Preparing for US Travel: A Journalist’s Phone Scrub Reflects Broader US-China Tensions

Before boarding my flight to Boston late last month, I spent the better part of three days doing something I never imagined I would do in more than 30 years of covering China: scrubbing my phone. Old emails, screenshots, WeChat threads that might be read the wrong way, anything that could be misconstrued in an airport interview room – all deleted, just in case.

I was not being paranoid. I was following advice now routinely passed among Chinese travellers to the United States: carry a clean phone, or better yet, a burner. American officials, academics and business travellers headed into China have long been told the same thing. Two sets of citizens, one shared instinct – that what is on your phone could get you into trouble on the other side.

Beginning this month, I take up a one-year appointment as a senior visiting scholar at the Rajawali Foundation Institute for Asia at the Harvard Kennedy School. My purpose is straightforward to state and harder to fulfil: to sit down with American thought leaders across the political spectrum and ask them where they think this relationship is headed, and whether conflict is as inevitable as it now appears.

Layered on top were structural anxieties. In Washington, there is the perceived erosion of American primacy in manufacturing and superpower status. In Beijing, there is a mirror-image worry: that a declining but still-dominant America, unwilling to accept the reality of a rising China, is bent on containing its development, through tariffs, technology export controls and alliances built for that purpose.