The limitations of strategic narratives: The Sino-American struggle over the meaning of COVID-19

Abstract

Recent research has explored how the Sino-American narrative struggle around COVID-19 might affect power shift dynamics and world order. An underlying assumption is that states craft strategic narratives in attempts to gain international support for their understandings of reality. This article evaluates such claims taking a mixed-methods approach. It analyzes American and Chinese strategic narratives about the pandemic, and their global diffusion and resonance in regional states that are important to the U.S.-led world order: Australia, India, South Korea, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. While the article confirms that strategic narratives remain a highly popular policy instrument, it argues that their efficacy appears limited. Overall, the five states in question either ignored the Sino-American narrative power battle by disseminating their own strategic narratives, or they engaged in "narrative hedging." Moreover, even China's narrative entrepreneurship was enabled and constrained by pre-existing master narratives integral to the current U.S.led world order.KEYWORDS China; COVID-19; power shift; strategic narratives; United States; world order As COVID-19 jolted the world in early 2020, various actors immediately began to spin narratives around it. They proposed competing accounts of causality, of heroes and villains, and of measures that ought to be adopted based on the lessons they drew. In this context, numerous references were made to an "infodemic," and to a narrative power struggle, in particular between the world's two most powerful states-the United States and China. Observers suggested that the narrative power struggle over the meaning of the pandemic could have implications for the future of world order and the ostensibly ongoing power shift from the United States to

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