US-China Barometer 2021

John Graham & Ben Leffel

The dual traumas of 2020 shook the global order, sealing fates and fortunes within the world’s two largest economies and beyond. The final year of the U.S. Trump administration and its adversarial relations with China was rocked by the COVID-19 pandemic, for which China is the known origin of the outbreak. The beginning of the Biden administration draws curiosity about how U.S.-China relations will be rebuilt. Human rights abuses of different sorts and severity continue in both countries, with political imprisonment, abuse of ethnic Uighurs and censorship in China, and with police violence, caged immigrants and poverty in the U.S. Both countries continue to phase out fossil fuels for renewable energy to fight the building climate crisis. Our Harvard Business Review article using previous U.S.-China Barometer data continues to be relevant, as our data-driven approach helps show that trade is not a zero-sum game, and interdependencies can help or hurt both countries.  

 

Our 2021 Barometer is a statistical compendium of U.S.-China relations that is divided into two parts: Comparisons, which observes differences between both countries along a range of attributes, and Interactions, which examines the ways and extent to which both countries are connected to one another. The “Notes” section attached to each slide contains detailed commentary.

 

The 2021 Barometer shows several negative and mixed trends:

1. China has fiscally re-centralized since Xi Jinping’s assumption of the presidency, with the central government claiming more tax revenue than provincial and local governments, a reversal of the prior trend.
2. Both the U.S. and China declined in the 2020 Environmental Performance Index.
3. For 2020, China’s more stringent COVID-19 policy response corresponded to lower case-fatality ratios, while the U.S. led the world in pandemic deaths during that period.
4. In 2020 overall trade declined with a huge drop in exports from China. We do see a marginal increase in exports from the U.S. to and a decrease in the U.S. trade deficit.
5. In 2020 unemployment rates in both countries exploded.
6. Equitable income distribution also fell during the latest period.
7. The 2025 population pyramids predict domestic disruptions far into the current decade for both countries.
8. The response to COVID-19 was well managed in China and poorly so in the U.S. The 2020 statistics for life expectancy fell to its lowest level in the 21^st century, due primarily to COVID-19, the continuing opioid epidemic, and an uptick in homicides.
9. Military spending reached historic heights in the U.S. but marginally declined in China.
10. The value of the Chinese yuan has fallen to its lowest level in five years.
11. The U.S. carbon footprint is moving up again while China’s remains stable, both at record heights.
12. China is rated marginally less corrupt, but the U.S. is more corrupt than ever.
13. Human rights declined in both countries, and political rights in the U.S. declined.
14. Both nations have given up on WTO mediation of trade disputes.
15. Americans’ public opinion of China has plummeted, and China stopped responding to the PEW Research study of Chinese public opinion of the U.S.
16. Chinese travel to the United States has faltered dramatically.

 

The 2021 Barometer also shows positive trends:

1. Electricity generation in both countries continues to use more renewable sources and less fossil fuel sources.
2. China leads the world in ISO 14001 (Environmental management) certifications.
3. Large corporations in both countries continue to disclose climate change mitigation performance, though they are still outnumbered by non-disclosing high-polluting firms.
4. The steep decline in China’s FDI in the United States seems to have leveled off.
5. Joint U.S. Patent awards to invention teams including both American and Chinese citizens have resumed their healthy growth, and now total over 21,000 in this century. Intellectual piracy rates also continued their downward trend in both countries during the most recent period reported.
6. While COVID-19 has crushed international trade worldwide, U.S. exports of goods to China have remained resilient.

 

We deliver the Barometer as a 51-slide power-point presentation with interpretive notes and the data sets imbedded (right click then choose “edit data”). Users and viewers are most welcome to adapt the presentation to their own purposes, in exchange we ask that you do not change the original data. We expect and seek your criticism so that we might improve the Barometer in future years. Feel free to send comments to Ben Leffel at bleffel@uci.edu  (Twitter: @BenjaminJLeffel) or John L. Graham at jgraham@uci.edu

 

John L. Graham & Ben Leffel, July 28, 2021