The “Right” China Typology in Trump Era 2.0

The little graphic below is making the rounds in some China-watching circles. It’s totally wrong—at best misleading—and if you stare at it too hard, you’ll needlessly hurt your brain.

The underlying piece this came from was trying to develop categories that would help us make sense of the views that would aggregate into a Trump administration China policy…but the piece failed to mention any actual people. And that’s just as well, because some of these categories aren’t even real and there are no Republicans that would fit in some of them.

In 2023, there was an alternative typology developed by David McCourt that identified basically all Republicans as “strategic competitors” and then split out three sub-types: military-first hawks, economic nationalist hawks, and real “new Cold Warriors.” Military-first hawks included Randy Schriver and Bridge Colby. Economic nationalists including Robert Lighthizer and Peter Navarro. The new Cold Warriors included Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller.

McCourt’s typology had the advantage of associating real people with each category, and he was right that they were all “strategic competitors.” But both McCourt’s mapping of China thinkers—if you want to call them that—and this newly circulating four-quadrant thing are obscuring more than they’re revealing.

Every Republican elite now is a new Cold Warrior. And every military-first China hawk also supports economic rivalry with China. And every economy-first China hawk endorses military balancing games against China. These have become distinctions without difference.

The four-quadrant graphic above is even more problematic than McCourt’s schema, in part because it involves a substantial amount of self-deception.¹