemed to suggest that maybe these efforts to curb and stymie China are failing. You just talked about the PR opportunity that this presents, for China to present itself as a steady force, a force of mutuality, in contrast to the U.S. sort of cataclysmic rupturing. But in terms of this other ongoing competition, is this a moment of vulnerability and peril for China? Or is it a moment of opportunity?

Rachel: I think that for China, they definitely see the tariffs as something that will hurt both countries. So, you know, in this game that we are in, there’s really no winners from imposing this extraordinary level of tariffs.

But I will say that China has positioned itself well on the technology front. We’ve already seen with the Trump administration that they’re walking back some of the tariffs. And these tariffs are in the field of high technology. I think this is really revealing about the degree to which the United States does need China for a lot of its operations.

You have Apple, for instance, that does a lot of its manufacturing and operations in China, and Tim Cook has said that companies used to go to China for low labor costs, but now he argues that they’re going there because of the skills, specifically skills in advanced tooling and engineering.

And so the Trump administration, and the way that they’re implementing these tariffs, really has some inconsistency here, first of all, but secondly, I think it’s revealing to the degree at which China is quickly catching up, as you see with DeepSeek, where the company was able to develop a really impressive level of artificial intelligence despite the efforts to conduct export controls on chips.

But it’s true that there will be mixed reactions to this, that both countries will be hurt by the tariffs. But especially in the field of high technology, as Trump is attempting to compete with China, it’s really questionable the extent to which these tariffs will do anything to meet the goals that Trump had in mind.

Lindsay: Yeah. There is another battle underway, I suppose, between the U.S. and China that has to do with winning hearts and minds. The U.S. has long been a global leader in promoting its values overseas. It has a wide sphere of influence.

Hearing you talk about the way that China is positioning itself to a global audience as this sort of paragon of mutual benefit and shared prosperity, it sounds, in many ways, almost like an inversion of the way that we have traditionally thought about the world, that that would be America’s role in the world, and so it’s like the world kind of turned upside down.

China has been growing its presence on the global stage, and Trump, on the contrary, has been committed to withdrawing U.S. leadership in international organizations, in alliances, in the humanitarian space. Can you say a little bit more about what is happening? Can you walk us through what happened during the first Trump administration, in terms of U.S. withdrawal? And again, like how is China navigating that? To what extent is China meeting the moment, and what is China’s broader, long-term vision on the global stage?

Rachel: Well, it’s a great question. We’ve been watching this since the first Trump administration, where we saw a withdrawal that at the time seemed very extensive from United Nations agencies, particularly the United Nations Human Rights Council, also the Paris Climate Agreement, the World Health Organization. And at the time there was a lot of concern about American values, American commitment being undermined.

Now we see this on an extraordinary level in the second Trump administration. Not only do we have the United States withdrawing from international organizations, we see that USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development] for instance, all of the work that’s being done around the world to focus on development, to focus on meeting the needs of those in other countries, conducting joint research projects on how to mitigate global diseases. USAID has been completely shuttered. We see an attack on American universities, which also have an international role. They admit a lot of foreign students, even for the country I study, China. So many students want to come to the United States and learn at American universities, and we’re seeing Trump revoking funding from them.

And we’re also just seeing a lot of values at home under attack, democracy under attack, liberalism, deporting students for what they say. And I think that all of this has a lot of impact on the United States’ ability to lead, to gain soft power.

And as we think about great power competition, countries have been competing over shaping the rules of the game. So especially for things that I study, like emerging technologies, it’s really important to be able to set international standards, to be able to form international institutions that are going to regulate the next wave of technology. And we’ve seen now, the United States really stepping back from that role.

So what does this mean then, overall, for U.S.-China competition, and what we might see from China? Well, we certainly have seen the United States damaging its soft power. It used to be that the United States and China were really competing, we’d see the United States conducting efforts. Even aid, for instance, was meant to spread goodwill, meant to garner more support in the countries at which the United States and China are investing. And China, really for a long time, scholars had reported mixed success of China’s efforts to replicate the U.S. soft power strategy.

So it tried to set up Confucius Institutes to teach Chinese language. It tried to host the Olympics. It also tried to host foreign students, and a lot of these were met with mixed success. Scholars have found that exposure to these programs didn’t lead to more favorable views of China. But the United States, on the other hand, scholars have shown that United States attractiveness was really on the rise up until the first Trump administration, and this is where we saw a large dip in the United States’ image. This is true across the world in developing countries, but also in partners. We saw a large drop in views of the United States in Canada, Mexico, France, and Germany. And recent scholarship has shown that a lot of this is from what the United States is doing at home.

So a lot of this is the United States hurting itself. China doesn’t need to do anything at this point, for U.S. soft power to be in decline. And I look at, in my research, how words and actions matter, not just for shaping the opinion among domestic populations, but also looking at the elite level. Which government officials are going to be supporting the U.S. or China at the United Nations? Which governments are going to be backing China and its efforts to cultivate new international institutions and organizations that will be setting the next rules of the game for future technology? And as I mentioned, China is mobilizing an international campaign to promote its own values in contrast to the United States. So as the United States is retreating, it really assists China’s message. It sets up a dichotomy between the United States being interested in unilateralism, and then China positions itself as interested in multilateralism.

My research does show that China is gaining ground with government officials. So, while it may not have been effective in the past, this call for a focus on a community of shared future, or a need to protect sovereignty, a need for mutual benefits, is really attractive with those at the elite level that have the power to implement new rules.

This is showing China’s ability to build and shape international order, and I think we need to be cautious at this moment as new rules are being built for artificial intelligence. I’ve been listening to what the Trump administration has to say in these global artificial intelligence negotiations, where countries and officials are actively at the negotiation table trying to set the rules of the game, as we speak. And the United States is talking about the need for American leadership during this time in these forums, whereas China is talking about the need for capacity-building and the need for all countries to have access to artificial intelligence.

So it’s not hard to see why many countries, especially developing countries, would prefer a Chinese approach. And I think that the United States really needs to proceed with caution at this juncture to think about the implications for what I see as something that’s designed for a short-term political gain at home, really damaging the United States’ long-term effort to lead international order, and to be a force that’s going to be shaping international rules in line with American interests.

Lindsay: Yeah. One thing that I find interesting, insofar as what has attracted people to the U.S.—whether it’s students who want to come study here, or entrepreneurs who want to start businesses in the U.S., or a sort of general, normative leadership that the U.S. has been able to have over the last 50 years—a lot of that has been based on us upholding democracy and human rights, not consistently, but overall as our kind of approach to the world. And now we see China asserting itself on the global stage with some different kind of catchphrases, like sovereignty, like shared prosperity. But on the other hand, you know, China is an authoritarian country. Its internet is not free. It does not have the same rule of law protections that the U.S. has historically had. It oppresses different segments of the population.

So in thinking about the extent to which audiences globally are finding China more attractive, I just want to dig in a little bit more to what you know about what is driving that attraction.

Rachel: There’s a lot to unpack in terms of where does attraction come from, and how is China positioned in this moment to be able to attract support. In my research, I look at two different factors that influence support. The first would be a country’s image, how it’s perceived by others. So you can think about the way that individuals perceive other countries, as allies, or potentially as enemies. And the second factor would be a great power’s message: what they’re saying, how they’re communicating it. This can really shape decision making, shape the way that individuals are thinking about a particular topic. For instance, if we are thinking about a protest, if the media is framing it as something where people are exercising the right to free speech versus a security threat, that definitely shapes the way that audiences then come to think about the protest.

So what I find in my research is that China has an image problem, and this is due to three different factors. One would be China’s increasing material power. This is seen as threatening to other countries, and China’s assertive actions, such as those in the South China Sea, this has really been something that its neighbors like the Philippines and Vietnam have taken note of. We should see Vietnam being quite close to China. They have very similar regime types, but due to this assertive activity, we actually see quite negative public opinion in Vietnam. We also see, especially in democracies, that there is hesitation about China’s regime type, and China’s domestic activities, whether it’s censorship or repression. This also fuels an image problem that China has. And finally, we also have some counter narratives that exist. So when China goes to conduct different projects, such as the Belt and Road Initiative, which is an effort to provide aid and investment to other countries, there’s a counter narrative of debt trap diplomacy.

So this is where my research took off and really started to consider, well, how does China overcome this? How is it trying to build a counter coalition? And through my fieldwork—this is from speaking with a lot of foreign policy elites in China—I discovered that China is using a strategy that it calls discourse power, huàyǔ quán. And this is really China’s effort to shape the narrative, to really not be a country that is just exposed to ideas, but is setting the stage and setting the agenda.

Now, it’s not to say that China is always going to succeed, or that sometimes its message is not a bridge too far. We can think about China’s support for Russia right now, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, completely flying in the face of its support for sovereignty [and] really not resonating with any of the other major players. So China has its own set of challenges. But the point I do want to get across is that I am finding, especially in these international organizations, the audiences there are finding China’s message attractive. And the question then for researchers is, will this only push other countries more into the hands of China?

Lindsay: How are people inside China thinking about all of this? Like, what’s public opinion like in China? What are some of the challenges that they’re facing domestically?

Rachel: The public opinion in China right now is really interesting. I’ve been trying to map how people are responding and reacting, so it’s something that I want to look at more systematically, but anecdotally for now, what I can share with the listeners is that Xi Jinping has gotten a lot of praise domestically from people for standing up to Trump. He has gone through periods of being unpopular with domestic audiences in China, especially after the heavy-handed response to Covid, but now we see that domestic audiences are really praising Xi and praising the way that he’s standing up to Trump.

I would also say there’s a lot of shock over the attack on universities. I think when we are thinking about U.S.-China relations, we forget the role of American universities, but there’s a deep respect in China for these American universities. In particular, I can just tell you that Xi Jinping, although he attended Tsinghua, he sent his own daughter to Harvard. And it’s just seen as a place to be educated, a place to learn from the top minds. And as the Trump administration is rescinding the $2 billion in aid to Harvard, contacts in China have reached out and expressed shock.

And finally, I’ll say there’s a third category of dissidents, who look up to the United States for its values for being this shining city on a hill, this beacon of liberal democracy. And I think the most sad part about the public opinion in China is that some are drawing parallels to politics in China, such as the cultural revolution. Whether it’s the intimidation of the media, where the White House is selecting media outlets allowed to participate in the presidential pool. Whether it’s Trump musing about a third term. I saw a really sad post on the U.S. Embassy page on Weibo, which is China’s version of Twitter, that read “Beacon of Democracy, 1776-2025.” And it’s just really heart wrenching when you see just how the United States, and the policy moves that we’ve seen since January, [are being] interpreted in the Chinese community.

Lindsay: As, again, someone who is an expert and a keen watcher of Chinese foreign policy, and China-U.S. relations, what will you be watching over the next several years? What are you most concerned about and what do you think will be the most important kind of clues about where things are headed?

Rachel: I think we should be watching reactions at home. I think it’s great when we are seeing different entities, organizations, individuals standing up for human rights and for the protection of individual freedoms.

So we just saw Harvard stand up and push back against a request by the Trump administration to be reviewing what is being taught, who is being hired, and I wonder what type of impact these displays of a commitment to democracy have. Checks and balances are being pushed to an extreme. But we do have instances of resistance, and I wonder the extent to which this resistance is going to be very meaningful for a lot of the challenges that we’ve spoken about today, whether it’s soft power, or whether it’s American leadership.

I think we’ll have to very closely watch what’s happening with the tariffs. I really sincerely hope that it’s going to be that both countries are coming to the negotiation table, and they’re going to work out a deal. I’m very concerned for what it means if we continue this level of tariffs, not only for U.S.-China relations, but what it means for things like deterrence, for the United States being able to say, don’t invade Taiwan, for instance, or there will be some type of economic punishment. If we see these countries start to decouple, what type of leverage does that actually leave the U.S.?

And more importantly, as a lot of different problems and challenges are faced by the world: whether it’s climate change, whether it’s artificial intelligence… Do we really want China and the U.S. to be on separate sides, continuing this great power competition? Or do we want to see more collaboration in the future? It’s my hope that we can find more areas for collaboration and not continue down this path.

And then I’ll also say, I’ll be watching very closely the reactions within China, both of the leadership, the domestic public, and then how the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other government agencies in China are attempting to react to this moment in history, and what strategies China’s using and whether those are ultimately beneficial to China in the long run.

Lindsay: Yeah. Rachel Hulvey, this has been an illuminating conversation. Thanks for being with us on Talking Policy.

Rachel: It was wonderful to be here, thanks so much for the discussion.