2 superpowers, 1 playbook: Why Chinese and US bureaucrats think and act alike |
The year 2025 has not been a great one for U.S.-Chinese relations. Tit-for-tat tariffs and the scramble over rare earth elements has dampened economic relations between the world’s two leading economies. Meanwhile, territorial disputes between China and American allies in the Indo-Pacific region have further deepened the intensifying military rivalry.
This rift has often been portrayed as a clash of opposing ideological systems: democracy versus autocracy; economic liberalism versus state-led growth; and individualism versus collectivism.
But such framing relies on a top-down look at the two countries premised on statements and claims of powerful leaders. What it obscures is that both superpowers are administered by the same kind of professionals: career bureaucrats.
We are an international team of researchers investigating bureaucratic preferences and behavior. Earlier this year, we hosted a two-day workshop with participants from China, the United States and other countries to compare bureaucratic agencies’ responses to global challenges.
Our research and that of others shows that, despite the ideological standoff at the leadership level, officials in China and the U.S. are shaped by comparable incentives and dynamics that lead them to act in surprisingly similar ways. In other words, when it comes to the women and men who carry out the actual work of government – from drafting regulation to enforcing compliance – China and the U.S. aren’t really that different.
That’s not to suggest there aren’t differences in aspects of China’s and the U.S.’s bureaucratic base.
China’s system is more centralized, with a larger civil service of around 8 million employees as of 2024. The U.S. bureaucracy is more decentralized across federal, state and local levels and employs fewer bureaucrats, with around 3 million federal employees in 2024.
Still, comparative research on bureaucracies around the world shows that civil servants act similarly when confronted with complex problems, regardless of political system or policy........