The Construction of US-China Strategic Competition: A LLM-Advanced Analysis

That US-China relations have turned competitive is widely agreed; when the turn came, and what drives Beijing's adversarial posture toward Washington, are not. Classifying more than 100,000 Chinese and US documents from 2001 to 2025 with a Large Language Model (Google Gemini), we trace each side's characterization of the other at daily frequency. The US-China rivalry, we find, crystallized sequentially rather than simultaneously. American uncertainty about Chinese intentions eroded steadily as the conviction that China is a competitor or a revisionist took hold. Washington's discourse turned durably adversarial in March 2018; Beijing reciprocated in May 2019, and with that mutual turn a new Cold War in US-China relations took shape. Time-series modeling then shows that none of Beijing's own self-perception narratives—nationalist, capability, or interest—predicts its subsequent adversity toward the US. Instead, it is prior confrontational US statements that harden Chinese posture.