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Edward Wong, Keith Bradsher and Alan Rappeport, Bradsher is the Pulitzer Prize-winning Beijing bureau chief and Rappeport is an economic policy reporter at The New York Times, “Biden Bets High-Level Diplomacy Can Cool Fiery Relations With China," No Publication, 7-10-2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/10/us/politics/biden-china-diplomacy.html-- 嘉玮

Both the Biden administration and Chinese officials are bracing for domestic U.S. politics to add to strains next year. Republican and Democratic candidates in the 2024 elections are expected to try to outperform one another in hawkish rhetoric on China. U.S. officials say the trips this summer are intended to give the two governments a chance to have frank conversations about the relationship before the political campaigning heats up.

Robert D. Blackwill, "Policy Prescriptions for U.S.-China Relations," Council on Foreign Relations, 01-09-2023, https://www.cfr.org/blog/policy-prescriptions-us-china-relations-- 嘉玮

In any case, there are specific and practical policy prescriptions regarding the U.S.-China relationship that could help rebuild trust and reduce tensions.

At the very beginning of this essay, boldly titled “China’s Unpeaceful Rise,” John Mearsheimer, a world-renowned IR scholar, pessimistically predicts the consequences of China’s rise. Mearsheimer’s claim that China’s rise will be “unpeaceful” is clearly in antithesis to the Chinese government’s promise of a “peaceful rise.” In a typical example of the latter, Zheng, a former Chinese official and policy advisor, assures the outside world that “China does not seek hegemony or predominance in world affairs,” and that “China’s development depends on world peace— a peace that its development will in turn reinforce.” 41 People are thus faced with two opposing scenarios for IR in East Asia. Which should one believe? A poststructuralist reading of the above extract suggests that Mearsheimer articulates the China threat theory through the scientific mode of representation. First, there is a process of structural incorporation, whereby the subject of China serves the broader interests of academic enquiry. In short, although this is a serious issue of “hard” security, it is presented as a research topic. The author does not mention the China threat directly in the essay, and his argument develops in a fairly objective tone. Indeed, Mearsheimer emphasizes at the outset the need for a “theory of international politics” that explains the behavior of rising great powers when one tries to “predict” the future of world politics.42 Therefore, the issue of China’s rise and its consequences is fashioned as an academic subject rather than an internationally current topic of passionate debate.

In the scientific mode, the China threat is securitized via “scientific” reasoning. In this regard, the referent object is the national security of the United States, the world’s single remaining superpower and its allies. The subject or audience comprises the intellectual elites and, more important, policy makers of the United States and its allies. The securitizers are IR academics and policy analysts, represented in the above extract by Mearsheimer. From the poststructuralist perspective, these agents perform securitization acts by formulating theories, predicting inevitable outcomes, and advocating policy options. As a result, the distinction between theory and practice disappears at this point. To ensure that the issue of the China threat is situated in the relevant epistemic terrain, the proper language must be adopted for academic debate on the existence and nature of the threat posed by China. Mearsheimer thus claims that his argument is based on a “theory” of rising great powers and the effects of their rise on international politics. As students of international politics will immediately recognize, this “theory” is the “offensive” variant of the realist IR tradition, well documented in Mearsheimer’s 2001 book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. 43

Moreover, the quantitative data reveal that this narrative shift has had less to do with the growing capabilities of Russia/China than their ultimate goal to promote a new global architecture based upon multipolarity. The ability of Russia’s and China’s nuclear programs to end the physical existence of the U.S. has remained virtually the same since the end of the Cold War, and while these states have begun closing the military and technical gap between themselves and the U.S., this new geopolitical narrative more closely corresponds to a notable rise in references to their intentions, rather than capabilities. This is seen most clearly by the fact that Russia’s more overt challenge has resulted in it being singled out as the more significant threat over China, which, based upon raw current and future capabilities, is objectively a far larger danger. This raises important theoretical questions about threat perceptions and securitization processes which seemingly have more to do with perceptions about current and future aggressiveness than capabilities. This invites further study.

Finally, LeGreco and Tracy (2009) noted that an equally important aspect of discourse/narrative tracing is to track what is not said. There was little acknowledgment from the American side that it had a substantive hand in precipitating these changes by either promoting a security dilemma between itself, on the one hand, and China/Russia, on the other, or that it has engaged in a grand strategy which has led to overextension and imperial decline. Therefore, according to this (self-)limited understanding on Washington’s part, there appears little that it can do to ameliorate the situation, and no course correction is seen as necessary except for confronting these states when their actions run contrary to U.S. interests. If the pattern leading up to the 2019 threat assessment is any indication, we are likely to see a closer alignment between this intensified threat narrative and a reinvigorated mission to preserve the status quo, without any self-awareness that this policy may be self-defeating. America appears to be firmly in the “’Try Harder!’” phase of strategic thinking, to use Legro’s (2005, 37) formulation. This is reflected in the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS), which appears to double down on the strategy of pursuing American primacy, even to the point of direct confrontation (Clarke and Ricketts 2017). By doing so, these officials are neither preparing American foreign policy nor its citizens for a revised geopolitical culture better suited to ensure a soft-landing of unipolarity. Consequently, it is likely that the United States “won’t see [the end] coming until it’s too late,” as Schweller (2011) speculated. Thus, a full accounting of why this broader structural change is occurring will likely elude American policymakers for the foreseeable future, leading to an even weaker United States and more fraught great power relations as the defining features of the international system and America’s place within it.

China's military and economic strengths are far greater today than at any point in the history of Sino-US relations. Yet, the ‘threat’ it presents to American security is no less a social construction than in the past. The modern day proliferation of popular and academic ‘China threat’ literatures in particular is reflective of the increasingly widespread conviction that a ‘rising’ China inevitably constitutes a real or potential danger.Footnote97 Robert Kaplan explains that ‘the American military contest with China in the Pacific will define the twenty first century’.Footnote98 He does not question if or even when China might become a threat. He emphasises its inevitability. Babbin and Timperlake provide a fictional narrative of future Sino-American tensions in which, among other things, China uses cyber warfare to shut down American defence systems. The hostile scenario they present, it is argued, ‘could easily become fact … The Verdict: China means war.’Footnote99 Certainly, and as has been the case throughout history, China is not uniformly perceived in these terms. Among a significant proportion of the American population, however, the China ‘threat’ is an accepted and relatively unproblematic phenomenon.

China now has the world's largest population, the fastest growing economy, the largest army, the largest middle class, a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, a manned space program and a nuclear arsenal.Footnote100 Yet, all of these things do not necessarily make China a threat. Countries which share variations of these, notably the possession of nuclear weapons, a permanent presence in the Security Council and significant standing armies are not perceived in this way. Indeed, and as Director Clapper revealed in the Senate in early 2011, states like Russia with far greater stockpiles of nuclear weapons and significant additional military hardware can be viewed in less threatening terms, even when capability is cited as the critical factor.Footnote101 Furthermore, the PRC has had a large population and a substantial army since its founding in 1949, nuclear weapons since 1964 and a seat on the Security Council since 1971 without consistently being interpreted as a threat. Accordingly, forces additional to those of China's capabilities must still be implicated in understandings about the dangers it is said to present.

The study of narratives has grown in recent years and especially around narratives focusing on national security.1 The research focus on threat inflation has increased with respect to the decisions around military action. Much of the discussion around narrative creation and narrative dominance pertains to knowledge, the sharing of knowledge, and the perception of shared knowledge. President James Madison famously stated, the management of foreign relations appears to be the most susceptible of abuse, of all the trusts committed to a Government, because they can be concealed or disclosed, or disclosed in such parts and at such times as will best suit particular views; and because the body of the people are less capable of judging and are more under the influence of prejudices, on that branch of their affairs, than of any other.2 Thus, how a government or set of actors controls the dispensing of such knowledge in the form of threat narratives is critically important. Mona Baker has described narratives as “stories we tell ourselves and others about the world(s) in which we live...[which] provide our main interface with the world.”3 A narrative is a collective statement made up of a series of overt statements and intimations around a topic. These moments align to form a collective discourse that paints a story. Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen noted that the orientation around a topic based on the narrative could affect the various types of policy solutions. For example, if security narratives on Cuba were orientated around disarmament as opposed to the benefits of a market economy, the resulting policy solutions for Cuba would live in the weapon reduction space based on the directional narrative instead of economic and political space.4

Christina Rowley and Jutta Weldes also expounded upon the concept of security narratives by highlighting the selective nature of narratives as well as their likeness to metaphors. They noted that a metaphor “invokes a biological framework to account for and make sense of changes in international security studies scholarship…produc[ing] and naturaliz[ing] a narrative that, by privileging some facts while marginalizing others.”5 The intentionality by which narratives can be furthered adds a concerning level of subjectivity.

Securitisation endangers the international by virtue of presenting problem situations. When a thing is qualified as threat, a securitisation move projects it as a challenge onto the international, and it makes this presence known to a wider public. By presenting something as threatening, a securitisation move creates an epistemological reference point for society, as well as a need for political action: By arguing that there is danger in world politics, securitisation moves create an urge to do ‘something’ against that danger.10 Regardless of whether the basic rationale of this stimulus for activism is a quest for survival in the face of existential threats or the quest to master uncertainty, that is risk — endangerment in a basic sense creates knowledge of unacceptable foreign policy situations. Securitisation seen in this way ‘insecuritises’: 11 securitisation moves acknowledge that problems exist in world politics, bring knowledge of these into political (societal) existence, and — if accepted as truthful by the relevant local audience(s) — position these as mandatory objects of action. In terms of endangering, securitisation provides points of reference for agency and simultaneously asks for agency. How such agency is channelled, however, depends on how insecurity is circumscribed beyond its simple ‘naming’ or ‘identification’. This is to say that national insecurity is not merely acknowledged by securitisation moves, for these also invoke broader systems of meaning. By naming a threat, securitising actors haul topics into security logic, setting out problem situations and the imperative to act — but they also usually associate these topics with broader understandings of who (or what) threatens whom and how. Seen in this light, securitisation is a ‘relational’ or ‘positional’ process of international subjectification and subjectpositioning (Althusser 1971; Foucault 1981, 1982): The securitisation of a thing (or theme) comes with an identification of sources and targets of threats, and a specification of the nature of relations between them. Securitisation moves haul actors and things, whether foreign governments, cultural practices or non-state actors, into distinct roles. They recruit them as threatening or threatened subjects12 under the broader thematic umbrella of the securitised theme, attributing to them distinct functions in the known organisation of international security, and they relate the home nation to the international reality thus described.

With their subjectification components, securitisation moves have epistemological and political functions that go beyond those recognised by contemporary security studies. Epistemologically, the endangering and systematising of world politics gives structure to the undetermined social/international world. By setting out problem definitions, securitisation moves populate the world with originators and victims of danger, ordering the world and making it actionable. As a systematisation procedure, securitisation moves respond to ‘dread’, or ‘epistemological fear’, that is the fear of not knowing and the urge to make sense of the contingent context in which societies evolve (Huysmans 1998; Croft 2012). In the relational/positional development of securitisation theory of this article, the articulation of danger is thus a so-called ontological security strategy for the securitising actor. It gives a sense of place and location to the home nation, dividing the de facto always evolving and contingent world into temporarily stable categories of enemies, friends and fellows (Mitzen 2006). Politically, successful securitisation creates complex local truths about the presence and organisation of international danger, identifying numerous kinds of actors and relations. When issues are securitised, these topics are brought to local attention. Necessities for action are created, and knowledge of international security politics is produced and organised in distinct ways.

In China, IR scholars were also quick to link the China-Threat discourse to the yellow peril fear and the genealogy of racist western doctrine pertaining to China (Shi, 1997; Luo, 1997; Li, 1999; Shi, 2004; Chen, 2005). My analytical focus here is not on revealing whether the U.S. mediatic portrayal of Lee borrowed from yellow peril imageries in its construction of China as a security threat—although Hanser (2013) found racist footprints in major U.S. print-media coverage of scandals involving defective/contaminated products manufactured in China. Rather, what I am concerned with is how racial profiling appears to have played a role in Dr. Lee’s case. Racist or not as a discourse, the China-Threat is racist in its consequence. For instance, in 1997 when the CIA and other security-related agencies took stock of China’s sudden advance in nuclear design, some voices of reason noted that more than a few thousand scientists and federal workers had had access to the W-88 warhead blueprint design, so it was premature to think the alleged theft had occurred at Los Alamos. But, once Los Alamos was nevertheless “established” as the institutional source of the said leak, mostly because the W-88 was originally designed there, the suspicion quickly fell on Dr. Lee, one of the few scientists with Chinese heritage who had had contacts with Mainland Chinese colleagues in the 1980s.

I have argued above that the "China stream U.S. IR literature is derived, pr construction of otherness. This cons particular narcissistic understanding o tivist-based realism, concerned with ab a concern central to the dominant U these frameworks, it seems imperative threatening, absolute other since it is U.S.-led evolutionary scheme or guaran United States, so that U.S. power pre War world can still be legitimated.

Not only does this reductionist rep expense of understanding China as a dy try but it leads inevitably to a policy o tends to enhance the influence of real extremism, and hard-line stance in dose of the containment strategy is lik impact on U.S.-China relations, as the the 2001 spy-plane incident have vivid Chalmers Johnson is right when he su tainment toward China implies the pos during the Cold War vis-à-vis the form of terror prevented war between the United States and the Soviet Union, but this may not work in the case of China."93 For instance, as the United States presses ahead with a missile- defence shield to "guarantee" its invulnerability from rather unlikely sources of missile attacks, it would be almost certain to intensify China's sense of vulnerability and compel it to expand its current small nuclear arsenal so as to maintain the efficiency of its limited deterrence. In consequence, it is not impossible that the two countries, and possibly the whole region, might be dragged into an escalating arms race that would eventually make war more likely. Neither the United States nor China is likely to be keen on fighting the other. But as has been demonstrated, the "China threat" argument, for all its alleged desire for peace and security, tends to make war preparedness the most "realistic" option for both sides. At this juncture, worthy of note is an interesting com- ment made by Charlie Neuhauser, a leading CIA China specialist, on the Vietnam War, a war fought by the United States to contain the then-Communist "other." Neuhauser says, "Nobody wants it. We don't want it, Ho Chi Minh doesn't want it; it's simply a question of annoying the other side."94 And, as we know, in an unwanted war some fifty-eight thousand young people from the United States and an estimated two million Vietnamese men, women, and children lost their lives.

The discursive construction of the U.S. self and the "Chinese threat" argument are not innocent, descriptive accounts of "independent" reality. Rather, they are always a clarion call fo practice of power politics. At the apex of this power-politics is the politico-strategic question of "what is to be done" to make the United States secure from the (perceived) threats it faces. At a general level, as Benjamin Schwarz proposes, this requires an unhindered path to U.S. global hegemony that means not only that the United States must dominate wealthy and technologically sophisticated states in Europe and East Asia - America's "allies" - but also that it must deal with such nuisances as Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic and Kim Jong II, so that potential great powers need not acquire the means to deal with those problems themselves. And those powers that eschew Amer- ican supervision - such as China - must be both engaged and contained. The upshot of "American leadership" is that the United States must spend nearly as much on national security as the rest of the world combined.67

This "neocontainment" policy has been echoed in the "China threat" literature. In a short yet decisive article titled "Why We Must Contain China," Washington Post columnist Charles Krautham- mer insists that "containing China" and "undermining its ruthless dictatorship" constitute two essential components of "any rational policy toward a rising, threatening China." Not only is a policy other than containment considered irrational, but even a delay to implement it would be undesirable, as he urges that "containment of such a bully must begin early in its career." To this end, Kraut- hammer offers such "practical" options as strengthening regional alliances (with Vietnam, India, and Russia, as well as Japan) to box in China; standing by Chinese dissidents; denying Beijing the right to host the Olympics; and keeping China from joining the World Trade Organization on the terms it desires.68

By now, it seems clear that neither China's capabilities nor intentions really matter. Rather, almost by its mere geographical existence, China has been qualified as an absolute strategic "other," a discursive construct from which it cannot escape. Because of this, "China" in U.S. IR discourse has been objectified and deprived of its own subjectivity and exists mainly in and for the U.S. self. Little wonder that for many U.S. China specialists, China becomes merely a "national security concern" for the United States, with the "severe disproportion between the keen attention to China as a security concern and the intractable neglect of China's [own] security con- cerns in the current debate."62

At this point, at issue here is no longer whether the "China threat" argument is true or false, but is rather its reflection of a shared positivist mentality among mainstream China experts that they know China better than do the Chinese themselves.63 "We" alone can know for sure that they consider "us" their enemy and thus pose a menace to "us." Such an account of China, in many ways, strongly seems to resemble Orientalists' problematic distinc- tion between the West and the Orient. Like orientalism, the U.S. construction of the Chinese "other" does not require that China acknowledge the validity of that dichotomous construction. Indeed, as Edward Said point out, "It is enough for 'us' to set up these distinctions in our own minds; [and] 'they' become 'they' accordingly."64

Moreover, the US has not placed other states different from it, such as Vietnam, into an “othered” tier like China. Neither has it done so to other rising powers, like India. Thus, even when Thucydides highlights: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable”, it was perhaps also because it was Athens and not just its rise that made Sparta fearful. Allison notes this as well, observing that unlike the US taking over Britain, it is different to be “surpassed by an adversary whose values are so strikingly different”.123 The logical conclusion is that the US security portrayals of China’s rise as a risk are not due to China itself nor its assertive practices. Rather, the US is concerned with China’s rise. Unlike the “Yellow Peril” or the “Red Menace”, the US take on the “Blue Dread” is not a “China Threat” theory, but more appropriately a “China’s Rise Risk Thesis”.

Imagining China: the construction of threat and political possibility

In his analysis of the China Threat Theory Chengxin Pan argues that the ‘threat’ is an imagined construction of American observers.Footnote15 Pan does not deny the importance of the PRC's capabilities but asserts that they appear threatening from understandings about the United States itself. ‘[T]here is no such thing as “Chinese reality” that can automatically speak for itself’, Pan argues. ‘[T]o fully understand the US “China threat” argument, it is essential to recognize its autobiographical nature’.Footnote16 The geographical territory of China, then, is not separate from or external to, American representations of it. Rather, it is actively constitutive of those representations.Footnote17

Not only does this reductionist rep expense of understanding China as a dy try but it leads inevitably to a policy o tends to enhance the influence of real extremism, and hard-line stance in dose of the containment strategy is lik impact on U.S.-China relations, as the the 2001 spy-plane incident have vivid Chalmers Johnson is right when he su tainment toward China implies the pos during the Cold War vis-à-vis the form of terror prevented war between the United States and the Soviet Union, but this may not work in the case of China."93 For instance, as the United States presses ahead with a missile- defence shield to "guarantee" its invulnerability from rather unlikely sources of missile attacks, it would be almost certain to intensify China's sense of vulnerability and compel it to expand its current small nuclear arsenal so as to maintain the efficiency of its limited deterrence. In consequence, it is not impossible that the two countries, and possibly the whole region, might be dragged into an escalating arms race that would eventually make war more likely. Neither the United States nor China is likely to be keen on fighting the other. But as has been demonstrated, the "China threat" argument, for all its alleged desire for peace and security, tends to make war preparedness the most "realistic" option for both sides. At this juncture, worthy of note is an interesting com- ment made by Charlie Neuhauser, a leading CIA China specialist, on the Vietnam War, a war fought by the United States to contain the then-Communist "other." Neuhauser says, "Nobody wants it. We don't want it, Ho Chi Minh doesn't want it; it's simply a question of annoying the other side."94 And, as we know, in an unwanted war some fifty-eight thousand young people from the United States and an estimated two million Vietnamese men, women, and children lost their lives.

Therefore, to call for a halt to the vicious circle of theory as practice associated with the "China threat" literature, tinkering with the current positivist-dominated U.S. IR scholarship on China is no longer adequate. Rather, what is needed is to question this un-self-reflective scholarship itself, particularly its connections with the dominant way in which the United States and the West in gen- eral represent themselves and others via their positivist epistemol- ogy, so that alternative, more nuanced, and less dangerous ways of interpreting and debating China might become possible.

While the China Threat Discourse has become dominant in the West, other readings challenge the notion that China’s rise cannot be peaceful (Zhang & Buzan, 2010). Such different readings underscore the role of perception to analysis. Capturing this requires a methodology unbound by positivist approaches that focus on objective conditions in order to build explanatory theories that attempt to accord IR theorists with predictive powers (Sterling-Folker, 2013, p. 7). Whereas positivists use transhistorical structures to determine why actors will take certain actions, Doty notes that ‘explanations for why-questions are incomplete in an important sense’ (1993, p. 298). Sterling-Folker argues that for post-positivists ‘the primary activity of an IR theorist is to reveal how international events are described … and how those descriptions justify actions and arguments in a self-fulfilling cycle of codetermination’ (2013, p. 9, emphasis added). This article aligns itself with post-positivist exploration of how-questions to analyse the codetermination between the central discourses it explores.

In the US, the China threat tends to be propagated by (neo)realists who ‘assume that insecurity derives from the objectively threatening complexion of certain issues’ (Balzacq et al., 2016, p. 496). Indeed, American Sinophobia has relied on realist arguments that couch China threat arguments in positivist language and conceal otherwise subjective arguments in the language of objective truths (Yang & Liu, 2012, pp. 707-708). However, positivist analyses do not help us understand what these case studies mean and how they are discursively interlinked because ‘knowledge is not neutral … problem-solving positivism needs to be replaced by a critical theory, aware of the political interests it represents’ (Smith, 1997, p. 24). Post-positivism allows us to examine discursive constructions and biases that underscore foreign policy, and therefore national security. This article examines how perceptions of the Chinese Other, and, implicitly, the US Self, have affected US foreign policy. Hansen notes that ‘foreign policies rely upon representations of identity, but it is also through the formulation of foreign policy that identities are produced and reproduced’ (Hansen, 2006, p. 1). Because ‘policy is not always based on rational choices and interests, but can be affected by the cognitive beliefs, perceptions, and personalities of key individuals’ (Skonieczny, 2001, p. 437), post-positivist methods are essential to the examination of the Sino-American relationship as they can engage with key elements that positivist approaches disregard as immaterial. Securitization is central to this analysis because it is able to engage with social constructs of foreign policy and how material factors are ideationally ‘read.’ It has become so dominant as a theory that it is now an ‘analytical shorthand for the political construction of security’ (McDonald, 2012, p. 581).

“Lots of cars go over 60 miles per hour, but this is like ticketing just one because the driver had a Chinese face”84 Cecilia Chang, a friend of Dr. Wen Ho Lee’s family, said to a Times journalist outside the courtroom in 1999. For the scientist’s colleagues and friends, there was little doubt Dr. Lee was a victim of racial profiling in a moment of securysteria. The two China-Threat episodes documented in this paper reveal a security paradox: the unintentionally racist effect of over-securitizing a state adversary like China. Namely, unsupported and dropped prosecutions against American citizens of Chinese heritage accused of acting as foreign spies contributed, in both cycles, to the waning of the China-Threat. I call these events “reflexive triggers.” While agenda-setting scholars argue that information shocks (Jones, 1994; Jones and Baumgartner, 2005) can propel issues from obscurity to prominence, I suggest instead that reflexive trigger can move securitizing vocabulary from visibility to obscurity since they expose the fear-inducing, alarmist, and paranoid nature of the China-Threat perspective. In addition to the real-life effect of the China-Threat discourse, what else contributes to the fading of sinophobic sentiments and racist legal practices? Consistent with the literature, both declining China-Threat cycles discussed in this paper show the significant role of state power (Zhang, 2010). Following the collapse of Dr. Lee’s case, the U.S. War on Terror definitively ended the 1996-2001 China-Threat cycle in 2001. The 2010-2016 period saw not a drastic shift in state enemy—from Communist China to Islamic Terrorism and Rogue States—but the implementation of state mechanisms designed to prevent over-zealous national-security prosecutions from targeting Asian Americans. The War on Terror—the securitization of states that the U.S. believes are sponsoring terrorism and radical Islam networks—has exacerbated policing and racist sentiments against North American citizens of Arabic heritage and Islamic faith (Love, 2017; Wilkins-Laflamme, 2018). My findings show similar patterns with sinophobic moments, between both 1996 and 2001, and 2010 and 2016. The American-media writing of China using securitizing rhetoric has real-life consequences: mediatic scripts and sounds reverberate back into key political and social realms to reinforce already-rooted worldviews, as The Times discovered in the early 2000s. Al-Jazeera Center for Studies recently pointed at Fox News for its “media-driven reinforcement of the alleged Muslim-terror menace” and the rise of Islamophobic politics on U.S. soil (Cherkaoui, 2016:2-3).

The modern day China ‘threat’ to the United States is not an unproblematic, neutrally verifiable phenomenon. It is an imagined construction of American design and the product of societal representations which, to a significant extent, have established the truth that a ‘rising’ China endangers US security. This is an increasingly acknowledged, but still relatively under-developed, concept within the literature.Footnote121 The purpose of this article has been to expose how ‘threats’ from China towards the United States have always been contingent upon subjective interpretation. The three case studies chosen represent those moments across the lifetime of Sino-US relations at which China has been perceived as most threatening to American security. The ‘threats’ emerged in highly contrasting eras. The nature of each was very different and they emerged from varying sources (broadly speaking, from immigration in the nineteenth century and from ‘great power’ rivalry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries). Yet in this way they most effectively demonstrate how China ‘threats’ have repeatedly existed as socially constructed phenomenon.

Collectively they reveal the consistent centrality of understandings about the United States in perceptions of external danger. They demonstrate that, regardless of China's ability to assert material force or of the manner in which it has been seen to impose itself upon the United States, the reality of danger can be manufactured and made real. China ‘threats’ have always been threats to American identity so that the individual sources of ‘danger’ – whether a nuclear capability or an influx of (relatively few) foreign immigrants – have never been the sole determining factors. As James Der Derian notes, danger can be ascribed to otherness wherever it may be found.Footnote122 During the mid-to-late nineteenth century and throughout the early Cold War, perceptions of China ‘threats’ provoked crises of American identity. The twenty-first-century China ‘threat’ is yet to be understood in this way but it remains inexplicable in simple material terms. As ever, the physical realities of China are important but they are interpreted in such a way to make them threatening, regardless of Beijing's intentions.

Fiscal redistribution is defined as the reduction in income inequality, brought about by government via taxes and transfers. Their findings indicate that only in countries characterized as young democracies do elections exert a positive impact on fiscal redistribution.

Dalton (1971) defines redistribution as the obligatory payment of money to a central political authority which uses the receipts for its own maintenance, to provide community services, and as an emergency reserve in case there is a community disaster. Thus, in the context of leisure services, redistribution involves the obligatory payment of property and sales taxes to local and state governments, and income taxes to state and federal governments, which redistribute portions of what they receive to provide leisure services for the community.

fiscal /'fisk(ə)1/ ► adj. 1 relating to government revenue, especially taxes. 2 chiefly N. Amer. relating to financial

matters. ■ N. Amer. denoting a financial year: the deficit for fiscal 2008.