Six Months Across America in 1988

Published October 4, 2026

In 1988 a Chinese political scientist named Wang Huning received a fellowship to spend six months traveling in the United States. He was thirty-three, a professor at Fudan University, and already one of the more influential political theorists in China. He visited more than thirty cities and more than twenty universities. He went to church services, watched television, walked neighborhoods in decline, and sat in seminars on American democracy. Back in Shanghai he wrote a book.

America Against America, published in 1991, is not a shouting polemic. The chapter compares it to a clinical autopsy of a patient who does not yet know he is dying. Wang wrote about American individualism not as a strength but as a solvent, something that dissolves the ties holding a society together. He recorded homelessness, racial inequality, family breakdown, drug addiction, and civic decay, and concluded that the American system held the seeds of its own coming apart. The mechanism, in his analysis, was freedom itself. Unrestrained individual liberty produced social fragmentation, which produced institutional decay, which would eventually produce collapse. The question for him was not whether America would decline. It was how long the decline would take, and what China could learn from watching.

Three decades later Wang sits on the Politburo Standing Committee, the seven-person body that governs 1.4 billion people. He has been the chief ideological theorist for three general secretaries in a row: Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping. He is credited with formulating or refining three of the Party's defining constructs: Jiang's Three Represents, Hu's Scientific Development Concept, and Xi's Chinese Dream. No other figure in the Party has shaped the intellectual architecture of Chinese governance across three administrations. The 1988 thesis did not stay an academic note. It became an operating assumption inside the analytical framework of the most senior leadership.

The country's foundational story, in the chapter's account, is not a revolution or an empire. It is a wound. The Century of Humiliation, from the First Opium War in 1840 to the Communist Revolution in 1949, is the frame through which the leadership processes sovereignty threats, foreign military action, diplomatic pressure, and perceived disrespect. Rana Mitter, whose work on China's wartime history is among the most rigorous Western scholarship on the subject, has argued that the century functions less as a closed historical period and more as a narrative resource that can be deployed to frame almost any contemporary event involving foreign pressure on Chinese sovereignty.

The content is straightforward. Between 1840 and 1949 foreign powers carved China into spheres of influence, imposed unequal treaties, seized territory, extracted resources, and humiliated a civilization that had considered itself the center of the world. The Opium Wars forced China to accept the drug trade. The Treaty of Nanjing ceded Hong Kong to Britain. The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 showed that a smaller Asian nation could defeat China in battle. The Eight-Nation Alliance looted Beijing in 1900. Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 and launched a full-scale war in 1937 that killed millions. The lesson, repeated in each episode, was that when China was weak the world was predatory. The story is taught in schools, reinforced in media, embedded in military doctrine, and referenced in diplomatic notes. PLA documents describe Western nations as rapacious, greedy, and aggressive. The chapter's question is not whether that description is accurate. It is whether the people deciding in Zhongnanhai, the leadership compound in Beijing, actually use it, and what it produces when it meets a specific choice. The evidence the chapter cites is that the belief is genuine and operational, not in the sense that every official harbors personal hatred, but in the sense that the default model treats Western actions as driven by a desire to contain, weaken, or subordinate China.

On May 7, 1999, five U.S. Joint Direct Attack Munitions, precision-guided bombs, struck the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia. Three Chinese journalists were killed. Twenty others were wounded. The CIA later acknowledged the strike and attributed it to an outdated map that had marked the embassy as a Yugoslav arms-procurement facility. The United States paid 28 million dollars to the victims' families and 4.5 million for damage to the building. In Washington the incident was processed as a tragic error: bad intelligence, weak target checks, an embarrassment, a temporary diplomatic crisis, and still an accident. In Beijing it was processed through the humiliation frame. Most Chinese people continue to believe the attack was deliberate. Surveys in later years showed that reading as the majority view among citizens and, more importantly, among military and intelligence officials. The reasoning was plain. The United States had some of the most sophisticated targeting systems on earth. The embassy was a known, marked diplomatic building. The chance that five precision weapons hitting it was a genuine accident was, inside that framework, functionally zero.

The operational consequences lasted. Belgrade prompted the PLA to speed development of cyberwarfare and anti-satellite weapons. The logic was direct: if the United States would bomb a Chinese embassy during a war against a third country, China needed the capacity to degrade American military infrastructure in a potential conflict. The map explanation was not merely disbelieved. It was treated as an insult. Of course the Americans would say it was an accident. Kevin Rudd, a former Australian prime minister and a fluent Mandarin speaker, has called the gap mutually assured non-comprehension, and also mirror imaging. Each side reads the other through its own logic. Washington cannot imagine deliberately bombing an embassy, so the accident feels obvious. Beijing cannot imagine the most advanced military accidentally hitting an embassy with five precision munitions, so the deliberate reading feels equally obvious. The protests across Chinese cities afterward were among the largest since 1989. Jessica Chen Weiss's research shows the government strategically permitted the demonstrations while constraining their scope, channeling fury at the United States and keeping it from spilling into anti-government feeling. Twenty-five years later the cyber and anti-satellite programs Belgrade set in motion structure the military balance in the Western Pacific.

Wang's wider frame, as the chapter describes it, is Hobbesian. Thomas Hobbes is the philosopher who pictured life without a sovereign as a war of all against all. In this version the world is a Darwinian jungle. Power is the only reliable currency. Cooperation between states is a temporary convenience that dissolves when the power balance shifts. Western realist theory, from Thucydides through Morgenthau to Mearsheimer, makes similar arguments. What the chapter says is distinct is that in many Chinese institutional settings this is not one school among others. It is the dominant lens, and often the only one. The liberal idea that trade makes a durable peace, that institutions constrain states, that democratic norms have force of their own, is treated not as a rival theory but as a Western deception, a story meant to preserve American hegemony by getting other states to accept rules the United States wrote for itself.

Zhang Weiwei, director of the China Institute at Fudan University, has put that position clearly. He argues the Western liberal order is not a neutral frame but a power structure built to keep Western dominance, and that China's rise requires not joining that order but building an alternative that reflects Chinese civilizational values. His phrase is the civilizational state: China as a continuous political and cultural entity, different in kind from Western nation-states, so that Western governance models do not fail to fit China because China is behind, but because China is a different category. Operationally, the chapter says, this supplies the justification for reading Western criticism of Chinese governance as a tool to weaken China rather than a good-faith argument about values. Human-rights advocacy becomes destabilization. Democracy promotion becomes regime change by another name. Press freedom becomes information warfare. When China lifts hundreds of millions out of poverty, the frame reads vindication of the Party's stewardship, not evidence that market reforms worked. When the Western financial system crashed in 2008, Zhang read confirmation that liberal capitalism was structurally inferior to China's state-directed model. Successes validate the Chinese system. Failures validate the critique of the West. Ambiguous outcomes get the reading that flatters.

The comfortable Western error, the chapter argues, is that officials say these things only for a domestic audience and do not believe them. The assumption is partly true. Weiss's research shows the government allows or represses nationalist protest depending on the diplomacy. Protests against Japan over the Senkaku islands, which China calls the Diaoyu, were allowed to rise when Beijing wanted to signal resolve, then shut down when they threatened to lock the diplomats in. Hu Xijin, former editor of the Global Times, has said that over-excited emotions can hinder the effective application of foreign policy. The Party manages nationalism. It does not simply follow it. A thermostat regulates heat. It does not create heat from nothing. The underlying conviction, that China was victimized, that the order benefits the West at China's expense, and that sovereignty must be defended against a hostile outside, is the premise planning starts from. The chapter's evidence is behavioral. Classified military documents, internal party communications, and where the money goes line up with the public story. Anti-access weapons, the cyber and anti-satellite programs after Belgrade, artificial islands in the South China Sea, the security apparatus in Hong Kong, the surveillance infrastructure in Xinjiang: these are expensive, long commitments. They do not make sense, the chapter says, unless the people authorizing them believe Western powers are a fundamental threat. Mitter notes the narrative does two jobs at once. It legitimizes the Party by tying authority to national restoration, and it is a real lens for reading sovereignty threats. A government that uses a story it knows is false behaves differently from one that uses a story it believes. The second makes bigger bets, tolerates higher costs, and is less moved by evidence against the story, because the story is not a prop it can put down.

The lens also filters information. If cooperation is a facade, evidence of real cooperation is noise, and evidence of hostility is amplified. Analysts in Beijing expected the Western response to Hong Kong's National Security Law to be fractured and temporary. The model said democracies were divided, commercially self-interested, and unable to sustain collective action. Statements, minor sanctions, then business as usual, because companies would press governments to keep market access. The prediction was wrong. Sanctions were coordinated. The British National (Overseas) visa was implemented. Capital flight from Hong Kong reached the tens of billions. Companies moved to Singapore faster. Some division among Western nations did occur. The error was overestimating how far commercial interest would override political and institutional responses.

A parallel distortion sits in Beijing's own numbers. Official consumer-price figures were suppressed by about one percentage point a year between 2000 and 2011. The China Beige Book, an independent survey of business conditions, has consistently read more pessimistic than official statistics. Zhang has argued that China's consultative model produces better policy than Western elections precisely because it walls decisions off from the short-term pressure of public opinion. The chapter's counter is that insulation from opinion is also insulation from the information opinion aggregates. No CCP leader, the chapter says, ever imagined the United States would write off the Chinese market. The assumption was plausible in 2010. By 2024 the United States had imposed tariffs, export controls on advanced semiconductors, entity-list restrictions on hundreds of Chinese companies, and investment screening. Commercial interest did not constrain strategic behavior the way the model said it would.

The same lens shapes how Beijing presents itself. If standing among civilizations is the contest, culture is not a luxury. Ne Zha 2, an animated film grounded in the sixteenth-century novel Fengshen Yanyi, generated 1.69 billion dollars in domestic box office in the mid-2020s figures the chapter gives for 2024 and 2025. Black Myth: Wukong, a game based on the sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West, sold more than 20 million copies globally. State media described both as national representational projects, not purely commercial ones, and as the start of a new era for cultural soft power. In the Western industry a hit is a commercial achievement. In this framework it is evidence of civilizational vitality, and it tightens Zhang's thesis: China does not need Western cultural forms to find a global audience.

In trade, the 2010 rare-earth dispute, when China briefly restricted exports to Japan after a maritime confrontation, was framed at home as a legitimate use of sovereignty over Chinese resources. CEPR data shows very few of the disruptions lasted more than two months, which the chapter reads as more improvisation than strategy. The Western alarm, and the rush to find other sources, was processed in Beijing as confirmation that the West would use any pretext to depend on China less. In technology, semiconductor export controls are read not as a targeted answer to military uses but as an attempt to cap Chinese development below the American level. The historical parallel Chinese strategists reach for is not Cold War controls on the Soviet Union. It is the unequal treaties of the nineteenth century. Whether the parallel is valid matters less, the chapter says, than that it is believed, and that it shapes the urgency of the self-sufficiency programs. American military presence in the Western Pacific, and alliances with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia, are read as encirclement, not as stabilization. A G7 statement on Taiwan is processed not as seven democracies arriving at a shared view through their own politics, but as a containment action directed by Washington. The model has little room for the idea that public opinion, legislatures, and normative commitment might converge without American orchestration.

Wang came home from the thirty cities in 1988 and wrote the book in 1991. Five bombs hit the embassy in Belgrade on May 7, 1999. The map explanation was paid for, 28 million and 4.5 million, and it did not become the explanation inside the system that then built the cyber and anti-satellite programs. Rudd's phrase for the result is mutually assured non-comprehension. The danger the chapter names is not that one side is lying. It is that both sides are sincere.