From Shaping China to Refusing to Admit Defeat — Forty Years of the U.S. Perception of China

Why Blinken and Sullivan Suddenly Started Telling the Truth

Since 2025, two of the Biden administration's former China-policy architects — Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan — have repeatedly offered public retrospectives on what they had done. Sullivan said in May 2025 that the Biden administration's China policy ran on two tracks: on one, export controls, investment restrictions and allied coordination to pressure China; on the other, high-level communication to prevent conflict. The subtext was blunt: this competition could not be won. If it could, America would never have minded confronting it head-on.

Blinken went further in July 2026, openly acknowledging that China has a larger market, a more complete manufacturing system, and rapidly growing scientific, technological and industrial capacity — the language, at last, of facing reality. But then the turn: America cannot win alone, so it must bring Europe, Japan, South Korea, India and Australia along to win together.

Shen Yi's verdict is that these accounts are at best partially correct and still far from the substance of the problem. One thing, however, is true — America's perception of China has indeed changed. In the immediate post–Cold War years, America believed it could take China on by itself; now it treats China as an anxiety it cannot cure.

Fukuyama Takes the Stage: The Confidence of the End of History

For the first decade after the Cold War ended, the background hum of America's perception of China was Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. America had won the Cold War, and the conclusion followed naturally: I won, what could be wrong with me? The whole world should walk the American road.

Is China part of that world? Yes. So in the mainstream Washington imagination, China's opening up, participation in globalization and entry into international institutions would eventually lead to "Americanization" — its social structure, political outlook and state behavior all merging into the U.S.-led system.

Bill Clinton turned this line of thought into policy. In 1997 he described the U.S.–China relationship with the keyword engagement: while cooperating with China, express America's differences; through long-term interaction, push China toward change "consistent with America's expectations." In 2000, the United States granted China Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) and then supported its accession to the WTO. This was no charity — American companies made fortunes on the deal. Washington's calculation was that economic openness would pry open China's institutions the way it had pried open the Soviet bloc.

This policy had a name: principled, purposeful engagement. Its premise was spelled out plainly: China could enter the contest, but it had to accept the rules and the distribution of power in the system; China could become an important member, but its trajectory had to be — and could only be — the one America defined as modern.

At the time, American theory largely held three readings. Liberals believed that interdependence and international institutions would reshape China's preferences; modernization-theory supporters believed that economic development would naturally push political institutions toward Western forms, that modernization equaled Westernization; realists, though alert to China's rise, saw America's advantage as so glaring that most judged China was not yet a challenge. All three judgments shared one premise: America had never imagined that once China reached a certain level of strength, it would have its own ideas and walk its own road.

The Zoellick Era: You May Grow Up, but You Must Behave

Into the twenty-first century, China joined the WTO, its economy surged, and America collided with 9/11. George W. Bush looked to Beijing for cooperation on counterterrorism, the North Korean nuclear issue and global economic stability, while at the same time beginning to track the long-term consequences of China's growing strength.

In 2005, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick floated the "responsible stakeholder" concept — an upgrade of engagement that acknowledged China was already an important participant. But the term carried a hierarchy: America unilaterally decided which behavior counted as responsible and which did not, and China had to use its policies to demonstrate that it met the American standard. You may grow, but once grown you must accept instruction — otherwise you are a threat, otherwise you are irresponsible.

Obama: Welcome to Be Stable, Peaceful and Prosperous — Just Not Strong

The 2008 financial crisis damaged the authority of the American economic model; China's role in the global recovery, by contrast, strengthened. The Obama administration launched the "pivot to Asia," working simultaneously on military presence, alliance networks and regional institutions, while continuing to seek Chinese cooperation on climate change, Iran and global governance — that awkward posture of "press on one side, cooperate on the other" that the Biden administration would reproduce almost unchanged. Shen Yi's reading: when facing China, America's toolkit is actually very limited, and its strategy is barren.

In 2011, in Australia, Obama said America "welcomes a peaceful and prosperous China." The 2015 National Security Strategy worded it more carefully: it welcomes a China that is "stable, peaceful and prosperous." Note what is missing: strong. America could accept a stable, peaceful and prosperous China — it would not accept a strong one. Shen Yi reads this as a refusal to acknowledge the growth of Chinese power.

It was also in this period that the American academic landscape began to fracture. Aaron Friedberg acknowledged that the risk of U.S.–China competition was rising, but judged that conflict could be managed; G. John Ikenberry believed that the liberal international order was open enough and institutionally sticky enough that China's rise could be absorbed; Alastair Iain Johnston, studying China's actual behavior in international institutions, argued that China's posture varied by issue — accepting some rules, demanding revisions of unreasonable ones — and that pasting the abstract "revisionist" label on it invited a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The policy center of gravity was shifting too: from "changing China's internal institutions" to "limiting China's ability to translate economic strength into regional and global influence." Translated into plain language: when we can't get at you from inside, we box you in from outside.

Trump: Engagement Has Failed, and Therefore It Was China's Fault

In 2017, Trump's National Security Strategy defined China as a "revisionist power" trying to reshape the international order. In Washington's vocabulary, engagement became a forbidden word. Shen Yi cites the observation by Wu Xinbo, director of Fudan University's Center for American Studies: nobody uses the term anymore; it has been replaced by neutral substitutes like communication.

Trump himself put it more plainly: the United States once believed that supporting China's development and integrating it into the international system would push China toward liberalization, but that expectation did not pan out. This was "a very unflattering truth" — the real thought that U.S. policymakers had found inconvenient to articulate for decades, now spoken out loud.

The "engagement has failed" reading then became the dominant narrative in American strategy circles. Its script ran: America once bestowed market access, technology, capital and institutional opportunities, only hoping you would accept the Western model; you deceived me, used those conditions to build your own strength, and stubbornly stuck to your independent path. So America was swindled, must correct course, must rebuild domestic industry, must rally allies.

Shen Yi pushes back on this script. America is neither a fool nor a philanthropist, and no one can swindle it for thirty or forty years without it changing course. The fact is that U.S.–China economic and trade cooperation enriched companies and consumers on both sides; American multinationals extracted excess profits through their global allocation; China's development rested on its own long-term investment, labor accumulation, industrial policy, education, infrastructure and technological progress. To call China's refusal to change along American lines "the failure of engagement" is to admit that U.S. China diplomacy always carried a purpose of peaceful evolution — which is precisely a threat to China's core interests.

A deeper problem sits here. The cognitive error warps everything China does. China upholding its own system and path is read as the failure of American policy. China normally upgrading its industrial and technological capacity is read as exploiting the international system. China proposing reforms to international institutions is read as a challenge to the "rules-based international order." Strategic suspicion snowballs; China cannot dispel it by proving its innocence, and America itself is being twisted by it into a steadily more distorted policy.

Biden: Three Features, One Misstep

The Biden administration inherited Trump's basic judgment and considered itself cleverer for it. In 2022, Blinken proposed the three-layer framework of "invest, align, compete": first invest in America's own infrastructure, technology and industrial capacity; then align with partners; then compete with China. Blinken called China "the only country with both the intent and the capability to reshape the international order" — economically, diplomatically, militarily and technologically, it qualified on every front.

But Shen Yi points out that the Biden administration's biggest failure was precisely its failure to invest in its own country — a failure hardwired into America's institutions and beyond any one administration's ability to fix. Three features stood out:

• Industrial policy welded to national security. The CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act looked thunderous, but once the money was spent and the budget closed, no one evaluated the effect — America's political system has a core flaw: it lacks any serious audit and review mechanism after policy is executed.
• The alliance system repurposed as a tool of tech-supply-chain and rule competition. America pushed its European and Asian allies to restrict China together on semiconductors, critical minerals and advanced manufacturing, but could not offer attractive chips to compensate the allies for the economic interests they sacrificed.
• "Guardrails." High-intensity competition on one side, restored high-level communication on the other, to prevent military conflict. Behind the guardrails sat the unspeakable truth: within the first island chain, the Taiwan Strait, the East China Sea, the South China Sea, America's military advantage over China has ceased to function. Beyond avoiding conflict, America has no other choice.

The biggest misstep inside this operation was the "small yard, high fence" of precise restriction. It applied precise external pressure on China, and the result was that it woke China up in two directions. First, China confirmed that Trump was no exception — that two administrations' basic judgments were aligned, that the U.S.–China relationship could not return to the past, and that China no longer sought to return there. A 2026 article on Trump's visit to China made the point explicitly: no need to go back to the past, but a better future can be opened up. Second, China saw with precision every targeted defect inside its own strength system — and those defects happened to be the exact loci where industrial upgrading was needed. The American pressure it had imagined as pressure turned, through China's effective response, into a kind of "backhanded external assistance."

2025–2026: Fight to the End If You Fight; the Door Stays Open If You Talk

With Trump's return to office, the center of gravity of U.S. China policy shifted to economic security, industrial回流, technology control and trade balance. During the first half of 2025's trade war, China's reply was "fight to the end if you fight; the door stays open if you talk," combined with rare-earth export controls and a gradually成形 system of counter-sanctions and counter-long-arm-jurisdiction capabilities — proof that China holds a complete industrial system, a super-large market, rapidly growing innovation capacity and broad global economic ties.

At that point, those who had cast off their offices — Blinken, Sullivan — were suddenly willing to acknowledge China's strengths: market size, manufacturing capacity, shipbuilding, research output, patents, AI, all showing significant scale advantages. After the 2026 head-of-state exchange visit, the two sides established the new framing of a "constructive strategic stability relationship" (see the dedicated page on this new positioning framework).

But Shen Yi cautions: a change in America's vocabulary is not an admission of defeat. America's narrative has moved from "comprehensive surpassing, absolute lead" to "multi-dimensional differentiation, long-term evolution" — in plain translation: delay the moment China achieves final victory. You have clearly won, and it tells you that you have not won, that you still have flaws elsewhere.

The Academic Spectrum: Six Versions, One Premise

Across these four decades, the American theoretical readings of U.S.–China relations have roughly clustered into six:

• Liberal engagement theory — markets, institutions, contact can change China;
• Realist power-transition theory — growth in power must bring competition, with Friedberg as a representative voice;
• Liberal-order absorption theory — Ikenberry: China will find it more cost-effective to reform the existing order than to overthrow it;
• Strategic-competition allied-balancing theory — America cannot do it alone, but allies can help;
• Risk-management theory — the Sullivan line: competition is permanent, but there are shared interests in nuclear security, climate, finance, public health, AI governance;
• Reflection-expansion theory — stuffing everything into competition with China damages America itself and risks a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The readings differ in every other respect, yet share a single premise: America ought to be the leader, is not the leader now, and must return to being the leader in the future — that is manifest destiny, not negotiable. Whoever does not share my preferences is challenging me; whoever does not play by my rules is cheating.

Six Dilemmas: Why America Cannot Turn Around

Shen Yi condenses the flaws of this perception into six.

One: teleology. The "end of history" thesis treats America as the highest stage of human society and forbids challenge. Because China did not walk that script, everything is China's fault.

Two: equating America with the international community itself. American interest equals the international order; a narrowing of America's advantage equals China destroying the order. The rules are used when they suit, discarded when they don't — and when it comes to taking the lead in breaking international norms, it is America itself that does so. Biden and Trump made no difference on this front.

Three: pushing domestic contradictions outward. America's profit distribution, social polarization, and wealth gap are all explained as "the China shock"; deindustrialization is blamed on unfair Chinese competition. The real drivers of deindustrialization are American corporate profit-seeking, financialization, and the neglected problems of infrastructure, vocational education, labor mobility, and government governance — none of which get mentioned. If all the problems are China's fault, what does America need to change in itself? Nothing — so it keeps being wrong.

Four: the over-stretching of national security. Once competition with China became a bipartisan consensus, "national security" became the万能 catch-all into which domestic-governance difficulties are casually tossed.

Five: projecting one's own history onto China. Every negative accusation America levels against China is something America itself has done — a mirror-perception that is blind to China's history, stage of development and cultural tradition.

Six: overestimating the integrative capacity of alliances and underestimating the反弹 effect of competitive policies. Allies are not ATMs, and pressuring others costs the presser too.

Cognition Can Be Calibrated — Through Action

Having laid out these problems, Shen Yi offers his final judgment: America's perception of China is indeed changing. It still does not correctly reflect China's true form, but it is better than it was. Perception can be adjusted, calibrated — and the calibrator is China. The instrument of calibration is action. When America blunders around in confusion, China's firm action pushes it back toward the right direction.

This is why he anchors the future of U.S.–China relations in three things: strength, institutions, and perception. Strength determines what you can do; institutions determine whether you can do it; perception determines which direction you do it in. The future trajectory of the relationship will be jointly determined by these three — not pre-written by an old script of "Cold War experience" or "hegemonic succession."