On October 2nd, 2025, Donald Trump dispelled any lingering doubts about his relationship to the überconservative policy positions laid out by the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025.” Rowing back on his oft-repeated insistence that he “had no idea who [was] behind” the more than 900 page document, Trump announced on his social media platform that he would be meeting with “Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent.” The president’s announcement marked a sudden reversal: with the US government shutdown (now in its fourth week and counting), Trump not only openly embraced the same conservative blueprint that he desperately tried to distance himself from during his 2024 campaign, but has furthermore staffed his administration with several of the authors who penned the 900-plus page Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. As of mid-October 2025, the independent online “Project 2025 Tracker” estimates that the second Trump administration has already implemented a stunning 48% of the Mandate’s policy proposals, only seven months after his inauguration.
Chinese media have taken notice. In an oft-cited South China Morning Post article, Orange Wang noted that China was mentioned 483 times (400 times more often than Russia, the next most-oft cited country) in the Mandate, in a manner that she described as “shockingly malicious,” and warned that this was certainly “bad news for Beijing.” She noted that Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts had minced no words in his scathing forward to the Mandate:
“Unfettered trade with China has been a catastrophe… American factories have closed. Jobs have been outsourced. Our manufacturing economy has been financialised. And all along, the corporations profiting failed to export our values of human rights and freedom; rather, they imported China’s anti-American values into their C-suites.”
Reviving incendiary political language that was rarely seen since the 1980s in the post-Mao era, “China,” Roberts repeated, “is a totalitarian enemy of the United States, not a strategic partner or fair competitor.” (11-12) Meanwhile, in the widely-read Shanghai-based Observer (观察者), Lu Yicheng summed up the new domestic scholarly consensus in the PRC last July: “China needs to be fully prepared” (中国需做好充分准备).
The bulk of the Heritage Foundation’s most incendiary claims about US-China relations in the Mandate are historical. For example, in his chapter entitled “The Case for Free Trade,” Counsellor to the President, Peter Navarro warns of “the broader existential threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in its quest for global dominance,” calling out a pattern of what he sees as “the CCP’s continued economic aggression” against the US, beginning with “tools such as tariffs, nontariff barriers, dumping, counterfeiting and piracy, and currency manipulation.” (798) In addition to benefitting from what Navarro identifies as “unfair and nonreciprocal trade institutionalized in WTO rules” that favour less developed economies, “Communist China” and India are accused of having blocked “American exporters from selling goods at competitive prices to more than one-third of the world’s population” in recent years (770). Navarro enumerates “more than 50 types of policy aggression institutionalized by the CCP across six different categories,” including such market-protective measures as “high tariffs and nontariff barriers, currency manipulation, a heavy reliance on sweatshop labour and pollution havens, the dumping of unfairly subsidized exports, and widespread counterfeiting and piracy.” (783) Other forms of so-called economic aggression include employing a “predatory ‘debt trap’ model of economic development aid…to developing countries” (783); “technology-forcing policies… to force the transfer of the West’s technologies to Communist Chinese soil” (784): and employing “technology-seeking, state-financed Foreign Direct Investment (FDI)” worth close to $20 billion in cutting-edge US firms (786). “Viewed as whole,” Navarro charges, “the extent of Communist China’s aggression is breathtaking.” (783)
Of course, prior to the second Trump administration, such accusations were more commonly levelled against the US in its “quest for global dominance” under the Washington Consensus model of neoliberal globalization. Nobel Laureate and former chief economist for the World Bank Joseph Stiglitz, for example, richly documented how the US historically shaped the global economic order to serve its own corporate interests, and in a way that was fundamentally “unfair to the poorest countries of the world.” Robert Wade and Frank Veneroso highlighted a “Wall Street-Treasury-IMF Complex” managing the Asian Financial Crisis that instituted “massive devaluations, IMF-pushed financial liberalization, and IMF-facilitated recovery…[that precipitated] the biggest peacetime transfer of assets from domestic to foreign owners in the past fifty years anywhere in the world, dwarfing the transfers from domestic to US owners that occurred Latin America in the 1980s.” More recently, in December 2022, WTO panels ruled that the US’s steel and aluminium tariffs, allegedly imposed on the grounds of “national security,” violated WTO rules in disputes with four WTO member countries– China, Norway, Turkey and Switzerland. As Richard Falk recently observed, the UN Security Council further institutionalized these mechanisms of economic inequality by exempting the five permanent members from compliance with international law, bolstering double standards through “the global projection of hypocrisy.”
And yet, such polarized projections and accusations by political elites is hardly a new phenomenon. In “The Great Moving Right Show,” Stuart Hall’s 1979 essay on the rise of Thatcherism, he defined authoritarian populism as an exceptional form of the capitalist state. Unlike classical fascism, authoritarian populism largely retained the formal representative institutions of democratic governance by manufacturing active popular consent even as it dismantled the link between class and party in favour of “an alternative articulation: government-to-people.” (17) The “objective contradiction” underlying Thatcher’s authoritarian populist rhetoric embracing “social market values,” Hall argued, emphasized enterprising individualism as a collective value intrinsic to the British national character (17). Although hers was an elite project that harnessed state power from ‘above’ to renegotiate established relationships between the state, capital and labour in the UK, the populist element mobilized grassroots consent “from below” based on the construction of a series of ‘them’ vs. ‘us’ binaries. The “well designed folk-devil” of the “welfare scavenger” was thus discursively pitted against “over-taxed individual, enervated by welfare coddling, his initiative sapped by handouts by the state.” (17) Hardworking Brits with socially conservative values were arrayed in Thatcher-era political discourse against a range of allegedly threatening forces—including young Black men, the gay rights activists and trade unionists—triggering tabloid-fuelled moral panics focussing on “the enemy within.”
Hall’s enabling concept of articulation understood discourses neither as free-floating systems of meaning unconnected to social forces, nor as anchored positions in the relationship between socioeconomic classes and ideology. Instead, he envisioned them as the result of a process through which subjects make sense of the conditions that they encounter by reworking socially produced ideas to render their conditions intelligible:
In his words: “The theory of articulation is both a way of understanding how ideological elements come, under certain conditions, to cohere together within a discourse, and a way of asking how they do or do not become articulated, at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects… [It] asks how an ideology discovers its subject rather than how the subject thinks the necessary and inevitable thoughts which belong to it… without reducing those forms of intelligibility to their socio-economic or class location or social position” (53). This version of ideological process helps explain Thatcherism’s appeals.
Thatcher’s articulation of a meritocratic, competitive individualism was linked to the global economic transition already underway, offering a discursive narrative that conveniently facilitated political elites in shifting away from state managed economies with a suite of policies designed to address the “crisis” of the 1970s. As is well known, these policy responses matured into full-scale assaults on the power of organized labor, the removal of controls on the international movement of capital, and a reliance on successive debt crises to prise open national economies across the global South. As articulated by the British prime minister, neoliberalism flagged an entirely new reality in which, famously, there is no such thing as ‘society’, because the only conceivable social ideal moving forward involved liberated individuals meeting and competing in unfettered global markets. Her vision of neoliberal globalization was facilitated by new developments in information technology that made possible vast transnational supply chains, and new forms of competition enabled by capacious differences in living standards and average wages between developed and developing nations that broke the backs of organized labour and tore through the sinews of the welfare state.
According to historian Gary Grestle, we are now living in an interregnum in which the political order of neoliberalism has been eclipsed, yet before a new political economic order has fully taken shape, but nonetheless one in which defensive protectionist sentiments are profoundly shaping conversations about the future of China-US economic relations. In contrast to the Thatcherite (and Reaganite) state as handmaiden to “self-correcting” markets at the behest of a putatively entrepreneurial citizenry, in the UK we are witnessing the rise of what the current Chancellor has dubbed “securonomics” that takes as its object putatively imperilled national populations requiring protection from external forces. Emerging “from the ashes of the old hyper-globalisation” promoted by the failed Washington Consensus, Rachel Reeves told the Peterson Institute in Washington DC, “securonomics” promises “more active state” apparatus “focus[ed] on the economic security of the nation,” capable of “securing the finances of working people” who are allegedly demanding protection from bad-faith external actors intent on “gaming the system” (emphasis added). Likewise, the Trump 2.0 government, according to Peter Navarro’s contribution to the Mandate, takes the helm of “the globe’s biggest trade loser and victim of unfair, unbalanced, and non-reciprocal trade,” and vows to reverse “the systematic exploitation of American farmers, ranchers, manufacturers, and workers through higher tariffs institutionalized by [granting] MFN [status to China]” (766, 770). This, once again, seems to flag a future of more robust state action in protecting domestic markets and domestic market interests from external bad-faith actors, and, nominally, as in the UK, “securing the finances of working people.”
However, in the PRC, which of course never subscribed to the Washington Consensus, Party leaders are likewise signaling the advent of their own form of “securonomics” against bad-faith external actors and forces. The near-obsessive emphasis in official political discourse on the importance of improving one’s suzhi—a term that, according to Yan Hairong, once marked “a sense and sensibility of the self’s value in the market economy” in a neoliberalising post-Mao China— is rapidly being replaced by official warnings of the need to “adapt to the new normal” (适应新常态) of slower economic growth. Popular discourses reflect widespread worries about the dangers of involution (内卷) in China’s hypercompetitive labour market, as well as the need for domestic companies and working people to be buffeted from the vagaries of increasingly unpredictable and hostile global forces. The May 2025 White Paper on China’s National Security for a New Era (新时代的中国国家安全) implicitly gestures at—without directly naming– the Trump administration:
“Economic globalization is facing headwinds. Unilateralism and protectionism are intensifying, hindering the multilateral trading system. Actions like ‘building walls and erecting barriers,’ and ‘decoupling and disrupting supply chains,’ are undermining the security of global industrial and supply chains. Certain countries are imposing tariffs on others for non-economic reasons, disrupting the global economic order. The momentum for world economic growth remains insufficient, international economic circulation is encountering obstacles, and the global development gap is widening.”
(经济全球化遭遇逆流。单边主义、保护主义加剧，多边贸易体制受阻，“筑墙设垒”、“脱钩断链”等破坏全球产业链供应链安全。个别国家以非经济理由对他国加征关税，扰乱全球经济秩序。世界经济增长动能不足，国际经济循环遭遇阻碍，全球发展鸿沟拉大。)
As a preview of this 2025 position, in a 2014 speech to the Central National Security Commission (中央国家安全委员会), Xi established his “comprehensive national security” concept (总体国家安全观 ) which “takes economic security as the base” (以经济安全为基础), goes so far as to insist that “development is the foundation of security, and security is the precondition for development” (发展是安全的基础，安全是发展的条件). The May 2025 White Paper addresses, first, the need to “maintain the Party’s ruling status and the socialist system” (维护党的执政地位和社会主义制度) and, secondarily, the need to “improve the people’s sense of benefit, happiness, and security” (提高人民群众获得感、幸福感、安全感) in the face of “profound shifts” (深刻变化) in contemporary Chinese society that are impacting “people’s security needs, [which] are becoming stronger and more diverse” (人民群众的安全需求更趋强烈、更加多元). And, in the newly released Communiqué of the Fourth Plenary (which typically deals with matters relating to Party-building, law, and governance issues), official formulations relating to “protection” (保护), “safeguarding” (维护) and “indemnification” (保障) appear a noteworthy fourteen times, perhaps underscoring a new vigilance against the intrusion of potentially destabilizing foreign political orders.
As the expression of post-neoliberal imaginaries sees Trump’s Washington turning increasingly inward, treating opponents and immigrants as security threats while sniping at allies and trading partners alike, the US-China rivalry has not merely intensified: it has fundamentally changed character. It is becoming less coalition-based and more unilateral, more ideological, and infinitely more brittle. It was only eighteen years ago that Niall Ferguson and Morize Schularick announced the “The End of Chimerica,” “a world economic order that combined Chinese export-led development with US over-consumption on the basis of a financial marriage between the world’s sole superpower and its most likely future rival.” Trump’s acceleration of decoupling and embrace of what The Nation’s Jake Werner has christened “permanent belligerence” is eroding the very assets—alliances, talent inflows, bureaucratic competence, and international legitimacy– that would facilitate future constructive engagement.
Editorial Note: This is revised from a talk delivered at the Verso Conference on China, convened in London on 2-4 October, 2025.
Patricia Thornton is Professor in Politics of China, Department of Politics, Oxford University