Under Chinese President Xi Jinping’s leadership, especially since his third term, maintaining and expanding local exchanges has become a priority in Beijing’s U.S. policy. Recent literature suggests that Xi and PRC scholars increasingly view China-U.S. subnational engagement as an asset that shapes perceptions and attitudes while incentivizing stable relations from the bottom up, during a strategic era defined by the prioritization of both de-risking and balancing competition with cooperation.
For example, in a November 2022 article published in Contemporary American Review titled “Historical Development and Internal Logic of China-U.S. City Diplomacy,” Renmin University professor Diao Daming noted that city diplomacy “helps participants at all levels develop a positive or at least pragmatic attitude towards each other.” He wrote:
In fact, many U.S. political figures who serve as presidents, members of Congress, federal government officials, and governors have local political experiences. If they come into contact with China-U.S. city-level activities during their time in local politics, it may form a key early molding of their views on China and China-U.S. relations, thereby influencing their future attitudes toward China. At the same time, in the process of carrying out city diplomacy, ordinary American people can objectively understand and get to know China, and local enterprises can develop trade with China on the sister-city platform. All these are of certain positive significance to the development of China-U.S. relations and the formation of a good domestic public opinion base toward China.
In a May 2023 interview on Chinese diplomacy and China-U.S. relations with Phoenix TV, Wang Yizhou, associate dean of Peking University’s School of International Studies, expressed similar views. He stressed the need to “oppose and constrain the [U.S.] policy of suppression, exclusion, and decoupling toward China adopted by those at the federal level, including many members of Congress,” while suggesting that China should not take a “tit-for-tat and uniform approach toward the entire nation-state, all sectors of society, cultural and educational spheres, as well as different localities, states, and towns.”
Wang elaborated: “Screening and countering the enemies requires precise targeting and dynamic adjustment. When the other side makes adjustments and concessions, and new points of compromise become available, it would then be possible to turn an enemy into a friend.”
Diao and Wang’s comments came not long after the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center issued a bulletin in July 2022 warning U.S. state and local leaders about escalating PRC subnational influence operations. The U.S. intelligence community noted in its annual threat assessment in February 2023 that “Beijing has adjusted by redoubling its efforts to build influence at the state and local level to shift U.S. policy in China’s favor because of Beijing’s belief that local officials are more pliable than their federal counterparts.”
In October 2023, speaking about the significance of California governor Gavin Newsom’s China visit, Gao Lingyun of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) told Global Times: “There may be more ideological influence within the federal government, but at the local level, economic and trade cooperation carries more weight.” CASS research fellow Lü Xiang noted that Newsom “will definitely have the opportunity to offer some constructive suggestions” on China-U.S. relations to President Joe Biden – who was set to host Xi at the APEC Summit in November 2023.
In November 2023, Xi himself began frequently stressing the importance of expanding local engagements and people-to-people exchanges. The Foreign Ministry-affiliated Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC) named expanding sister-city cooperation, promoting mutual development, confronting global challenges including climate change, and strengthening exchanges among young people as 2024’s priorities. It has since hosted or coordinated a series of events and delegations, such as a Roundtable on China-U.S. Subnational Legislatures Cooperation attended by the leaders of Delaware, Georgia, Alabama, and California state legislatures, among others, in Nanjing.
The Biden administration has largely supported these exchanges. In February 2024, a State Department spokesperson told National Review that the United States “is realistic and careful about each interaction with Chinese Communist Party-affiliated organizations, including CPAFFC,” noting: “Conducting diplomacy in the PRC means we have to talk to the CCP in order to advance U.S. interests. We believe it is better to engage so we know what organizations like CPAFFC are doing and who in the United States they are talking to.”
This statement came a year and a half after the administration elevated paradiplomacy’s role in U.S. foreign policy through formal institutionalization, as reflected in the State Department’s launch of its first Subnational Diplomacy Unit in October 2022.
While many U.S. subnational actors have also reciprocated in reconnecting with their PRC counterparts, a growing number of governors and state legislators have been proposing and enacting an unprecedented volume of substantive measures aimed at mitigating risks from PRC behavior, predominantly citing security concerns as justification, to fill a perceived policy vacuum. As Utah state representative Candice Pierucci (R) stated in February 2024: “National security … is more and more becoming a state’s issue. And more and more of us as states are feeling the need to step forward and address this concern, to help protect our citizens, individual privacy and data, businesses and our land as a state.”
This analysis series examines these latest efforts by presenting notable trends from three original datasets – 167 China-related excerpts identified in 941 state of the state addresses delivered by U.S. governors from 2005 to 2024, as well as 334 China-related measures introduced in 50 U.S. state legislatures in 2023 and over 270 China-related measures proposed in 43 U.S. state legislatures in 2024, systematically coded across 12 variables (including month introduced; status; sponsor partisanship; originating chamber passage vote partisanship; opposite chamber passage vote partisanship; impactfulness; sentiment; China specificity; primary subject, primary issue area(s), primary topic(s) addressed; and volume per state), supplemented by illustrative examples of China-related campaign rhetoric employed by candidates in 13 U.S. gubernatorial races from 2022 to 2024 and discussions of dynamics behind these measures, such as drivers, correlations with federal actions, bilateral events, and among states.
Acknowledgements: This research was conducted with support from the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Templeton Fellowship. I am grateful to Prof. Jacques deLisle, Dr. Kyle Jaros, Dr. Sara Newland, Dr. Matthew Erie, Dr. Christopher Carothers, Prof. Ryan Scoville, Connor Fiddler, and an anonymous reviewer for their feedback during the research process and/or on earlier drafts. All errors are my own.