On Bad Terms
How We Talk About China Shapes—and Too Often Distorts—How We Think About It
By Josh Kerbel
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There is probably no national security topic being debated more right now than China. Are we in a new Cold War? Should we decouple? How can we best exert leverage or reduce tensions? Questions such as these, whether we realize it or not, are infused with loaded language that not only reflects, but that also—powerfully—shapes our thoughts.
Given that, it’s interesting—and troubling—how those of us engaged in this debate pay so little attention to how our own use of language influences our thinking and understanding of these same issues. Put differently, we typically and mistakenly think about language merely as a means to communicate our thoughts—not as fundamental to shaping and understanding the thoughts themselves. It’s no wonder, then, that the more we debate the challenge presented by China—without thinking carefully about the terminology we’re using—the more we seem to misperceive it.
The power of language to influence our thoughts is particularly prominent in our choice and use of metaphor. What are metaphors? (I ask only because metaphor—like Justice Potter Stewart’s observation regarding the definition of obscenity—is one of those things that most people can’t necessarily define but rather “know it when they see it.”) People often think of metaphor—if they think about it at all—as a stylistic embellishment, a means to add color or flavor to verbal communication. And while metaphor can certainly serve such stylistic purposes, it is much more than rhetorical flourish.
Metaphors are cognitive-linguistic models through which we understand one thing by viewing it in terms of another. We create them by borrowing a term from one domain (the ‘source’) and figuratively applying it to another domain (the ‘target’) in such a way that it—we hope—enhances our understanding of the issue or domain to which it is applied. The danger, however, is that a bad metaphor can distort rather than enhance our understanding.
The Power of the Framing Effect
How do our metaphors so powerfully shape our understanding? First, they do it through ubiquity. The use of metaphor is deeply ingrained in our speech and firmly rooted in our habits of mind. Note how the previous sentence employs two metaphors. Metaphors are so commonly scattered throughout our speech that we are often not even conscious of the fact that we’re speaking—and thinking—in metaphorical terms.
Next, and more directly, metaphors shape our thinking through a phenomenon called the framing effect. The framing effect is a cognitive bias—famously explored by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky—whereby how something is said—’framed’—can exert greater influence on ones thinking than what is actually said.
An excellent example of framing was demonstrated in a study that showed how people’s policy preferences shifted when crime was metaphorically characterized as a “beast” versus a “virus.” For the former, study participants opted for more punitive and aggressive policy responses. But when characterized as the latter, they opted for more curative and preventative policy options.
Despite the extensive and replicable research regarding the framing effect, many people—including many in the national security realm with whom I’ve discussed this phenomenon—discount or push back against the notion that our common metaphors can subconsciously but powerfully shape and distort their thoughts. On numerous occasions during the course of my research, national security professionals have said to me that the metaphors they employ are “just figures of speech” or “long-accepted terms.” Of course, these dismissals get at the essence of the problem—the world has changed, but in our desire to cling to comfortable if increasingly inapt metaphors, we inadvertently contribute to our misperception of those changes.
Bad Metaphors Are Distorting Our Perception of China
Although metaphors exert this power across the entire range of national security issues, nowhere are they more evident—or distortionary—than in our ongoing debate about the challenge posed by China. And there are a few in particular that stand and out and warrant special scrutiny.
At the moment, there is perhaps no metaphor more damaging to our understanding of China than the evermore ubiquitous characterization of our relationship with China as some sort of latter-day Cold War. On a cursory level the Cold War metaphor seems applicable due to a few large and obvious similarities between the Soviet Union and China. Large nation-states—check. Large, capable militaries—check. Authoritarian or totalitarian political systems cloaked in Marxist–Leninist drapery—check. But beyond these general similarities, differences quickly emerge.
Whereas the Soviet Union was predominantly a military threat, economically ‘decoupled,’ and physically contained, the same simply does not hold for China. China is a multidimensional challenge, with extraordinary power in domains (e.g., economic, political, technological, etc.) beyond military force. Additionally, China is not—and cannot be—economically ’decoupled’ (more on this metaphor later) from our, or the larger global, economy. Rather it is fully and irrevocably entangled in that economy. And finally, China is not only uncontained physically, but also virtually—a domain and distinction that didn’t even exist during the Cold War.
All told then, applying a Cold War metaphor—even if modified with the labels ’new,’ ‘next,’ ‘2.0’ and so forth—to our competition with China is highly problematic in that it encourages us to misread China as reminiscent of the Soviet Union. Worse, it also prompts us to think that the Cold War playbook that served us so well in our struggle with the Soviet Union may also be a useful guide to dealing with China, but it’s likelier to encourage us to over-militarize our approach the same way that the terribly inapt ‘war’ on drugs and ’war’ on terror metaphors did for their own respective challenges.
Another place where the Cold War metaphor is less than helpful is in its promotion of the idea that China can be thought of as a discrete entity from which we might somehow ‘decouple’ Indeed, the decoupling metaphor is perhaps the next most dangerous metaphor after the Cold War metaphor. Sure, the United States could break or weaken some of the direct ties that bind us to China. However, the fact remains that many—and perhaps most—of those ties run through other parts of the complex web of physical and virtual interconnectivity and interdependence that bind us to each other and the rest of the world. That is to say, the United States simply cannot decouple from China any more than China can decouple from us. Like it or not, we are stuck together in the sense that a clean break—precisely what decoupling implies—is impossible.
The decoupling metaphor also highlights a larger problem: it's a mechanistic term that ignores the messy, organic reality of the U.S.–China relationship. Unfortunately, our broader national security discourse is riddled with such Newtonian mechanistic metaphors. We write of ’tensions’ between nation-states. We discuss ’leverage’ in negotiations. We speculate on the ‘trajectory’ of events. And this list continues—think of terms like ’inertia,’ ‘momentum,’ ‘friction,’ ‘backlash,’ ‘pressure,’ ‘linchpins,’ ‘pivots,’ or ‘centers of gravity’ that so thoroughly pervade the literature of national security affairs.
The common thread in all the aforementioned metaphors is that they contribute to a distorted portrayal of China as some sort of discrete and mechanistic entity that can be acted upon with linear precision and predictability. Of course, the real China couldn't be more different: it is so deeply entangled with us and the world in a kind of complex organic mass that any effort to shape it is inevitably rife with nonlinear imprecision and unpredictability. In sum then, our prevailing metaphors conceptually mischaracterize China and in doing so encourage us to misperceive it as well.
Reframing the China Challenge
To remedy the mischaracterization and misperception promoted by our prevailing metaphors, we need to conceptually ’reframe’ China, which will require us to think carefully about deficiencies inherent in our default metaphors, and consciously identify and use new, more appropriate, replacements.
Some encouraging signs on this front are evident. For instance, there has been some notable criticism of Cold War framing with regard to China. There has also been an explicit shift from decoupling to ’de-risking,’ although decoupling remains all too common. While de-risking is arguably an improvement, I would actually like to see ’disentanglement’ become our preferred metaphor for discussing the reordering of our relationships with China. For one thing, this term aligns well with the enduring ’web’ metaphor that still is the universal metaphor for capturing the interconnectivity and interdependence of today’s evermore complex world. Moreover, disentanglement captures the more organic—Gordian—nature of the relationship and the difficulty, if not impossibility, of a full, clean break.
Some readers may hope to see a comprehensive list of our commonly used—but poor—metaphors mapped to preferable new—more effective—replacements. I hesitate to do that, however, because this is not just a matter of terms—but also concepts. To arrive at a better metaphor, one needs to think more deliberately and try to choose a term that better portrays the concept in question. Put differently, the core problem here is the automatic, unthinking use of language. Cognitive biases, like the framing effect, can only be countered via conscious and reflective thought—awareness is not enough. Simply providing a list of alternatives would not promote—and might well discourage—such deliberate thought.
That said, I do have a couple of suggestions as to the general nature of new metaphors that might truly help us to better grasp the immensely complex challenge that is China. First, our new metaphors should be more organic, not mechanistic, drawn from domains such as biology, ecology, meteorology, and epidemiology. Again, the China challenge is not a mechanical engineering problem to be definitively ‘solved’ but rather an organic issue that must be ‘managed.’ As such, metaphors drawn from similarly organic source domains are more apt to reflect that reality. Second, our new metaphors should also be less militaristic—’war’ should be used very judiciously. War metaphors—recall the ’war’ on drugs and the ’war’ terror metaphors mentioned earlier—have a problematic history of promoting simplistically aggressive policies towards complex challenges that realistically demand much broader and more nuanced perspectives and approaches.
It’s worth repeating that the linguistic challenges described herein are not at all limited to our China debate. Our poor metaphorical habits and choices infuse every aspect of our larger national security discourse. Consequently, we need to think about this issue comprehensively. Still, given the prominence of the China challenge at this moment, our China debate is not a bad place to start.
Josh Kerbel is a professor of practice and member of the research faculty at the National Intelligence University—a component of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that is the US Intelligence Community’s only accredited and degree-granting education/research organization. His research at NIU explores the increasingly complex security environment and the associated intelligence challenges. Prior to joining NIU, he held senior analytical positions at DIA, ODNI (including the NIC), the Navy staff, CIA, and ONI. His writings on the intersections of government (especially intelligence) and complexity have been published in Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, Studies in Intelligence, Slate, The National Interest, The Hill, War on the Rocks, Defense One, Parameters, and other outlets. Mr. Kerbel has degrees from the George Washington University and the London School of Economics as well as professional certifications from the Naval War College and the Naval Postgraduate School. More recently he was a post-graduate fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The views presented here are his alone.
“Fig. 22. Dissection by sunlight of a block of ice and its crystalline structure shown.” (Edwin D. Babbitt).
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