Top Down vs. Bottom Up: Reconsidering the Role of Rhetoric in Sino-American Relations

The Sino-American relationship navigates the politics between two of the most influential nations on the world stage today. Previous research clearly establishes that political rhetoric and public opinion are explicitly tied; a bottom-up approach involving public opinion driving political rhetoric and a top-down approach involving political rhetoric driving public opinion within the field of politics are frequently described to show this link. Is it the bottom-up approach or top-down approach in each the United States and People’s Republic of China that drives the relationship between the two nations? This paper answers this question through a comprehensive Quantitative Content Analysis analyzing textual evidence by Chinese and American politicians between 2008-2018, scoring them on a Likert scale from -3 to +3 to quantify this information. Public opinion surveys and data from Pew Research Center were also used to overlay onto the rhetoric scores in order to identify trends in the relationship. For the United States, research suggests that political rhetoric significantly affects public opinion in a top-down relationship. For China, evidence supports that a bottom-up relationship is not engaged, but is insufficient to conclude that a top-down approach is employed. This further implies that communication between politicians of both nations are key to the successful development of current U.S.-China relations.