On the evening of December 22, 2025, the Institute of International and Strategic Studies (IISS), Peking University (PKU) successfully held the 94th session of its "North Pavilion Seminar" lecture series, themed “Fear and Anger in Great Power Competition — An Affective Analysis of the 'Anxiety Spiral' in Chinese and American Media Narratives.” The lecture was delivered by Pang Xun, Professor at the School of International Studies (SIS), PKU, and Director of the PKU Analytics Lab for Global Risk Politics. The session was moderated by Gui Yongtao, Vice President of IISS, PKU and was attended by over 60 faculty members and students from inside and outside the university.

Prof. Pang noted that contemporary great-power competition is typically interpreted through the lens of the traditional security dilemma, but the “affective turn” in international relations research offers a fresh perspective: emotions are not mere “noise” in foreign policy, but important signals through which interstate interaction can be observed and understood. She argued that fear and anger, by shaping perceptions of uncertainty and trust, are continuously and interactively amplified in China-U.S. relations, intensifying both sides' sense of insecurity through an “affective spiral.” She contended that anger tends to be associated with morality, identity, and dignity, it can motivate action and reduce the sense of uncertainty, but may manifest as more aggressive behavior, in turn provoking deeper fear in the other party.

Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of the security dilemma and political psychology, and applying computational text analysis to China-U.S. media narratives from 2016 to 2023, Prof. Pang presented her research findings. She found out that China-U.S. media narratives exhibit a pronounced trend of affective polarization, with fear and anger constituting the dominant tone. The study shows that China's sense of insecurity rose markedly after 2019, manifesting as more persistent and concentrated anxiety. On certain issues, this affective interaction takes the form of a mutually reinforcing spiral mechanism and may drive the spillover of insecurity from high politics into other issue areas — thereby increasing the risk of irrational interaction in the bilateral relationship and posing a long-term challenge to strategic mutual trust. These findings offer important insights for future efforts to reflect, from the perspective of “affective governance,” on how to mitigate the accumulation and escalation of negative affect.

During the interactive session, Prof. Pang engaged in in-depth discussion with faculty and students present at the lecture on topics including the representativeness of media data samples, differences in the media ecosystems of the two countries, big data web scraping methods, and the relationship between emotions and policy transformation. She also encouraged young scholars not only to attend to the contest of material power in their research, but also to recognize collective emotion as an important driver of change in international relations. (Contributed by Xiong Zhuohuan)

Editor: Li Fangqi    Photographer: Zheng Huaizhou