The contemporary U.S.–China competition is driven less by China’s concrete actions than by deep-seated American anxieties rooted in ideology, projection, and domestic instability. China is perceived as an unacceptable competitor because it revives long-standing U.S. fears of socialism and state-led development, disrupts the post–Cold War assumption that liberal democracy is the sole path to legitimacy, and demonstrates durable economic and political performance outside Western norms. American discourse, shaped by a binary worldview that equates legitimacy with democracy and markets, interprets China through mirror-image projection—assuming it will seek ideological expansion and domination as the United States historically has—while overlooking China’s distinct historical priorities of stability, development, and national resilience. This fear is amplified by the United States’ own internal crises—deindustrialization, inequality, polarization, and governance paralysis—which incentivize the externalization of blame and the securitization of economic and ideological rivalry. As a result, China becomes both a strategic challenger and a symbolic threat, mobilized to reinforce U.S. anti-socialist reflexes, unify a fractured polity, and defer reckoning with domestic contradictions, turning bilateral competition into a politics of fear rather than a sober assessment of power and coexistence.
China and the Logic of the Unacceptable Rival
The United States’ fear of China is not reducible to material power alone; it is a layered anxiety shaped by ideology, history, and self-perception. China is constructed as an “unacceptable” competitor because it does not merely challenge U.S. interests within an established order but calls into question the assumptions on which that order rests. In American strategic imagination, China appears not as a normal rising power, but as a composite adversary that fuses past traumas and unresolved ideological conflicts.
First, China is viewed through the lingering shadow of the Cold War. Its political system revives deep-seated American hostility toward communism and state-led governance, long associated with existential threats to U.S. values and global leadership. The collapse of the Soviet Union reinforced the belief that liberal democracy represented the inevitable end point of political development; China’s sustained rise disrupts this narrative by demonstrating stability, growth, and legitimacy without adopting Western political forms.
Second, China evokes memories of Japan’s economic challenge in the late twentieth century, but in a far more unsettling form. Like Japan, China excels in manufacturing, technology, and global trade, yet unlike Japan it is neither a U.S. ally nor politically subordinate to American leadership. Its socialist market economy, strategic autonomy, and refusal to conform to Western institutional norms make economic competition appear less manageable and more threatening, transforming rivalry into a question of systemic control.
Finally, China is interpreted through mirror-image projection. U.S. policymakers often assume that China will behave as the United States historically has—exporting ideology, leveraging power for influence, and subordinating principles to strategic advantage. This projection obscures China’s distinct historical experiences and priorities, and reinforces the perception that its success represents not just competition, but defiance. The resulting anxiety stems less from China’s capabilities than from the intolerability of an alternative political order that functions outside Western liberal democracy, undermining the ideological monopoly the United States has long assumed as the foundation of its global role.
Ideological Filters and the Logic of Projection
American interpretations of global politics are shaped by a rigid ideological framework that reduces political reality to opposing binaries: capitalism versus socialism and democracy versus autocracy. This lens leaves little room for historical contingency, cultural specificity, or alternative paths to development. Because the United States defines its own legitimacy primarily through ideology—constitutionalism, individual freedom, and democratic governance—it assumes that other states are similarly motivated. As a result, China is not assessed on its own historical experiences or governing logic, but is instead interpreted as an ideological actor analogous to the United States, presumed to pursue expansion, influence, and ideological competition.
This interpretive habit produces mirror-image projection. American policymakers often assume that China will act as the United States would under similar conditions, exporting its system and reshaping the international order in its own image. Such assumptions exaggerate China’s ambitions while obscuring the extent to which its behavior is shaped by domestic priorities, historical memory, and a focus on stability rather than ideological conversion. China thus becomes less a concrete actor than a reflective surface for American fears about power, decline, and ideological contestation.
The framing of China’s rise as an existential threat also serves a political function. Much like Singapore’s ruling party invokes national vulnerability to marginalize dissent and consolidate authority, U.S. leaders mobilize ideological threat narratives to unify a polarized domestic audience and legitimize strategic hardening abroad. Ideology, in this sense, operates not only as an analytical lens but as a political instrument—projecting internal anxieties outward and transforming systemic difference into perceived existential danger.
Domestic Fracture and the Externalization of Anxiety
The intensity of American fixation on China cannot be understood apart from the United States’ own internal crises. Long-standing structural contradictions—financialization, deindustrialization, and the offshoring of capital—have hollowed out economic security and widened inequality. These material pressures are compounded by deep social fragmentation, intensified by digital media, persistent racial tensions, and a political culture marked by fear and resistance toward redistributive or left-leaning ideas. Together, they have produced a society struggling to sustain cohesion under its existing institutional arrangements.
These internal stresses incentivize the search for external explanations and external enemies. China increasingly functions as a convenient scapegoat, absorbing blame for economic dislocation, technological anxiety, and political dissatisfaction that originate domestically. Policies such as trade wars, investment restrictions, technology bans, and heightened scrutiny of Chinese firms and platforms are not merely strategic responses to a foreign challenger, but outward manifestations of unresolved internal insecurity. By transforming domestic failures into external threats, U.S. leaders redirect public frustration away from structural reform and toward nationalist mobilization.
This dynamic closely resembles governance strategies that invoke existential danger to justify extraordinary measures. Just as Singapore has historically framed internal dissent as a threat to national survival, the United States frames China’s rise as an overriding external menace, legitimizing policy hardening and narrowing political debate. Fear becomes a substitute for consensus, and confrontation a stand-in for domestic renewal.
At the same time, American discourse often misrepresents the nature of Chinese stability. China is portrayed as monolithic and durable only through coercive authoritarian control, obscuring the role of centralized coordination, long-term policy continuity, and performance-based legitimacy. The United States, by contrast, equates stability with pluralistic consensus and social cohesion—conditions that are increasingly difficult to sustain amid economic inequality and political polarization. The resulting contrast reveals a deeper anxiety: the externalization of crisis serves not only to manage competition with China, but to mask the fragility of America’s own political and social foundations.
An Economic Challenger Beyond Containment
China’s economic rise is frequently compared to Japan’s challenge to the United States in the 1980s, yet it is perceived as far more destabilizing. While Japan’s ascent generated intense trade friction and industrial anxiety, it unfolded within a framework of alliance, strategic subordination, and shared institutional norms. China’s challenge, by contrast, is unsettling precisely because it occurs outside these constraints, transforming economic competition into a broader test of systemic authority.
A central source of anxiety lies in China’s strategic autonomy. Unlike Japan, China refuses to operate under U.S. leadership or accept Western-defined institutional hierarchies as the basis of legitimacy. Its economic policies, industrial planning, and global engagements are shaped by domestic priorities rather than alliance management, making its behavior less predictable and less susceptible to external pressure. This autonomy weakens the United States’ traditional tools for disciplining economic rivals.
Equally significant is the effectiveness of China’s development model. China’s sustained growth, industrial upgrading, and technological advancement demonstrate that large-scale economic success is possible without liberal democratic governance. This challenges the long-standing American assumption that open markets and political liberalization are prerequisites for prosperity, replacing ideological reassurance with performance-based legitimacy that resonates beyond China’s borders.
Civilizational distance magnifies economic rivalry into moral and security concerns. Unlike Japan, which was culturally legible and politically assimilable within Western frameworks, China is often portrayed as fundamentally alien. This perceived otherness encourages the securitization of trade, technology, and investment, recasting market competition as an existential struggle. As in the Singaporean logic of governance, the success of an alternative model is framed as a threat to survival itself, thereby justifying restrictive measures and extraordinary interventions that would otherwise be difficult to defend on purely economic grounds.
Competing Foundations of Legitimacy and Survival
At the heart of the U.S.–China rivalry lies a fundamental disagreement over the sources of political legitimacy. The United States grounds legitimacy primarily in ideology, emphasizing democratic procedures, constitutional order, and individual rights as universal standards. Within this framework, political systems that diverge from liberal democracy are often treated as inherently deficient, regardless of their capacity to deliver stability or material improvement.
China operates according to a contrasting logic in which legitimacy is derived from performance. Economic growth, poverty reduction, administrative competence, and long-term governance effectiveness constitute the core basis of political authority, while ideology functions as an instrument rather than an end in itself. This approach prioritizes outcomes over formal processes, framing political survival as a function of adaptability, modernization, and national resilience.
These divergent conceptions of legitimacy produce different understandings of survival. The United States tends to equate security with primacy, assuming that sustained dominance is necessary to preserve both its system and the international order it leads. China, shaped by historical experiences of vulnerability and humiliation, defines survival in terms of avoiding fragmentation, maintaining sovereignty, and achieving durable development. American anxiety arises from the recognition that China’s model demonstrates order and legitimacy beyond Western ideological frameworks, thereby weakening the universalist claims that have long underpinned U.S. global leadership and moral authority.
Fear as an Instrument of Governance and Strategy
Fear operates not only as a reaction to external conditions but as an intentional political and strategic instrument. States often invoke narratives of vulnerability or threat to discipline domestic debate, consolidate authority, and legitimize policies that might otherwise face resistance. In this sense, fear becomes a mode of governance, shaping how societies interpret both internal challenges and external competition.
A useful parallel can be drawn with Singapore’s longstanding emphasis on existential vulnerability. By framing the nation as a fragile “tiny red dot” surrounded by potential threats, the state has justified stringent political controls and limits on dissent in the name of survival and stability. The narrative of permanent risk transforms extraordinary measures into necessities and reframes opposition as irresponsibility.
The United States employs a comparable logic in its portrayal of China. The construction of a pervasive “China threat” serves to rationalize strategic escalation, ideological rigidity, and the postponement of domestic reform. By externalizing insecurity, American leaders mobilize nationalism and ideological projection to manage internal divisions, reinforcing the belief that social fragmentation and political dysfunction can be contained only through confrontation with an external rival. Fear, in this framework, is less a response to danger than a tool for sustaining political order amid structural uncertainty.
Conclusion: The Real Source of Anxiety
The U.S.–China competition ultimately reflects deeper dynamics than a simple struggle over power, ideology, or security. China provokes anxiety not merely because of its growing capabilities, but because it demonstrates success outside the Western ideological framework long assumed to be universal. Through mirror-image projection, the United States interprets China as an expansionist rival modeled on its own historical behavior, turning China into a symbolic repository for American fears about decline, legitimacy, and internal fracture.
This framing serves an important domestic function. By casting China as an existential threat, the United States forges a unifying narrative that temporarily bridges internal divisions and defers confrontation with structural dysfunctions at home. As long as American political discourse remains locked in a zero-sum, ideologically absolutist worldview, China will continue to be treated less as a concrete, historically situated actor and more as a reflection of unresolved American anxieties. In this sense, the rivalry endures not as an inevitable clash of systems, but as a mechanism for managing domestic contradictions—echoing governance strategies that invoke perpetual vulnerability to preserve an existing political order.