Institutional agenda of Chinese international relations. Analysis of the official text about the trade war with the United States

Abstract

What is China's institutional agenda in the trade war with the United States? This research begins by presenting its theory for an institutional analysis of China and secondly an agenda-based approach to interpret China's institutional approach to international relations. In particular, the trade war with the United States is studied by examining the Chinese government's official document on the subject presented in September 2018. Named-entity recognition and text mining techniques, along with content analysis, have led two types of findings. On the one hand, the conflict is characterized within the categories of the New Institutional Economy and deconstructed by the Chinese rhetoric with a wide range of information sources that explain other possible contexts of action for commercial institutions. On the other hand, China presents a proactive resolution to the conflict by proposing economic (and not just business) cooperation processes with political enforcement and to produce particularity, dynamism and coordination, based on the differences between the two countries.