Cultural Decoupling From China Is Not the Answer

“De-risking”—minimizing the danger of national security threats, economic shocks, and diplomatic setbacks—has become the watchword of U.S. relations with China. Officials including National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan insist that to de-risk is not to “decouple.” They acknowledge that China and the United States, while locked in economic, political, and ideological rivalry, are also interdependent and must continue to collaborate on trade, climate change, public health, nuclear security, and more.

The focus on risk mitigation amid intensified competition marks an end to decades of faith that U.S. economic and political engagement with China would yield stable relations, reciprocity, and—it was thought—Beijing’s slow gravitation toward the norms and habits of the liberal world order.

This drastic remaking of the U.S.-China relationship raises important questions for culture and society. For decades, U.S. cultural institutions—including creative industries such as publishing, film, and media, as well as universities, nonprofits, foundations, and museums—deepened their involvement with China. Hollywood studios have altered plotlines to change the ethnicity of Chinese villains and even valorize the Chinese military in attempts to court favor with the government.

Hollywood studios vied fiercely to get their pictures shown in the world’s biggest moviegoing market. The number of Chinese exchange students in the U.S. swelled to a peak of 372,000 in the 2019-20 academic year, more than came from any other country. Leading U.S. universities opened satellite campuses and programs in Beijing and Shanghai.

But in the new, fraught era, these cultural entities are considering their own version of de-risking. They are weighing the trade-offs and pitfalls of engagement with China.

Cultural contact with China has never been simple. U.S. entities seeking to deal with Chinese publishers, film investors, or academics have always known that ultimate decision-maker on the Chinese end is the Communist Party government, which insists on censorship, control over narrative, and other forms of repression. Given those realities, many U.S. cultural entities are now evaluating whether and how to continue to do business with China.

The challenge is how to avoid complicity in the Chinese government’s patterns of repression while keeping enough cultural connectivity to avoid deepening distrust and distancing between the American and Chinese peoples. A total cessation of cultural links between Americans and Chinese could reinforce diplomatic hostilities, fan prejudices, and impair prospects for eventual détente and rapprochement.

Pressure then mounted in other forms. After a Bloomberg story on the wealth of Chinese leader Xi Jinping in 2012, the company saw a sharp reduction in Chinese uptake of the company’s lucrative data terminals as government officers were ordered not to subscribe. The company’s website was blocked, and visas were denied to its journalists. The following year, Bloomberg spiked a major exposé detailing links between a Chinese tycoon and the families of Communist Party leaders.

The New York Times reported that Bloomberg’s editor in chief killed the story, which had passed through multiple stages of legal and editorial review, on grounds that the company feared being kicked out of China. The lead reporter behind the scuttled story was suspended and prohibited from talking about what had happened. Bloomberg’s then-CEO vowed to stick to straight-up business reporting in order to preserve its market access.

A state censor board that has the authority to veto not only books published in China, but those printed there to be shipped to global audiences.

Hollywood studios have altered plotlines to change the ethnicity of Chinese villains and even valorize the Chinese military in attempts to court favor with the board that picks just a handful of foreign movies each year to distribute on the mainland. Films released in the 1990s, including Kundun and Seven Years in Tibet, which critically depicted China’s political system and treatment of minority ethnicities, prompted Beijing to blacklist the associated studios and creators, even though the movies were never released in China.

In subsequent years, movies including Red Dawn (2012), Transformers: Age of Extinction, and Dr. Strange (2016) bore clear earmarks of the influence of Chinese government influence. When a Taiwanese flag patch was removed from Tom Cruise’s bomber jacket in a 2019 preview of Top Gun: Maverick the outcry was swift, prompting Paramount Pictures to reverse course and restore the original image.

More recently, the makers of Warner Brothers’ Barbie have been called out for a hand-drawn map in the film that depicts the so-called nine-dash-line, a maritime border that only China recognizes. The inclusion of the mysterious dashes on the cartoonish map could have been an innocent mistake or an effort to butter up Beijing film authorities. Sure enough, while the movie was banned by an irate Vietnamese government, which rejects the nine-dash line, Barbie was welcomed as a box office hit in China.

While some of the compromises seem petty, they point to how a globally influential China can wield its power not just to control information within its borders, but also to self-servingly shape narratives globally. For China, culture is not just a national product, but rather a primary instrument of social control and political strategy.

Xi has invested deeply in both ancient and more modern Chinese cultural traditions as wellsprings of patriotism, nationalism, and reinforcement of his own personal brand of leadership. In just one manifestation, Xi has commissioned a serious of self-congratulatory documentaries covering the Belt and Road Initiative, seeking to ensure that the world views Beijing’s sometimes-usurious loans and shaky investments favorably.

Xi’s quest for cultural dominance pervades China’s international cultural ties. As China has emerged in recent years as the world’s largest and cheapest source of book printing, publishers in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and elsewhere have been caught revising books having nothing to do with China in order to appease a state censor board that has the authority to veto not only books published in China, but those printed there to be shipped to global audiences.

Movie projects touching on hot-button topics such as Tibet or Tiananmen Square never see the light of day, with Hollywood producers and executives on notice that a retributive Chinese government has blacklisted actors and directors previously associated with such topics. Human rights groups have documented how the Chinese government pressures and intimidates artists of Chinese background who are living abroad and uses its leverage to prevent Western arts institutions from showing work critical of China.

China’s influence is also being felt on faraway home campuses in the United States. Wealthy Chinese donors, who could never have made their fortunes without being on the right side of the CCP government, have spent hundreds of millions to endow programs at U.S. universities.

Researchers have documented numerous forms of influence at U.S. colleges, ranging from the intimidation of Chinese students who dare criticize the Beijing government to pressures on China scholars and direct influence over the curriculum of so-called Confucius institutes on U.S. campuses, which focus on Chinese language and culture but are funded by the Chinese government.

The capitulations that are usually required to work with China often go unseen. Institutions would rather avoid talking about how they have given into pressure, and sometimes internalize Chinese concessions to the point where they no longer admit to themselves that they are making them at Beijing’s behest.

In a February 2020 article, Max Brooks, the author of the novel World War Z, wrote that in drawing on the experience of the SARS epidemic, he had made China the epicenter of his fictional virus because “I needed an authoritarian regime with strong control over the press. Smothering public awareness would give my plague time to spread, first among the local population, then into other nations.”

When the book was adapted into a movie in 2013, Brooks’s message, a prescient one, was obscured by the industry impulse to self-censor in order to appease China’s film arbiters; the plot of the film was altered such that the virus was unspecified. Despite the doctoring, World War Z was never approved for release in China.

These pressures have contributed to a climate of mutual cultural retreat, both coerced and voluntary. After rising steadily over decades, the number of new Chinese students studying in the U.S. has declined by double-digit percentages in each of the past three years. The numbers of U.S. students studying in China and learning Chinese languages have begun to drop.

Facing up to the mounting conflicts, Harvard University moved a summer program from Beijing to Taiwan, and Duke is reconsidering whether it will renew its partnership with Wuhan University. A restrictive 2017 Chinese law regulating foreign nongovernmental organizations—groups working in areas as diverse as training lawyers to running health programs—has led scores to pull up stakes. In January 2020, the U.S. Peace Corps announced it would phase out its decadeslong China program, a casualty of COVID-19 and rising tensions. With fewer foreigners living and traveling in China, cultural connectivity is weakening.

Global museums and universities are also coming under pressure to scale back partnerships with Chinese government-linked arts institutions lest they be accused of association with the CCP’s rights abuses. The distancing is compounded by China’s own cultural turn inward, whereby Xi’s government has moved to privilege the country’s homegrown film industry, publishers, scholars, and media. Western entities have seen their China dreams dashed and turned their sights to Taiwan, India, or elsewhere.

The growing divide is compounded by dwindling ranks of U.S. and other foreign journalists reporting inside China. In its March 2023 report, the Foreign Correspondents Club of China described its members as “battered in morale and greatly diminished in numbers by successive expulsions and delays in granting new visas to incoming journalists.” The dearth of reporting not only chokes off the flow of hard news and analysis, but also denies Western readers the cultural insights, visuals, and human-interest stories that made China come alive in the eyes of Americans.

Cultural disengagement has already resulted in some de-risking. The widening expanse between U.S. and Chinese societies blunts the threat of Beijing’s censorship, official narratives, and repressive policies infiltrating the West and subverting the independence of U.S. institutions.

The question now is how to weigh the hazards of engagement with the costs and detriments of a full-scale decoupling. To get the balance right, U.S. cultural actors should seek to sustain interest, understanding, and outreach to the Chinese people while avoiding compromises of principle made to appease the Chinese government.

Such a posture needn’t imply an absolute refusal to compromise. Some U.S. authors have agreed to make edits to their work in order to satisfy Chinese censors, deciding that getting the bulk of their ideas into China still has value, even if certain words and phrases were excised. New Yorker writer Peter Hessler has written openly and thoughtfully about compromises that he has made in his work in order to appease Chinese censors and get published on the mainland.

By ensuring that such concessions do not carry over to dictate how books and artistic works appear for audiences outside China, and by candidly discussing their predicaments, U.S. artists and creators can support one another and avoid contributing to a climate in which the Chinese government exerts an unseen chill on expression.

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U.S. universities should publicly assure their Chinese students and China scholars that Chinese government interference on campus will not be tolerated. By doubling down on their commitments to academic freedom and free speech, and collectively pledging to adhere to principled engagement with China through academic and industry associations, U.S. institutions can avoid putting themselves at an individual competitive disadvantage. Such a commitment should entail transparent ongoing risk assessments to objectively evaluate whether such collaborations have a corrupting influence.

Independent cultural institutions still have some opportunity to deal directly with Chinese people, skirting the heavy hand of the CCP. There are certain authors, intellectuals, artists, and creators who, while working within the system, manage to test boundaries and engage in original work. Where possible, conferences, festivals, dialogues, and exhibitions should seek out individuals who have the leeway to engage internationally, offering more than a party line.

Exiled and émigré Chinese writers, artists, and filmmakers offer authentic experiences and perspectives that can be brought to wider audiences in the West. These individuals deserve greater protections from institutions and law enforcement so that their independent voices can be heard without fear of the long arm of the Chinese government.

By expanding the sharply narrowed channels for legal immigration, the U.S. government can help ensure ongoing ties to China through independent professionals, artists, and creators who want to live in the United States permanently. Standalone programs such as the Schwarzman Scholars, which sends up to 200 graduates from around the world to China for a year of study, can avoid some of the risks that larger institutions face in terms of self-censorship and compromise in order to preserve access.

Debates over Chinese treatment of critics when hosting the Olympics, as well as the 2021 forced disappearance of outspoken tennis champion Peng Shuai, are reminders that nothing China-related, not least sports, is divorced from politics. That said, in the 1970s ping-pong helped thaw U.S.-China ties; U.S. institutions should look out for opportunities for low-stakes, relatively risk-free engagement.

It is vital to ensure that cultural de-risking does not generate more risk than it averts. The U.S. needs to understand what is happening inside China, needs links to Chinese people, and needs to avoid fanning suspicions and stigmas that sow divisions at home. Institutions that influence culture should think about laying groundwork for the long term. With the allure of study and work prospects in China having dimmed, new incentives may be needed to cultivate the next generation of Mandarin speakers and China scholars in the United States. Work on China, including by critical scholars whose work may anger its government officials, needs to be supported and protected.

At its best, culture can offer a bridge of understanding across geographic, political, and ideological divides. Whether in relation to the economy, technology, trade, the military, or diplomacy, the United States is groping for a delicate balance that allows it to reduce risk while sustaining important and constructive ties to China. The cultural sector must do the same.