Stephen Roach laments that facts - especially about China - are in short supply as the US presidential race tightens

The Big Lie has become bigger. The false claim of a rigged, stolen 2020 US presidential election embraced by Donald Trump and his cult has brought about the end of fact-based accountability. This is having profound and lasting implications on a deeply troubled Sino-American relationship.

Sinophobia is a visible manifestation of how the Big Lie has corrupted norms of the American body politic. Irrational fears of China have taken on a life of their own. That includes any of a number of alleged threats to the US: China’s large share of the US trade deficit; the feared back door of Huawei’s 5G network; Chinese-made electric vehicles (EVs) and dock-loading cranes; the vulnerability of US infrastructure to a so-called Volt Typhoon hacking network; and the potential of TikTok to assault the character and privacy of innocent American teenagers.

I have argued that these fears stem from false narratives aligned with America’s anti-China political agenda. Such narratives are not pulled from thin air. They reflect projections from the distorted facts of what academic psychologists call a “narrative identity,” which “reconstructs the autobiographical past.” In the US, that past unfortunately reflects a toxic strain of identity politics traceable to a long history of racial and ethnic prejudice. To be sure, as I also detail in my book, China is equally guilty of embracing and promoting false narratives about America to suit its own purposes.

In examining the corrosive effect of false narratives on the China debate in the US, I have stressed the distinction between the potential to inflict harm based on circumstantial evidence and conjecture, and the intent to do so based on the “smoking gun” of hard evidence. The exaggerated fears of Sinophobia largely fall into the former category.

For example, US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo asked Americans to imagine what might happen if Chinese EVs were turned into destructive weapons on US highways. FBI Director Christopher Wray warned of an attack on critical infrastructure if China decides to activate its embedded malware. Fears that China will invade Taiwan in 2027 reflect a dated hunch by retired Admiral Phil Davidson, former head of the US Indo-Pacific Command. The key words – imagine, if, and hunch – speak volumes to the dangers of acting on conjecture.

But that hasn’t stopped US politicians. Recent hearings of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party are reminiscent of the red-baiting used by the House Un-American Activities Committee during the 1950s to target alleged Communist sympathisers. The House’s penchant for conjecture also spurred the recent passage of 25 anti-China bills – a rare flurry of legislative activity in late September now known as “China Week.”

The Big Lie has precipitated an even more troubling outcome: false narratives are no longer spun out of fact-based fragments of narrative identities. False narratives have become outright lies.

Consider recent press reports of the espionage indictment of five Chinese graduates from the University of Michigan for taking photos near a US National Guard training exercise that involved Taiwanese military personnel. The reports turned out to be wildly exaggerated: the five men were more than 50 miles from a military base and were charged not with espionage but with lying to the police.

This largely fictitious news item has Sinophobia written all over it. It resulted in a Republican state senator in Michigan attempting to scrap subsidies for a new $2.4 billion battery-component plant to be built by a US subsidiary of Gotion High-tech, a Chinese company. Never mind that Gotion’s largest shareholder is Volkswagen, not the Communist Party of China, as US politicians allege. The company has become an election issue in swing-state Michigan.

The Big Lie also shows up in other aspects of Sinophobia. Last year, FBI Director Wray, a Trump acolyte with well-established anti-China credentials, sounded a very public alarm that “China already has a bigger hacking program than every other major nation combined.”

Maybe not. According to the new World Cybercrime Index compiled by researchers at the University of Oxford, the world’s top cybercrime threats originate from, in descending order, Russia, Ukraine, China, the US, Nigeria, Romania, North Korea, and the United Kingdom. In fact, China only narrowly beat out the US for third place.

I am not arguing that China or any other foreign actor should be ignored as a potential threat to American cybersecurity. Rather, senior US officials must be more transparent about the global scope of cyberhacking – and own up to America’s role in propagating it.

As lies replace truth, Sinophobia not only destabilises the world’s most important bilateral relationship; it also results in serious policy blunders. Just as the US government once blamed Japan for America’s trade deficit, now it has directed its ire at China, imposing high (and possibly even higher) tariffs on Chinese imports. Never mind that bilateral action cannot eliminate a multilateral trade deficit stemming from a domestic-savings shortfall.

The results can be perverse and self-destructive. The US is effectively banning Chinese-made EVs precisely when it needs cost-efficient, high-quality green technologies to address climate change. And exaggerated fears of China’s cyberhacking are dominating the legislative agenda.

Thanks to the Big Lie, facts are in short supply as the US approaches its most consequential presidential election in modern history. This raises a deeper question: What comes next? The Big Lie has ushered in a climate where facts are no longer a prerequisite for political discourse and policymaking. That jeopardises the future of all Americans. One can only hope voters bear this in mind when casting their ballots.

*Stephen S. Roach, a former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, is a faculty member at Yale University and the author of the forthcoming Accidental Conflict: America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives (Yale University Press, November 2022). Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2024, published here with permission.