Contemporary Chinese Political Economy and Strategic Relations: An International Journal (Aug 2022)
Analyzing China-U.S. Relations in the Eyes of Chinese Scholars through Word Frequency
Abstract
With the help of various corpus software, this paper reviews the adjectives and nouns used with high frequency by Chinese scholars when talking about China-U.S. relations from 31st August 2020 to 31st July 2021, i.e., a total of one year before and after Biden's inauguration, and the changes in the frequency of use, hoping to reflect Chinese scholars' perceptions of China-U.S. relations and how such perceptions have changed with the change of U.S. presidents. The authors find that Chinese scholars generally have lower expectations of China-U.S. relations, accepting the fact that China and the United States are strategic competitors and will compete in several fields, but still hold out hope for mitigation of China-U.S. relations and offer their own "prescriptions" from different perspectives. And with the inauguration of Biden as president, Chinese scholars believe that China-U.S. relations will remain stable overall compared to the Trump years, although Chinese scholars believe that the Biden administration's policy toward China will expose Beijing to more complex challenges.
