Last year, the Africa Cup of Nations, the continent’s biggest international soccer tournament, kicked off in Côte d’Ivoire, in a stadium designed, financed, and built by China. This should not come as a surprise to anyone who follows the sport, nor is it some new development. The first Chinese-made stadium in Africa was completed more than fifty years ago. By the end of the millennium, nine more African countries would open their capital cities to what came to be known as “stadium diplomacy.” The quantity and scale of these stadiums grew alongside an increasingly robust push to quickly build infrastructure in poor African countries. The soccer historian David Goldblatt writes:
In the 1980s, China had been content to foster solidarity in Africa and leverage it to diplomatically exclude and isolate Taiwan. After assessing the post-Cold War landscape in the early 1990s, however, it became clear to the Chinese leadership that Africa offered rather more. China’s burgeoning industrial economy and population would soon require new export markets, land for agricultural purposes and, above all, access to the full range of raw materials its factories consumed. Africa, particularly as its oil reserves grew, offered all of these in abundance and, given the United States’ rapid withdrawal from the continent after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the price of entry looked very low.
Stadium diplomacy has had its problems. Some of the structures have been set up in inconvenient locations. There’s also reportedly very little follow-up from the Chinese, who mostly seem content to drop a big stadium in an African city and let the local government figure out what to do with it. In some cases, stadiums constructed less than twenty years ago have already been effectively abandoned. But from a foreign-policy perspective, China’s investment has more than paid off. Soft power, in many ways, is an economy of symbols. You get a foothold in some wildly public spectacle, throw some money at it, and then hope that the masses conclude that you’re not so bad.
President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, through the first two weeks of their Administration, have unleashed a series of executive orders and purges of the federal budget that may very well benefit China and its seemingly unrelenting appetite for soft power. U.S.A.I.D., the international-development organization that helps to advance American interests abroad, has become Musk’s most recent focus. This is a bit strange given that foreign assistance comprises less than one per cent of the total federal budget. A management consultant who comes into a company to radically slash waste probably shouldn’t get caught up for weeks on the water bubblers in the lounge, but Musk seems fully committed to razing U.S.A.I.D. and salting the earth beneath it. One can speculate why this has happened. Perhaps Musk has been told that he can’t actually overrun the entire federal government and has committed himself to thoroughly dismantling a relatively small program so he doesn’t look weak. Or maybe he just really hates the idea of helping people in other countries, regardless of how it might help American interests. But, if you follow the accepted logic of soft power, all of Musk’s gleeful cutting could very well open up opportunities for China to fill the void that U.S.A.I.D. leaves behind.
But do Americans still care about competition with China? Do appeals to American soft power still resonate with the electorate? At first glance, it appears that they do. A Pew Research poll from last year found that about eighty per cent of older Americans have an unfavorable view of China, a number that has steadily risen since the start of Trump’s first term in office. In 2017, sentiment was more or less evenly split, with forty-seven per cent of respondents saying they had an unfavorable view and forty-three per cent saying they had a favorable view. Last year, a poll from the Chicago Council of Global Affairs found that fifty-five per cent of Americans said the “United States should actively work to limit the growth of China’s power,” and fifty-six per cent believed trade between the United States and China weakened national security. Some of this can be attributed to the pandemic, but the negative swings in sentiment started years before COVID-19 started spreading out of Wuhan.
Given these numbers, one would expect both Republicans and Democrats to be rattling their sabres at China. During the first Trump Administration, the gutting of U.S.A.I.D. would have been accompanied by endless recriminations from hawkish liberals about the imminent end of democracy in the developing Global South and the coming of a Chinese hegemonic superpower that would extract every mineral from the earth and use whatever energy they produced to violate the human rights of every inhabitant in their new colony. But there has been little talk about China at all from the Democrats. Trump has implemented a ten-per-cent tariff on China, which, it should be noted, is significantly lower than the tariffs he dangled in front of Mexico and Canada. His tone with President Xi Jinping and our supposed Cold War nemeses has been relatively dovish.
Of all the elected officials in Washington, Tom Cotton seems most committed to Cold War rhetoric—he and two fellow-senators recently reintroduced legislation that would bar any Chinese individual or business from owning land in the U.S. Cotton’s most notable recent appearance in the public eye came when he questioned TikTok’s C.E.O., Shou Zi Chew, as part of a congressional hearing. In a viral clip, which was mocked by everyone from John Oliver to video-game streamers, Cotton kept asking Chew if he was a Chinese citizen or if he was affiliated with the C.C.P., and Chew, who is Singaporean, kept reminding Cotton that China and Singapore are not the same country. Cotton’s hawkishness and his career, over all, feel almost anachronistic at this point, a relic from 2020 when everyone was looking around for Trump’s successor, not realizing the king was just taking a nap.
China talk, of course, is not relegated to one side of the aisle: on Tuesday, David Axelrod, the Democratic strategist who made his name during the Obama Administration, appeared on CNN to comment on Trump’s still hazy, but certainly startling, plan to “take over” the Gaza Strip. “Imagine how the Chinese interpret that as they eye Taiwan,” Axelrod said. The point, while fair enough, also felt antiquated and from a different time when the war, in itself, would not be enough of a political story, and when we all believed we were on the brink of armed conflict with China. Does any American citizen, upon hearing Trump’s plan for Gaza, turn their thoughts to what China must be thinking about all this? The Cold War almost feels like a rhetorical gesture—something people say when they need to tack on reasons why their political opponents have messed up, once again.
Last year, I wrote that the now paused ban on TikTok represented a serious threat to civil liberties and free speech. Echoing the logic of Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, I argued that Americans have the right to receive propaganda, even if the propaganda might not paint this country in a particularly favorable light. Concerns about stolen data felt mostly beside the point—almost all of our data can already be purchased cheaply on open markets, which means that China, having created a sprawling data-stealing video algorithm that happened to captivate the world, would probably be better off just shutting down the data-stealing part and focussing on its new creation. It’s like in Woody Allen’s “Small Time Crooks,” where a character played by Tracey Ullman starts a cookie bakery so that her husband can use the store’s wall to access and rob a bank. The cookie shop takes off, making them fabulously wealthy, which ends the need to rob the bank.
But that doesn’t mean that the millions of hours Americans have consumed on TikTok have had zero influence on how they feel about the world, and China, in particular. TikTok gave millions of Americans a look into a China filled with friendly, English-speaking tour guides in bustling and architecturally fascinating cities like Chongqing; charming, hard-drinking farmers in verdant countrysides; hilarious lighted-sign salesmen; and fun, relatable groups of friends who got dressed up for hot-pot dinners. During the very short time that TikTok went offline in America, thousands of former users went over to RedNote, a Chinese TikTok alternative, where meme-happy Chinese netizens introduced themselves and their country to the flood of American digital refugees. This cute cultural exchange was short-lived and had no real lasting effects, but TikTok probably did quietly change the attitudes of millions of Americans toward their purported enemy. The most effective propaganda China could produce was extremely normal and mundane portraits of daily life. TikTok took away the illusion that many Americans had about polluted skies, legions of militarized police, and slave-like working conditions. It made China look normal, even occasionally cool.
TikTok, perhaps by accident, became a form of stadium diplomacy. Give Americans the algorithm and audience dynamics they want, and they’ll eventually conclude you can’t be that bad. It’s difficult to know whether any of this was intentional, but the over-all public sentiment about China doesn’t seem in line with the increasingly distant calls for alarm. When DeepSeek, a Chinese A.I. company, released a new model that could complete the same tasks as American A.I. firms, but at a fraction of the computing cost, several leading members of the tech industry, including the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, called it a “Sputnik moment” that signalled the U.S. was now in an A.I. arms race with China. The response from much of the public was mostly bemusement. (It certainly wasn’t a rallying of support to Silicon Valley or companies like OpenAI and Anthropic to win the race to artificial general intelligence.) Much like with the TikTok ban, the demand, instead, seemed to be, “Just give us the cool app. China already has our data.”
One of the most shared and discussed ideas from the previous election season came from the economist Tyler Cowen’s blog. Cowen was trying to make sense of why public sentiment had swung toward Trump and listed off a number of reasons why this “vibe shift” had taken place. Similarly, we might be in the early phases of a vibe shift when it comes to America’s relationship with China. Hawkishness and our own forms of stadium diplomacy, regardless of whether the programs are helpful or not, are clearly no longer priorities. Trump and Musk probably have a variety of reasons for going after U.S.A.I.D., but I imagine part of it comes from the fact that most Americans aren’t particularly interested in diplomatic aid programs or the geopolitical implications of withdrawal from the international stage. Trump, at least for now, seems to agree. And, though he and Musk have likely squandered whatever good will they might have had after the election and Inauguration, the decision to mostly withdraw from the anti-China Cold War rhetoric of the Biden Administration might accurately reflect the will of the electorate. Let China build their stadiums abroad, they seem to be saying. We have our own problems here. There is an implicit capitulation in all this, one that might be reflected in the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. Americans may be waking up to what has been quite obvious until now, but difficult to admit: this Cold War has only one protagonist and it isn’t us. ♦
