US-China Zigzag: Semantic Shifts in US Congress on Policy towards China & Taiwan

• In Event: Elites and Foreign Policymaking in the US

Abstract

The relationship between the United States (US), the Republic of China (ROC), and the People's Republic of China (PRC) is a classic example of the modern hegemon's zigzag shifts in international policy. This article compares changes in political discourse to changes in US policy toward the "Two Chinas." In this article, the author looks at how the US addressed different Chinese entities at different times, using a specially curated corpus of US congressional speeches and a Word2vec model to study semantic shifts.
The findings paint a complicated picture of the US Congress's diachronic patterns, indicating shifts in US policy. Historical evidence and computational methods have indicated semantic shifts in the PRC and ROC images in American political discourse. The article draws three main conclusions from them. The first is a set of eight parochial empirical conclusions derived from semantic shifts, such as how the PRC's image as a communist regime weakens and identifies the rise of the economic point of view toward it. Furthermore, the author provides evidence for the ability to predict future policy changes based solely on political discourse, as demonstrated by historical-based semantic shifts, which can occur even before policy changes are announced. Finally, there is substantial evidence that the US Congress has semantically recognized the ROC as the one-China over the last thirty years, rather than the PRC, which has official US recognition. Therefore, policy makers and scholars as one could utilize this study for fine-tuning their work regarding each of the 8 semantic shifts, and the broad US One-China framework.

Author

• Jonathan Elkobi, Yale University