The Weaponisation of Ideas: US-China Competition in the Symbolic Field

This project examines a neglected but increasingly important dimension of United States-China competition: the role of ideas, culture and symbolism. While much existing research focuses on military power, economic statecraft or technological rivalry, this research shifts attention to how ideological, cultural and civilisational narratives are mobilised by Washington and Beijing to frame their rivalry. These narratives are used to legitimise policy choices, shape threat perceptions and influence both domestic and international audiences.

At the core of the project is the argument that symbolic power is not merely an accompaniment to material competition, but a constitutive element of contemporary great power rivalry. The project investigates how ideas and cultural narratives are “weaponised” over time and how they contribute to the construction of adversarial collective identities between the United States and China. It explores how each side defines itself and the other through discourses on values, ideology, culture and civilisation, and how these discourses draw boundaries around political community.

The research is grounded in International Relations theory and discourse theory, combining insights on great power competition, identity formation and strategic rivalry with approaches that analyse how meaning and power are produced through language and symbolic practices. Methodologically, the project adopts a mixed-methods design, integrating machine-learning-enhanced text-as-data analysis with qualitative discourse analysis. This approach enables the systematic study of large textual corpora from 2000 to 2024, while retaining close interpretive analysis of narratives, symbols and identity claims.

Empirically, the project analyses US and Chinese discourses across several symbolic fields with strong societal resonance, including official political statements, academic and expert debates, and selected outputs from literature and cinema. Its objectives are conceptual, empirical, theoretical and methodological, with planned outputs ranging from academic articles and a research monograph to policy briefs, expert workshops and an open-access platform that will disseminate key findings and selected datasets to a wider audience.

This project is supported by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) under grant number: FWOAL1182