As the top destination for Chinese investors, students, tourists, technologists, filmmakers, and home buyers, California is ground zero for this experiment in deep and multifaceted engagement between China and the United States. The results of this experiment—the personal ties, economic frictions, and technological innovations—are already reshaping China and the United States and filtering out into the international system that orbits around them.
All of these interactions bring new opportunities—for investment, jobs, tuition dollars, and fascinating cultural fusion—but also new anxieties.
When international diplomacy enters our everyday lives, it is transformed. Greater contact can humanize the other side, turning a faceless “other” into a neighbor, classmate, or even friend. But that close-up contact can also drag things in the other direction, sharpening awareness of our differences and making geopolitical problems feel personal. In the Transpacific Experiment, we see both of these forces at work: a magnetic pull toward greater integration and synergy, as well as an intense backlash when one side feels manipulated or taken advantage of.
Here we catch a glimpse of the tension that animates this experiment in grassroots diplomacy. This new breed of deep U.S.–China engagement has the potential to bring tremendous benefit to people in both countries, but in that process, it creates entirely new problems that hit closer to home.
Heightening the drama is the grand geopolitical backdrop to these interactions. In the century and a half since Chinese and American people first came face-to-face in California, the relative positions of the two countries have changed dramatically. During that first wave of engagement in the 1800s, China was a once-great dynastic empire slowly being torn apart by colonial aggression and internal strife. The United States was instead an up-and-coming nation of immigrants, an unproven democratic experiment mixing lofty ideals, messy realities, and mounting military strength.
Today, the people of these countries are getting reacquainted on different footing: as citizens of the world’s two superpowers. Now, the United States plays the role of the incumbent juggernaut. It is home to powerful global industries and proud national traditions but also an increasingly fraught economic, social, and political order. And China is now the up-and-comer, a nation that has emerged from decades of domestic turmoil to challenge the United States for global leadership. To complicate matters further, China has not risen to this position by walking the path prescribed for it by Western theorists: free markets, free speech, and democratic politics. Instead, it has relied on its own unique alchemy of Leninist politics, state-guided development, and strict controls on speech and culture.
That geopolitical role reversal infuses every aspect of the Transpacific Experiment. New ties may be forged at the grassroots, but they are often colored by our sense of relative standing on the world stage. How Americans feel about their new Chinese neighbors is intimately wrapped up in our feelings about China as a rising power, as well as insecurities about the trajectory of our own national experiment in democracy. Chinese people’s perceptions of these interactions are similarly bound up in questions of national pride and insecurity. On a good day, the United States and its top companies might be looked at with admiration, as a source of inspiration for artists, entrepreneurs, and educators. On a bad day, that same country is seen as mired in steep and unsalvageable decline, an aging nation that will expend its last ounce of energy attempting to hold China down.
As Chinese investors, immigrants, and ideas make their presence felt on U.S. soil, they pose a question that challenges something deep within the American psyche: Are Americans ready for a world in which they engage with Chinese people, companies, and ideas on equal footing? Or a world in which the Chinese side has the upper hand?
Today, California is the space in which these tensions, frictions, and possible futures are taking shape. In many ways, China and California make for an odd couple. America’s most liberal state, and one of the world’s most sophisticated authoritarian regimes. A bastion of environmental protectionism, and an industrial behemoth that leads the world in carbon emissions. The free-spirited home of everything from the hippies to the Kardashians, and an ancient Confucian culture built on ritual and personal restraint.
And yet, those apparent contradictions are often what have drawn these two states into their dialectical dance. Chinese leaders see a vision for their own country’s future in California: blue skies, top universities, innovative technology, and global blockbusters. They know that if China is going to make the leap from a middle- to a high-income country, it needs to move up the global value chain, fostering technological and cultural industries. In that light, California offers both inspiration and a tremendous wealth of resources to be accessed or acquired.
For Chinese families, the stakes are less grandiose but no less important: they want clean air for their lungs, a good education for their kids, and a place to stash their life savings that is safe from the vagaries of the Chinese political system. They often don’t think of themselves as volunteer diplomats in the most pivotal international relationship of the twenty-first century, and yet circumstance and happenstance have made it so.
On the U.S. side of the equation, these same phenomena have a tendency to challenge dearly held values and pose uncomfortable questions about our own nation.
At the neighborhood level, the new Chinese arrivals are turning many American ideas about immigration on their head, confronting Californians with complicated questions about acceptance, assimilation, and citizenship. Residents of suburbs like my hometown often feel comfortable—even self-righteous—in their open-armed embrace of immigrants and refugees targeted by President Trump. They abhor “build the wall” chants and proudly decorate their lawns with signs declaring NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL. Looking back on the Chinese Exclusion era, they condemn the racist white workers who resented Chinese laborers for “stealing” their jobs.
But tweak a few of the variables and bring these issues to their own doorstep, and you might get far different reactions from these same people. What if the immigrant isn’t a poor laborer, but a rich family escaping the Beijing smog? What if the resource being competed for isn’t a working-class job, but a house in your hometown? What if, like many of the early immigrant laborers, the new arrivals have no intention to remain in the country long-term? Suddenly that comfortable moral clarity is harder to come by, forcing a closer examination of exactly what principles to hold on to and which to amend.
For California’s trademark industries—technology and culture—the rise of competitive Chinese ecosystems also challenges long-standing orthodoxy about the sources of innovation and creativity. For over half a century, California has been a global haven for personal freedoms and alternative lifestyles. During that same period, it has also dominated the world of technology and culture. That correlation—between personal freedoms, technological innovation, and cultural production—led many to believe these phenomena were inextricably woven together. A country without political freedoms could not truly innovate, and people without freedom of expression couldn’t create a thriving cultural industry. It’s a mantra woven deep into our American psyche, and one that seemed to be confirmed by the country’s successive triumphs over rivals such as the Soviet Union.
But the rise of China’s technology and movie industries is steadily peeling apart that once-solid correlation. In the process, it is challenging certain core beliefs about what makes innovation and creativity possible. Instead of putting stock in abstract personal freedoms, China is instead betting that you can build these industries up brick by brick. Throw together a critical mass of computer programmers, free-flowing capital, film sets, movie screens, and disposable income, and hope that innovation and commercial culture emerge from it. The game is far from over in these industries, but China has consistently outperformed expectations, and that surprising run of success is changing the conversation about technology and culture on both sides of the Pacific.
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