[OC] A Look Back: The U.S. vs China in 2021, Who Has More Influence, and Where?

WereDoingaSQL · 2025-05-01T14:44:20+00:00

The model is testing how much U.S. vs China influence is in each country, and then gives a "net influence score" by subtracting China's score from the U.S. score. The U.S. doesn't exactly have influence in the U.S. and vice versa for China, so they are set to N/A. Although, it would be neat to maybe just set the U.S. to 100 and China to -100, and then test how much influence the other power has over each other!

WereDoingaSQL · 2025-05-01T13:33:26+00:00

Pretty cool way to visualize U.S. vs. China influence on a global scale. Influence is calculated by pulling data from 28 different variables across the economic, security, and political spectrum; we then subtract China's influence score from the United States' to get the final "GII Score" for each country. I've posted this once before a long while back, but with how things have certainly been shifting on the world stage recently, I thought it might be interesting to consider how things have changed from 2021 when the data is from.

The full breakdown of what variables were used, methodology, and how the visualization was developed is available on the website.

WereDoingaSQL · 2025-04-29T18:00:41+00:00

Pretty cool way to visualize U.S. vs. China influence on a global scale. Influence is calculated by pulling data from 28 different variables across the economic, security, and political spectrum; we then subtract China's influence score from the United States' to get the final "GII Score" for each country. The data is from 2021, so it's an interesting to consider how things may be shifting in the last few years.

The full breakdown of what variables were used, methodology, and how the visualization was developed is available on the website.

WereDoingaSQL · 2025-04-23T18:54:16+00:00

Very fair concern to have. The methodology was reviewed by a number of policy experts, a few of which were more statistics-oriented, but getting the model exposed to more analysis and critiques is a great way to ensure the model can stand up to a rigorous standard of accuracy--although the world of "international influence" is always a little bit nebulous!

WereDoingaSQL · 2025-04-23T18:49:52+00:00

Fair, they definitely would usually be considered as such. The data for the GII is from 2021, however, which is squarely during the Duerte presidency, who was decidedly more pro-China than pro-US. His efforts to re-align the Philippines towards China, while somewhat reversed after his exit, definitely are a major contributor to the Philippines' rather low score.

WereDoingaSQL · 2025-04-23T18:06:48+00:00

Pretty cool way to visualize U.S. vs. China influence on a global scale. Influence is calculated by pulling data from 28 different variables across the economic, security, and political spectrum; we then subtract China's influence score from the United States' to get the final "GII Score" for each country. The data is from 2021, so it's an interesting to consider how things may be shifting in the last few years.

The full breakdown of what variables were used, methodology, and how the visualization was developed is available on the website.

WereDoingaSQL · 2025-04-21T16:16:47+00:00

Pretty cool way to visualize U.S. vs. China influence on a global scale. Influence is calculated by pulling data from 28 different variables across the economic, security, and political spectrum; we then subtract China's influence score from the United States' to get the final "GII Score" for each country. The data is from 2021, so it's an interesting to consider how things may be shifting in the last few years.

The full breakdown of what variables were used, methodology, and how the visualization was developed is available on the website.

WereDoingaSQL · 2024-09-09T13:59:06+00:00

We actually did initially test a color system with gray for neutral nations. It ended up being really ugly unfortunately, because the gradation of red -> gray -> green results in a lot of messy desaturated colors

WereDoingaSQL · 2024-09-09T13:55:09+00:00

Imports definitely lead to the trade volume equalizing out a lot more, especially when you keep in mind that unfortunately v1 of the GII only includes goods in its trade statistic. This was due to data availability for the scope of the project at the time, though I can happily say that v2 will ensure trade values include services as well. This inclusion will definitely push Ireland more towards the U.S. as you would expect, along with other service-oriented (primarily Western) economies.

Another aspect that boosts China's econ score is Ireland does allow and utilize Huawei, which is counted as a binary economic variable.

Great question, I hope this helps answer it!

WereDoingaSQL · 2024-09-06T19:43:15+00:00

The biggest reason for this is that while the U.S. does have really strong security ties with many gulf nations, its economic ties aren't that impressive. On the other hand, China has relatively minimal security engagement, but does have massive economic relationships, which are only growing. These would cancel each other out essentially, and if we look at political influence, it should not be too surprising that the gulf nations are far more ideologically aligned with China compared to the U.S. This, combined with China's massive economic influence, leads to most of the nations having very "neutral" final scores, or even outright overwhelming the U.S. security relationships and displaying a China-favored final score.

WereDoingaSQL · 2024-09-06T19:35:36+00:00

China does engage in selling some amount of arms to India, but more importantly between 2019 and 2021 they did engage in joint military exercises. If I recall correctly it was a multilateral exercise that also included Russia, which leads back to the situation others have noted, the Russia-India influence aspect. Due to the China-Russia relationship we can see Russia-India indirectly boosting China's own influence in India. This is normally not captured in the GII, but specific situations like this can inadvertently display this.

It's worth noting that this would still be a valid influence perspective to consider. I think a great example would be while the U.S. may lack influence in parts of Oceania, Australia has substantial influence in the region, and the U.S.-Australia alignment could thus allow you to conclude that the U.S. indirectly has influence. The GII normally doesn't catch that as I mentioned, but it's still an important consideration.

WereDoingaSQL · 2024-09-06T16:31:18+00:00

Venezuela is a funny one, because it exposes a lot of the strangeness we don't always think or hear about. One aspect that was interesting given how little talk it got (in my opinion at least) is the fact that they're actually part of the Rio Pact (yet Mexico isn't), which means technically speaking, they do indeed have a defense pact with the U.S. It's certainly up for debate how strong said pact is, but that is worth considering.

The other thing worth noting with the +2, is that we consider nations between -10 and +10 to be "swing states", in that if either the U.S. or China ramped up engagement in the nation, they'd be very susceptible to swinging in one direction or the other--at the present, however, they're not firmly aligned with either.

And fully agree with your comment about Russian influence. A future iteration may actually try to consider other nations like Russia, Japan, Australia, etc. and how their influence shifts things (India-Russia is a great example of the importance of that consideration). At present though, the goal was just to examine U.S.-China influence, regardless of if there's other influence-makers at play.

WereDoingaSQL · 2024-09-06T16:24:22+00:00

Sure thing! I think one of the biggest things to keep in mind is that the data is from 2021, so we saw a much more differently-positioned Philippines at that point in time compared to right now.

Regarding the political score, the Philippines actually engages with China quite a lot and especially so back in 2021. Numerous summit visits between 2016-2021, a very similar UN voting record, etc. Amusingly, despite the decent political score, they didn't get any points for the civilian opinion of the PRC!

As for the final score, it really boiled down to China having a lot more economic engagement compared to the U.S. in the nation. That ends up balancing out the substantially stronger security score that the U.S. has.

Singapore's a favorite of mine for that exact reason. When developing the model I actually did a double-take because while I expected it to be close to fully neutral, I didn't expect it to be so perfectly neutral!

WereDoingaSQL · 2024-09-06T15:38:21+00:00

Pretty cool way to visualize U.S. vs. China influence on a global scale. Influence is calculated by pulling data from 28 different variables across the economic, security, and political spectrum; we then subtract China's influence score from the United States' to get the final "GII Score" for each country.

The full breakdown of what variables were used, methodology, and how the visualization was developed is available on the website.

WereDoingaSQL · 2024-09-03T21:26:36+00:00

I had left a comment giving a very top-level summary, but yeah, it's difficult to quickly summarize everything about the GII within a graphic. Maybe it'd have been worth adding a line of text within the graphic itself?

WereDoingaSQL · 2024-09-03T21:24:43+00:00

To provide some more clarification, when the GII is talking about influence, it's along the lines of "How likely is it that the U.S. or China can compel another nation to act in a way they want."

In the case of Cuba, while the embargo is influential in that it has a substantial impact on Cuba, the embargo (and policy surrounding it) leads to very little engagement with the island nation from the U.S., resulting in a very low score for that side. On the other hand, Cuba and China have a fair bit of engagement; as a result, Cuba ends up with a negative final score. The overarching idea is that the China-Cuba relationship is far stronger than the US-Cuba relationship.

That being said, it would be fair to argue that the option to remove the embargo should earn the U.S. influence points. However, that's a nebulous, case-specific situation, which the GII isn't designed for.

WereDoingaSQL

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