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Now that “orientalism” has become an academic buzzword, it may be useful to recall its former meanings. From the mid-eighteenth to the late-twentieth century, the term was applied to the study of the languages, literatures, and cultures of the Orient. In his 1978 book Orientalism, Edward Said acknowledges this ordinary (but by then obsolete) meaning and adds two others: “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’ ” and “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”2 It is with the third sort of orientalism that Said chiefly is concerned. “Orientalism” in this sense is a discourse about the Orient as the “other” of Europe, which confirms Europe’s dominant position. Said studies the works of scholars who instantiate this discourse but he is less concerned with particular individuals than with the body of European discursive practices in regard to “the Orient” that generate a self affirming account of what it is (essentially inferior to Europe, and so on).3 One of his more controversial contentions is that all European orientalists of the colonial period were consciously or unconsciously complicit in the aims of European colonialism.4 Said’s theory has been criticized by scholars who study oriental cultures—now referred to as Indologists, Sinologists, Asian Studies specialists, and so forth— on several counts. Many object to his indiscriminate lumping together of different types of orientalism. Denis Vidal, for instance, insists that colonial orientalism of the nineteenth century and the sort of orientalism highlighted by Said are “two entirely different things.” The orientalism of the nineteenth century itself had two sides, one scholastic, the other romantic, and “Said’s definitions cannot account for” this distinction.5 Thomas Trautmann reminds us that British champions of Indian languages and culture (called “Orientalists”) were opposed by government proponents of English education (called “Anglicists”), and notes that “the Saidian expansion of Orientalism, applied in this context, tends to sow confusion where there was once clarity.”6 David Ludden distinguishes “colonial knowledge,” which generated authoritative facts about colonized people, from other forms of orientalism, some of which were explicitly anticolonial.7 Rosane Rocher spells out the consequences of these conflations: “Said’s sweeping and passionate indictment of orientalist scholarship as part and parcel of an imperialist, subjugating enterprise does to orientalist scholarship what he accuses orientalist scholarship of having done to the countries east of Europe; it creates a single discourse, undifferentiated in space and time and across political, social and intellectual identities.”8 The irony is that the Saidian analysis of orientalist discourse is itself an orientalist discourse—one that “sometimes appears to mimic the essentializing discourse it attacks,” as James Clifford puts it.9 This essentializing of orientalist scholarship might be excused if it resulted in a transformed view of oriental and occidental societies. But to Said the Occident is always the dominant partner, determining the terms of the oriental response. As a result the very orientals who are meant to be the beneficiaries of the Saidian analysis are again denied agency and voice.10

With this brilliant defense of Arab face, of dealing with kalam an-nas, Said's Orientalism flipped the vectors of the paralyzing negative judgment. On the one hand, it shielded Arabs from public criticism, on the other, it made the "imperialist" West (and its supposed outpost, "colonial Israel"), the object of relentless criticism. His success in this regard, gave rise to a generation of Middle East specialists, including academics, who described the Arab and Muslim worlds as "thriving civil societies," imminently "democracies," even as they berated the democratic West as a racist, imperialist culture badly in need of deconstruction, theoretically and practically. Such a move may have flattered Arab and Western (progressive) self-images, but it came at the cost of ignoring the darker realities on the ground.And yet, to many, that ignorance seemed like a small price to pay. After all, Said's framework offered conflict-averse progressives a way to avoid a clash of civilizations. Give Arabs and Muslims the benefit of the doubt, treat them with honor rather than gratuitously incensing them with criticism. That is the way to solve conflicts and bring peace. Educated Western adopters of Said's discourse saw it as a kind of therapeutic narrative, which, by accentuating the positive and glossing over the negative, encouraged, rather than alienated, the "other." It meant, among other things, treating Arabs and Muslims as if their political culture had already reached modern levels of societal commitment to universal human rights, to peace through toleration, to egalitarianism, to favoring positive-sum relations—when in reality, such an assessment was not only not objective (as in the post-modern world it cannot be), but also very far from any accurate assessment (which presumably it claims to be).

Said's Orientalism exploited a Western proclivity for moral self-criticism over criticism of other cultures to shield his people from shame. For him, criticism of Arabs or Muslims reflected the West's ethnocentric prejudices and its discriminatory, cultural map for imperial dominion. It was not what the Orientalists pretended they were doing, namely, offering accurate observations on the characteristics and conditions of another culture and its history. Rather, any contrasts between the cultures of the democratic West and those of Arabs and Muslims—certainly any that put the latter in a poor light—were ugly examples of invidious xenophobia directed at an inferior "them," not a reflection on a social reality. Speaking of the nineteenth century, Said wrote: "[E]very European in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric." He issued a plea for an alternative:

At all costs, the goal of Orientalizing the Orient again and again is to be avoided ... Without "the Orient" there would be scholars, critics, intellectuals, human beings, for whom the racial, ethnic, and national distinctions were less important than the common enterprise in promoting human community.

Xiaomei Chen’s theories regarding Occidentalism can help situate such adaptive repurposing in the larger context of post-Mao intellectual counter-discourses. In her examination of post-Mao Chinese culture, she distinguishes China’s official government discourses from its (dissident) 20 FLAIR DONGLAI SHI intellectual counter-discourses and defines Occidentalism as ‘a discursive practice that, by constructing the Western Other, has allowed the Orient to participate actively and with indigenous creativity in the process of self-appropriation, even after being appropriated and constructed by Western Others’.49 In other words, Occidentalism in post-Mao counter- discourses often involves the recycling of stereotypes created by Western Orientalism for the purpose of self-criticism, and this constitutes the basic mechanism of the adaptive comparative in post-Mao Chinese literature. As a case in point, Chen devotes a whole chapter to analyse Su Xiaokang’s 1988 documentary River Elegy (He Shang,), which has used numerous Orientalist clichés, including ‘Oriental despotism’ and ‘the Asiatic mode of production’, to criticize Chinese culture. The documentary is often regarded as one of the cultural triggers for the 1989 Tiananmen protest.50  Although Chen does not mention Wang Lixiong in her book, China Tidal Wave’s Occidentalist commonality with River Elegy is more than evident. Su has even written the back-cover blurb for the 2008 Taiwanese edition of Wang’s book, which reads: ‘Such a grand and well-organized political speculation; it might as well be the first in the history of contemporary Chinese literature.’51 Similar to Su’s evocation of Western Orientalist tropes in his documentary, Wang’s Occidentalist appropriation of fin-de-siècle Yellow Perilism can be viewed as a form of mimicry as well. But different from the kind of anti- colonial mimicry mentioned by Homi Bhabha, the Occidentalist mimicry is about constant anti-authoritarian self-mocking.52 This back-and-forth game of appropriation and mimicry is a testament to Chen’s post- structural conclusion that ‘Orientalism and Occidentalism must be seen as signifying practices having no permanent or essential content.’53 The same applies to Yellow Perilism as a travelling discourse: instead of some kind of undisputable metaphysical truth, it is merely a performative cultural practice that shifts its functions and allegiances according to the situated socio-political agenda of its practitioner. 

More than a cause of mere mischief, realists appear in Linklater’s eyes as members of an insidious, centuries-long conspiracy (à la Thomas Pynchon) called the totalizing project, ‘the high point’ of which ‘was reached in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia’ (p. 213). His discussion of neorealism gives the strange impression that Waltz set out to construct the ultimate theoretical critique of reformist approaches to world politics—the final culmination of the grand realist plot to enslave and divide the human race by means of the state’s monopoly power. Indeed, neorealists go so far as to claim that ‘international anarchy prevents human beings from leading a moral life’ (p. 61). One could, perhaps, reach such a verdict from Waltz’s Theory of International Politics, but it would have to be a particularly tortured reading of it. True, neorealism is not a theory about the process of historical change or the possibility of creating an alternative world. It does not, however, gainsay these pursuits; it simply says nothing about them. Instead, neorealism seeks to understand and explain constant features of the current epoch of world politics, in which states are the primary actors on the world stage and principal aggregations of political power. Specifically, Waltz shows how the interaction of states generates a structure that constrains them from taking certain actions and disposes them toward taking others. As a theory of international politics, neorealism resides at the systemic-structural level of analysis or third image; theories that include unit-level causal variables are, in Waltz’s view, not systemic but rather reductionist. Like any good (useful) theory, neorealism excludes virtually all of reality’s complexity and does not claim to explain everything (otherwise it would not be a theory). Derived in part from economic theories of imperfect competition and oligopolistic markets, neorealism yields only imprecise predictions and precious few of them; from theories of competition among a small number of powerful actors able to manipulate their environment and each other, outcomes are necessarily indeterminate. What Waltz’s theory tells us is ‘a small number of big and important things’ about international politics: how external forces shape, pull, and shove states’ behaviour in certain directions and not others; why states similarly situated in the international system behave similarly despite internal differences; and why ‘the style and substance of international politics has remained strikingly constant’ through all of the changes in social, economic, political, and military relations and activities that have occurred since the birth of the modern state system in 1648.3 Neorealists believe that a truly systemic theory—one that does not confound the internal attributes of states with their external environment—is required for an adequate understanding of international politics. But they do not claim, as Linklater suggests, that internal forces have no effect on the behaviour of states. To the contrary, Waltz declares: ‘Under most circumstances, a theory of international politics is not sufficient, and cannot be made sufficient, for the making of unambiguous predictions. An international political theory can explain states’ behavior only when external pressures dominate the internal disposition of states, which seldom happens.’ 4 Because it is a theory of international politics and not one of foreign policy, neorealism says nothing about the causal effects of national- or unit-level processes and attributes. But this is not to say that all that is important for a system is its structure, and so we can safely ignore its constituent units. It is an admission that the construction of a grand theory of internal and external politics is unlikely anytime soon. Linklater’s thesis about the emergence of ‘new forms of political community which sever the links between sovereignty, territoriality, citizenship, and nationalism’ rests on his conviction that ‘various trends create the expectation of [the sovereign state’s] steady decline as the most effective and legitimate instrument of close political cooperation’ (p. 34). (Can any liberal resist retelling the ‘hollow state’ myth?) Linklater admits that ‘neo-realism recognises [sovereign states] are unlikely to last forever’ (p. 15) but then lambasts the theory for obstructing challenges to the ‘totalizing project, in which states seek to construct homogeneous national communities which are sharply distinguished from the world of outsiders and largely unconcerned about their interests’ (p. 16). Curiously, Linklater himself concludes that he does ‘not anticipate the demise of the state but envisage[s] its reconstruction . . . This is not to advance the unlikely proposition that conventional state structures either will or should disappear, but rather to suggest that states should assume a number of responsibilities which have usually been avoided in the past’ (p. 44). Is this a challenge to the neorealist view of the primacy of states in world politics? 

Linklater rightly observes: ‘All such approaches—critical-theoretical, postmodern, feminist and liberal—have defined their identity through a series of challenges to neo-realism’ (p. 15). If he is also correct that ‘the theoretical challenge to neo-realism has largely succeeded’ (p. 23), why, one wonders, is Waltz’s theory still being used as the springboard for every conceivable theoretical discussion of international relations, even those as far removed from the concerns of neorealism as Linklater’s normative ideas about the transformation of citizenship and the modern political community? In other words, why have Waltz’s ideas become the standard grammar of the discipline? The answer is simple: neorealism remains the most coherent, elegant, and powerful theoretical perspective that addresses the central issues of the field, viz., war and peace, conflict and cooperation. Unparalleled in the clarity of its deductive logic, neorealism is the yardstick by which all other theories are measured and therefore the obvious target for those who believe they have built a better mousetrap. Since comprehensive and careful scrutiny of these so-called ‘successful challenges’ to neorealism is beyond the scope of this essay, a few brief observations about the constructivist research program will have to suffice for present purposes. Referring to Alexander Wendt’s constructivist challenge to neorealist theory, Linklater writes: ‘Neo-realism regards the learned and alterable behaviour of the major powers as inherent features of an immutable anarchy. But as an influential formulation correctly maintains, anarchy is what states make of it: the propensity for inter-state violence is not inherent in anarchy itself but is a function of how states have responded to inernational anarchy by constituting themselves as exclusionary and egotistical units’ (p. 18). Wendt’s claim that power politics is not a necessary consequence of anarchy is far less persuasive than Linklater suggests, however. In theory, Wendt is correct. An anarchic realm composed solely of angels, all with the certain knowledge that every other member is also a true angel and cannot be otherwise, might indeed be governed by other-regarding rather than self-regarding behaviour. If we introduce to this world the possibility of predation (a devil in disguise, so to speak), or one or two powerful undisguised devils, or a history of predation, self-regarding behaviour associated with power politics quickly emerges and drives out other-regarding behaviour. Wendt himself admits that a few bad apples will spoil the whole barrel. In practice, therefore, it is highly improbable that anarchy will ever lead to other-regarding behaviour. It is not my intention to denigrate Wendt’s theoretical insights, most of which I find quite compelling and all of which strike me as provocative and intelligent. It is simply to recognize that the task of the normative theorist is to imagine possible, if not entirely plausible, other worlds. Practitioners of international politics, however, understand that foreign policy is too serious a business to entertain utopian ideas about dramatically reconstructed social relations; confronted by weighty foreignpolicy decisions, they do not enjoy the luxury of retreating into a fantasy world of their own creation but instead must act under real-world constraints, knowing that bad judgment can lead to the subjugation or extinction of the state and its citizens.

The problem is that Linklater argues by fiat rather than by the weight of hard evidence, which is in scant supply here. Again and again, radical propositions are supported by nothing more than references to some other critical theorist who shares Linklater’s vision and/or tendency to rely on slippery, undefined and unmeasured concepts, primarily globalisation and fragmentation. This simply will not do. Whether Linklater, or Kant, or Marx, or Habermas, or other contemporary critical, feminist, postmodern theorists believe that something will happen, must happen, can happen, and should happen, does not make it so—or likely to be so—in the foreseeable future. Moreover, as a work of critical political theory, it is neither very critical nor very political. To believe, for instance, that the goals of the triple transformation will be advanced by wider dialogic relations, one must naively assume not only that there is an underlying global harmony of interests from which a consensus can be forged on important political and social issues, but that such ‘agreements will not be reached by ignoring or suppressing marginal and dissident voices’ (p. 41). In this view as in others, Linklater simply skates over the central rationalist-realist explanations for international conflict and the struggle for power and security, e.g., states have an incentive to misrepresent private information about their capabilities and resolve, and they may be unable to commit credibly to uphold bargains that they would mutually prefer to war;1 the nature of many international disputes are indivisible and therefore do not admit compromise; states exist under conditions of material and social scarcity with no sovereign arbiter to settle and enforce distributional disputes. As long as things commonly enjoyed cannot be commonly shared, individuals and groups will seek to influence and control others and their environment; that is, they will struggle for social and material power. That is what politics is all about and what distinguishes it from other modes of human behaviour. Politics so defined is largely absent from Linklater’s book. Leaving aside the problem of indivisible scarce goods, a meaningful reduction in global material inequality would require significant sacrifices from those enjoying the good life. Surely, no one really believes that the ‘haves’ will voluntarily hand over their riches to the ‘have-nots’. There is no historical precedent for such altruism on a global scale, and, no matter how much we all communicate with each other in the future, I cannot imagine that human nature will change so dramatically in my lifetime. Thus, unless one desperately wants to believe in this alternative future world, Linklater’s book will appear as little more than an intellectual exercise in historical speculation and theoretical wishful thinking along familar liberal lines.

This focus on how geopolitics plays out in particular places links to Thrift’s (2000) frequently cited argument that critical geopolitics leaves out ‘‘the little things’’. Thrift had two criticisms of critical geopolitics. First, critical geopolitics is apparently mesmerized by texts to the exclusion of the sociology of power. Which leads to the second apparent problem – the failure of critical geopolitics to deal with matters of embodiment and the actual functions of the clerks and secretaries, the functionaries of foreign ministries and defence departments who actually make foreign and military agencies operate. In suggesting that texts are merely texts, rather than discourses embedded in the practices of security with all their multitudinous representations of places as sources of threats requiring military action and practices of security, Thrift misrepresents the purpose of the critique. Thrift wants critical geopolitics to do all sorts of things, but not it seems, engage in the critique of the reasoning practices of intellectuals of statecraft, whether in terms of formal geopolitical reasoning, or the more practical versions in media and political discourse. In diverting attention from the political purpose of critique to the practical lived experiences of people in bureacracies and the non-representational aspects of text and identity production, Thrift also facilitiates the traditional modes of doing geography, field work, ethnography, interviews and giving voice to many who are not usually heard. But in doing so the engagement with the rationalisations of military power and the practices of mapping that legitimize military action, are abandoned. This may be an engagement with geopolitics very loosely understood, but it is not the ‘‘tactical’’ form of knowledge that challenges and deconstructs the imperial justifications of violence that Gerard Toal discusses in the epigraph to this paper. While Thrift (2000) may have no interest in tackling the conceptual infrastructure of military violence, in abandoning this critical edge his suggested agenda eviscerates the political purpose of critical geopolitics precisely as Macdonald (in press) suggests by leaving out the ‘‘big things’’.

In fact, considerable energy in academic international relations today in the United States and elsewhere focuses on the weaknesses of the neorealist synthesis even as the master’s programs continue to churn out would-be practitioners often oblivious to the political and theoretical bases of the arcane debates among some of their teachers (Long et al., 2005 ). The continuing, even revived, appeal of the neorealist synthesis seems to lie in its ritual appeal to U.S. centrality to world politics (the “necessary nation,” “the lender of last resort,” etc.) and in the enhanced sense since the end of the Cold War and after 9/11 of a dangerous and threatening world that must be approached with trepidation and preparation for potential violent reaction and intervention as mandated by realist thinking. Yet in practice there is a massive gap between the predictions of such theorizing and what actually goes into the making of U.S. (or any other) foreign policy, much of which has to do with persisting geopolitical orderings of the world and domestic interests and their relative lobbying capacities (Hellmann, 2009 ; Oren, 2009 ). International relations as a field around the world has followed largely in American footsteps. I can attest that my own introduction to it in the late 1960s in Britain involved reading textbooks that came overwhelmingly from the United States. Debate about the relative degrees of theoretical “pluralism” in the United States and Britain suggests that at least the modes of categorizing theories are somewhat less hidebound in the latter than in the former and that in recent years at least there has been something of a parting of the ways across the Atlantic, with nonrealist views becoming much more widespread in British universities than in their American counterparts (Schmidt, 2008 ; Smith, 2008 ). More recently and elsewhere around the world, U.S. theories, particularly neorealism, have proved rather more pervasive and persistent. In Russia, for example, which one might not expect to be particularly congenial to U.S. ideas, the main academic journal about world politics, Mehdunarodnyye protsessy (International Trends), seems to adhere to ideas about international anarchy, nation-state developmentalism, and systemic constraints on state action that are remarkably similar to those represented by U.S. neorealism. Even the more liberal currents, refl ecting on globalization and a less state-oriented world, mainly cite U.S. sources (Tsygankov & Tsygankov, 2007 ). Perhaps this tendency refl ects the lack of local alternatives following the demise of offi cial Marxist conceptions, dependence on funding from Western foundations, and a general disorientation following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It does not, however, entail much by way of support for U.S. foreign policy, only a similar theoretical logic in arriving in this case at Russiancentered positions (Müller, 2008 ). The recent revival of Eurasian geopolitical thinking perhaps is a harbinger of a more Russian-centric mode of thinking as an alternative to imported brands (Tsygankov & Tsygankov, 2004 ). Given the cumulative crisis of the United States in world politics over the past two decades, one might expect to see some emerging alternative theoretical visions emanating from beyond U.S. shores. The so-called English School of international relations, associated in particular with the idea of “international society” but effectively realist in many respects, has recently undergone a concerted revival as an alternative to U.S. theories. It has certainly traveled well beyond Britain, even if with questionable success (e.g., Waever, 1992 ; Wendt, 1999 ). Zhang ( 2003 ) has examined how well it has traveled to China since Adam Roberts, one of its main advocates, visited Beijing in 1991. Lacking in equivalently talented entrepreneurs or salesmen and the institutionalized connections between U.S. and Chinese universities, the English School has had limited infl uence, according to Zhang, in comparison to the continuing dominance of U.S. scholars. But most of the main works are also not available in Chinese, and the major research institutes in China are run by people trained in the United States. To a large extent, therefore, academic Chinese knowledge of the “international” largely remains refracted through intellectual lenses made in the United States. Within China, however, change is in the offing. Some Chinese academics write explicitly about what they term “international relations theory with Chinese characteristics” (Xinning, 2001 ). In other words, China has become involved in developing something akin to what happened in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. What is this Chinese synthesis? According to Xinning ( 2001 ), there are two variants, with the second smaller but growing more quickly. The fi rst borrows the phrase “Chinese characteristics” from Deng Xiaoping to indicate an international relations theory that centers on China’s need to protect its sovereignty, engage in peaceful coexistence with other states, and use Chinese language, thought, and expression. The second asserts a more radically Chinese vision of the world with China’s status at the center of a surrounding system, Confucian “benevolent governance,” the winning of confl icts without resorting to war, and interests, not morality, as the basis of interstate behavior. In Xinning’s words: After the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989, most social science disciplines (especially political science, sociology, and journalism) suffered a setback because of the government’s campaign against the ideological liberalism of Chinese scholars and the so-called peaceful evolution initiated by the West. However, International Relations received a different treatment. Theoretical studies on IR continued to develop. The teaching of Western IR theories continued at key universities, and academic exchanges with the West in IR studies became more active. This was mainly because Chinese leaders worried more about China’s isolation from the outside world than a “peaceful evolution.” (Xinning, 2001 , p. 62) More recently, as Xinning makes clear, a new Chinese international relations is evolving which combines a range of elements (also see Yang & Li, 2009 ). As in the U.S. case, however, it is its connection to state policy that gives it special status. As in so many other features of the relationship between the United States and China, there is an almost mirror image in assumptions between the theory imported from the United States and what increasingly goes for “Chinese” international relations theory. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. In brief compass, I have tried to illustrate one facet of the geography of knowledge, what I have called the geopolitics of knowledge, in relation to one body of thinking, so-called international relations theory. I have emphasized its founding in the early postwar United States, its travels around the world as a function of American hegemony, and the story of two alternatives, the English School, to illustrate the limits of pluralism, and the rise of an IR theory with “Chinese characteristics,” to show how an alternative with hegemonic potential can begin to emerge. Who knows, particularly if this latter, as Callahan ( 2001 ) has said in direct response to Xinning’s ( 2001 ) essay on Chinese thinking about world politics, adjusts to the more globalized and transnational world that has seemed, at least until recently, to be in the offing, then we may actually end up with a theory of world politics that avoids the inside–outside views of sovereignty and the need for a single hegemonic power that so much of recent IR theory has been devoted to normalizing (Agnew, 2009 ). Don’t bet your house on it. As long as we have global political hierarchy, we are likely to have parallel “theories” of world politics which naturalize that state of affairs.

How likely is China to start a war? This may be the single-most important question in international affairs today. If China uses military force against Taiwan or another target in the Western Pacific, the result could be war with the United States—a fight between two nuclear-armed giants brawling for hegemony in that region and the wider world. If China attacked amid ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the world would be consumed by interlocking conflicts across Eurasia’s key regions, a global conflagration unlike anything since World War II. How worried should we be? Notwithstanding the recent flurry of high-level diplomacy between Washington and Beijing, the warning signs are certainly there. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, Beijing is amassing ships, planes, and missiles as part of the largest military buildup by any country in decades. Notwithstanding some recent efforts to lure back skittish foreign investment, China is stockpiling fuel and food and trying to reduce the vulnerability of its economy to sanctions—steps one might take as conflict nears. Xi has said China must prepare for “worst-case and extreme scenarios” and be ready to withstand “high winds, choppy waters, and even dangerous storms.” All of this comes as Beijing has become increasingly coercive (and occasionally violent) in dealings with its neighbors, including the Philippines, Japan, and India—and as it periodically advertises its ability to batter, blockade, and perhaps invade Taiwan. Many U.S. officials believe the risk of war is rising. CIA Director William Burns has said Xi seeks the capability to take Taiwan by 2027. And as China’s economy struggles, some observers—including, reportedly, U.S. intelligence analysts—are looking for signs that a peaking China might turn aggressive in order to distract attention from internal problems or to lock in gains while it still can. Other analysts think the risk of Chinese aggression is overblown. Some scholars say the danger likely can be managed provided Washington doesn’t provoke Beijing—an echo of a longer-standing argument that China won’t upend a status quo that has served it well. Others point out that China has not started a war since its invasion of Vietnam in 1979. Still others dismiss the prospect that China might fight in response to a slowing economy and other domestic problems, claiming that the country has no history of diversionary war. What links these arguments is a belief in the basic continuity of Chinese conduct: the idea that a country that hasn’t launched a disastrous war in more than four decades is unlikely to do so now. We believe this confidence is dangerously misplaced. A country’s behavior is profoundly shaped by its circumstances, no less than its strategic tradition, and China’s circumstances are changing in explosive ways. Political scientists and historians have identified a range of factors that make great powers more or less inclined to fight. When one considers four such factors, it becomes clear that many of the conditions that once enabled a peaceful rise may now be encouraging a violent descent. First, the territorial disputes and other issues China is contesting are becoming less susceptible to compromise or peaceful resolution than they once were, making foreign policy a zero-sum game. Second, the military balance in Asia is shifting in ways that could make Beijing perilously optimistic about the outcome of war. Third, as China’s short-term military prospects improve, its long-term strategic and economic outlook is darkening—a combination that has often made revisionist powers more violent in the past. Fourth, Xi has turned China into a personalist dictatorship of the sort especially prone to disastrous miscalculations and costly wars. This isn’t to say China will invade Taiwan in a particular week, month, or year. It is impossible to predict when, exactly, a conflict might occur because the trigger is often an unforeseen crisis. We now know that Europe was primed for war in 1914, but World War I would likely not have happened then had the driver of the car carrying Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand not taken one of history’s most fateful wrong turns. Wars are more like earthquakes: We can’t know precisely when they will happen, but we can recognize factors that lead to higher or lower degrees of risk. Today, China’s risk indicators are blinking red. The possibility of a U.S.-China war might seem remote at first glance. Beijing has not fought a major war in 44 years, and its military hasn’t killed large numbers of foreigners since 1988, when Chinese frigates machine-gunned 64 Vietnamese sailors in a skirmish over the Spratly Islands. The so-called Asian peace—the lack of interstate wars in East Asia since 1979—has rested on a Chinese peace. The absence of war has hardly meant the absence of aggression: Beijing has used military and paramilitary capabilities to enlarge its writ in the South and East China seas. In recent years, China has also engaged in bloody scraps with India. Nonetheless, the fact that Beijing has abstained from major wars—while the United States has fought several of them—has allowed Chinese officials to claim that their country is following a uniquely peaceful path to global power. And it compels those who worry about war to explain why China, which has experienced record-breaking growth enabled by two generations of peace, would change course so dramatically. It wouldn’t be the first time a seemingly peaceful rising power broke bad. Prior to 1914, Germany hadn’t fought a major war for more than 40 years. In the 1920s, Japan looked to many foreign observers like a responsible stakeholder as it signed treaties pledging to limit its navy, share power in Asia, and respect China’s territorial integrity. In the early 2000s, Russian President Vladimir Putin mused about joining NATO and linking Russia closer to the West. That each of these nations nonetheless launched barbaric wars of conquest underscores a basic truth: Things change. The same country can behave differently, perhaps radically so, depending on the circumstances. READ MORE Chinese President Xi Jinping, wearing a dark overcoat, points and smiles as U.S. President Donald Trump talks to him. Behind them is a red carpet and flowers. Chinese President Xi Jinping, wearing a dark overcoat, points and smiles as U.S. President Donald Trump talks to him. Behind them is a red carpet and flowers. Chinese President Xi Jinping, wearing a dark overcoat, points and smiles as U.S. President Donald Trump talks to him. Behind them is a red carpet and flowers. Why China Is Rooting for Trump Beijing’s long game would be much better served by the candidate’s policies and the divisions he would unleash. ANALYSIS | AGATHE DEMARAIS An illustration shows a stylized globe with a crack through it. A hand with a wrench tightens the screw atop the globe. An illustration shows a stylized globe with a crack through it. A hand with a wrench tightens the screw atop the globe. An illustration shows a stylized globe with a crack through it. A hand with a wrench tightens the screw atop the globe. The Field of Geopolitics Offers Both Promise and Peril The world’s most dismal science could make Eurasia safe for illiberalism and predation—or protect it from those forces. ESSAY | HAL BRANDS Two Ukrainian soldiers in uniform and helmets, with guns drawn move across a snowy landscape. Black smoke from an explosion is seen on the horizon. Two Ukrainian soldiers in uniform and helmets, with guns drawn move across a snowy landscape. Black smoke from an explosion is seen on the horizon. Two Ukrainian soldiers in uniform and helmets, with guns drawn move across a snowy landscape. Black smoke from an explosion is seen on the horizon. 5 Rules for Superpowers Facing Multiple Conflicts Ukraine, the Middle East, and Taiwan are part of an unstable frontier—and require a more principled U.S. strategy. SHADOW GOVERNMENT | JAKUB GRYGIEL, A. WESS MITCHELL One such circumstance involves territorial disputes. Most wars are fights about who owns what strip of the Earth; roughly 85 percent of international conflicts waged since 1945 have revolved around territorial claims. Territory is hard to share because it often has symbolic or strategic significance. Even when nations agree to divide an area, they often end up fighting over the most valuable parts, such as cities, oil reserves, holy sites, waterways, or strategic high ground. In addition, securing territory requires physical presence in the form of fences, soldiers, or settlers. Thus, when nations claim the same turf, they come into frequent and unwelcome contact. Territorial disputes are especially likely to escalate when one side fears its claims are eroding precipitously. The belief that hallowed ground is slipping away or that the nation could be dismembered by its enemies can trigger aggression that a country more secure in its borders would avoid. A second cause of war is a shifting military balance. Wars are waged over various issues but all share a fundamental cause: false optimism. They happen when both sides believe they can use force to achieve objectives—in other words, when both sides think they can win. Of course, few wars are truly win-win affairs, meaning at least one side—and very often both sides—disastrously underestimated the enemy’s strength. In short, competitive or ambiguous military balances cause wars; therefore, anything that makes a given balance more competitive or ambiguous, such as the introduction of new technologies or a massive military buildup by the weaker side, increases the risk of war. Third, great powers become belligerent when they fear future decline. Geopolitical competition is fierce and unforgiving, so nations nervously guard their relative wealth and power. Even the mightiest countries can spiral into violent insecurity when beset by economic stagnation, strategic encirclement, or other protracted trends that threaten their international position and expose them to predation by their foes. Heavily armed but increasingly anxious, a great power on the precipice of decline will be eager, even desperate, to beat back unfavorable trends by any means necessary. For imperial Germany, imperial Japan, and Putin’s Russia, that ultimately meant war. Finally, a country’s conduct is shaped by its regime. Personalist dictatorships are more than twice as likely to start wars as democracies or autocracies in which power is held in many hands. Dictators initiate more wars because they are less exposed to the costs of conflict: Over the past 100 years, dictators who lost wars fell from power only 30 percent of the time, whereas other types of leaders who lost wars were voted out or otherwise removed from office nearly 100 percent of the time. Dictators veer into extremism because they are surrounded by sycophants who go all out to meet the dear leader’s demands. Dictators also cultivate real and imagined enemies abroad because blood-and-soil nationalism helps them justify oppressive rule at home. So whereas leaders of limited governments typically rule modestly and fade into obscurity, dictators—including Germany’s Adolf Hitler, Italy’s Benito Mussolini, the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin, China’s Mao Zedong, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and Russia’s Putin—often butcher their way into the history books.

But we can assess whether countries are more or less prone to war and whether their internal features and external conditions put them at higher or lower risk of lashing out. Today, much of what historians and political scientists know about the causes of war suggests China is primed for violence. Unfortunately, Washington can’t affect some of the factors pushing Beijing down this perilous path. The United States can’t fix China’s demographic crisis, solve its structural economic problems, or stop Xi’s consolidation of one-man rule. It could, perhaps, change China’s negative expectations about the future—by easing Beijing’s access to high-end technology or abandoning efforts to build stronger coalitions in the Indo-Pacific, for instance, although doing so might fatally weaken Washington’s position. The United States must try to prevail in competition and, at the same time, avoid an awful conflict. Within that context, it should aim to temper China’s optimism about how a war in Asia might turn out and prevent Beijing from concluding that it must fight to avoid a humiliating defeat. Washington and its friends are not moving with the speed, resources, or urgency needed to outpace a rapidly maturing Chinese military threat. The requirements of denying China optimism about the outcome of war are fairly straightforward—even if they are not easily satisfied. They include a Taiwan bristling with anti-ship missiles, sea mines, mobile air defenses, and other cheap but lethal capabilities; a U.S. military that can use drones, submarines, stealthy aircraft, and prodigious quantities of long-range strike capabilities to bring decisive firepower to bear in the Western Pacific; agreements with allies and partners that give U.S. forces access to more bases in the region and threaten to bring additional countries into the fight against Beijing; a global coalition of countries that can batter China’s economy with sanctions and choke off its oceangoing trade; and a revitalized industrial base that can keep the democratic countries fighting until their economic and financial superiority proves decisive in the end. Washington and its friends are already pursuing every one of these initiatives. But they’re not moving with the speed, resources, or urgency needed to outpace a rapidly maturing Chinese military threat. The second task involves pairing deterrence with reassurance—to limit the degree to which inaction might, in Xi’s eyes, condemn China to dismemberment and humiliation. Chinese officials genuinely fear that U.S. policy and Taiwanese politics are putting the island on a path toward independence or some other form of permanent separation, even as they fail to recognize that their own actions are largely responsible for that trend. So the United States must tread carefully regarding Taiwan. Washington should avoid showy spectacles—such as then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island in August 2022—that do nothing to strengthen the island’s defenses and much to stoke China’s anxiety and ire. The United States should reject the idea—proposed by former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, among others—of ditching the “One China” policy and formally recognizing Taiwan. It should push back against pro-independence declarations or actions by Taiwanese leaders. In short, the United States must wield a credible ability to defend Taiwan and, at the same time, offer a credible pledge that it aims to prevent either side from unilaterally changing the status quo. This approach is so challenging because of its many contradictions. Beefing up U.S. alliances may decrease China’s military optimism but also increase its sense of foreboding. The urgency needed to bolster deterrence may be hard to square with the prudence that cross-strait diplomacy requires—especially as China policy gets drawn into the U.S. presidential election campaign. A powerful but troubled China is heading in a bad direction. It will take all the strength and sobriety the United States and its friends can muster to prevent a slide into war.

Said counterimposes upon the discourse he calls Orientalism the reading of the fiction genre as fueling imperialism. In Culture and Imperialism , the novel as the mega-text of imperialism replaces the more mundane historical sources of treaties, archives, and memoirs. “Without empire,” claims the critic of novels, “. . . there is no European novel as we know it, and indeed, if we study the impulses giving rise to it, we shall see the far from accidental convergence between the patterns of narrative authority constitutive of the novel on the one hand, and, on the other, a complex ideological configuration underlying the tendency to imperialism.” 640 This is, as John Sutherland points out, a “sweeping proposition.” 641 Said positions the “novel” as both a product of empire and a productive shaping of imperialist ambitions. As a product, the novel understandably rises from a bourgeois public of authors who have the leisure to write and readers who have the education and time to read. For Said it is enough that the novel, “as a cultural artefact of bourgeois society, and imperialism are unthinkable without each other.” 642 If this only means that the novel and imperialism “fortified each other” so much that it is impossible “to read one without in some way dealing with the other,” 643 then we are only being asked to admit that fiction is not divorced from social context and that the study of history can be informed by contemporary fictional narratives. Few historians would doubt this in the abstract. The problem is that Said goes well beyond the abstract without making an adequate concrete case for his chosen particulars. Said appeals to establishment literary texts to explain the origin of the canon: “By the 1840s the English novel had achieved eminence as the aesthetic form and as a major intellectual voice, so to speak, in English society.” 644 On closer inspection, this Defoe-defying claim follows from the fact that Jane Austen and George Eliot, among others, were then writing texts that later critics have relentlessly lauded as aesthetic genius. For the record, Said goes on in Orientalism to cite novels ( Adventures of Hajji-Baba of Ispahan , Bouvard et Pécuchet , Les Chimères , Daniel Deronda , Don Quixote , The Guermantes Way , Heart of Darkness , Louis Lambert , Middlemarch , Les Orientales , A Passage to India , La Peau de Chagrin , Salammbô , The Talisman , Tancred , Victory ), plays ( The Bacchae , The Persians , Mahomet , Othello ), epics ( The Arabian Nights , Chanson de Roland ), poetry ( The Divine Comedy , Don Juan , El Cantar del Mio Cid , the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam , Westöstlicher Diwan ), and operas ( The Abduction from the Seraglio , the Magic Flute ), among other imagined texts. The issue is not, or certainly should not be, whether these authors were creating great literary works, but the extent to which such texts were actively shaping imperialism rather than reflecting personal spins on the obvious empireness the authors and their readers at the time experienced by default. Did the British admiralty— at least before Gilbert and Sullivan— need to be inspired by subliminal readings of Mansfield Park before setting sail? Does the mere fact that novels were being written and read prove that they were indispensible to the imperial ambitions of the British Crown abroad? If Said is right about the Anglo-French attitude to the Orient, how had England, Spain, Portugal, and France colonized the New World without requisite novels as an aid to conquest? Were all novels equally complicitous in abetting imperial ambition? A great deal of Western literature, even more so at the vulgar level of dime novels and tabloid prose ignored by Said, has been unflattering to Muslims, Arabs, and virtually all Orientals. But did every writer of fiction necessarily add to the friction between East and West? The point has come to provide counterpoint. In Culture and Imperialism Said points to contrapuntal reading as a critical lens for reading between the lines to note what is revealingly absent. There is a considerable discussion of this literary coinage with widely different views on what a contrapuntal criticism could mean. 645 The aim is to get underneath the skin of the text, to expose the conscious or unconscious choice of the author by searching for what is missing and at the same time overwhelmingly unrepresented by its absence. This is not simply another reading of the text, but another way of reading. “By looking at the different experiences contrapuntally, as making up a set of what I call intertwined and overlapping histories,” states Said, “I shall try to formulate an alternative both to a politics of blame and to the even more destructive politics of confrontation and hostility.” 646 Who could fault such a goal? Said wants the reader to join with him in reading with a purpose. That purpose, overtly stated, takes both imperialism and resistance into account “by extending our reading of the texts to include what was once forcibly excluded.” 647 Nowhere does Said elaborate a concise methodology for such reading-into; he develops his reading by forcing an example, such as why “a colonial sugar plantation is seen as important to the process of maintaining a particular style of life in England.”

Cultural racism, as Hardt and Negri have stated, is one of proximity to a normalizing Whiteness. While the deterritorializing global capitalism of Empire furiously traverses national, cultural and racial borders, paying little heed to place, its multicultural ideology seemingly appreciates (requires) the difference (distance) of the Other. Slavoj Zizek asserts that: multiculturalism is a disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism, a “racism with a distance”—it “respects” the Other’s identity, conceiving the Other as a self-enclosed “authentic” com- munity towards which he, the multiculturalist, maintains a distance rendered possible by his privileged universal position (1997: 44; emphasis added). It is precisely the “empty point of universality” of multiculturalism that enables it to respect the specificity of the Other by maintaining the proper distance and asserting its own superiority. If we accept that global capital- ism articulates a contemporary Orientalism, we need to withstand, as Zizek argues, merely exposing the (false) universality of multiculturalism as harboring Eurocentricism in the masking of its own particularity. Instead, he asserts, that the “particular cultural background or roots which always support the universal multiculturalist position . . . conceals the fact that the subject is already thoroughly ‘rootless,’ that his true position is the void of universality” (1993: 44). Zizek concludes by contending that rather than pointing out the particular characteristics of the universal subject (white,male,heterosexual, etc.),which represses and subordinates differences, “identifying universality with its empty point of exclusion” (1993: 51) is more likely to challenge extant capitalist hegemony. However, if contemporary Orientalism operates by an inclusive hegemony (which has no outside), we need to interrogate further “what” occupies the void of universality. In his analysis of multiculturalism, Zizek falls short of marking the empty place of the universal as a positionality of Whiteness itself. Our contention is not an attempt to identify the particularities of Whiteness, because its own inscription has no content. Rather, Whiteness as an “absent presence” seeks to stand for, and be a measure of, all of humanity. It operates as a universal point of identification that strives to structure all social identities. We should not therefore confuse or conflate Whiteness with particular white identities. In discussions of Whiteness, as Dyer (1997) points out, there is often an immediate action to identify the specific characteristics of white identities, to highlight their gendered, ethnic or class location, for example. However, the effect of such a move results in only further securing the hegemony of Whiteness. In this respect, Whiteness functions like an “empty signifier” (see Laclau 1994), such that it needs to fill or hegemonize the empty place of the multicultural universal in order to uphold its authority. But what happens when contemporary Orientalism irrupts into the cultural hegemony of Whiteness?

Samuel Huntington argues that ‘the idea of civilization was developed by French thinkers as the opposite of the concept of “barbarism”’.24 Huntington encourages us to think that the narrow understanding of civilization focused on ‘mechanics, technology, and material factors’ has to be supplemented with cultural practices focused on ‘values, norms, institutions’. Huntington further asserts that 19th-century Europeans devoted their energies towards ‘elaborating the criteria by which non- Western societies might be judged to be sufficiently “civilized” to be accepted as members of the European dominated international system’.25 Although Huntington acknowledges the elitism associated with these practices, he makes little attempt to cite these scholars or explicate their specific criteria and their application to particular practices such as weapons regulations and prohibition.26 The demand for these criteria and their application is significant because the ‘relevance of the civilizational paradigm’ articulated by Huntington is not an ahistorical suggestion and his rhetorical efforts to cite weapons proliferation as an ‘intercivilizational issue’ that positions the ‘West and the Rest’ in confrontation with each other deserves careful consideration.27 Huntington is content to simply describe the non- proliferation efforts of the West as efforts ‘to maintain its military superiority through policies of nonproliferation and counter-proliferation with respect to nuclear, biological, chemical weapons and the means to deliver them’.28 He astutely comments that ‘[t]he West promotes nonproliferation as reflecting the interests of all nations in international order and stability. Other nations, however, see non-proliferation as serving the interests of Western hegemony’.29 Huntington cites the growing nexus of cooperation between the Islamic-Sinic civilizations, ‘to develop their military capabilities, particularly weapons of mass destruction and the missiles for delivering them, so as to counter the conventional military superiority of the West’.30 Huntington describes these practices of arms regulation and prohibition as ‘arms buildup versus hold-down’, in the course of which, [t]he West’s antagonists are attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction and the West is attempting to prevent them from doing so. It is not a case of buildup versus buildup but rather of buildup versus hold-down. The size and capabilities of the West’s nuclear arsenal are not, apart from rhetoric, part of the competition . . . The outcome of a race between buildup and hold-down is more predictable. The hold-down efforts of the West may slow the weapons buildup of other societies, but they will not stop it . . . the political motives of core states and regional powers to protect their local hegemonies, all work to subvert Western hold-down efforts.31

Ever since the mediaeval period, China has been an empire of mythical characteristics in the European imagination: the utmost representation of the so-called Far East. Marco Polo had defined a number of traits that would remain unaltered for centuries in the European portrayal of the Chinese world: the luxury and refinement, the culture of exoticism, the mysterious nature of the women, the unheard-of ingenuity and invention, etc. make China an unknown, distant and mysterious world, yet one that is admired and attractive, as suggested by one of the titles of the work by the Venetian, The Book of Wonders.2 The lack of direct contact between the two ends of the Eurasian continent, as a consequence of the fall of the Mongol Empire, which had managed to unify this vast area, contributed to the reification of these ideas, which were applied to everything that extended from the east of the Mediterranean, beyond the known world. The 16th century represented a point of inflection in this trend. The Portuguese route that had led Vasco da Gama to the coast of India skirting the African continent and which continued as far as the ports of Japan and China brought Europe and East Asia into contact once again. And it was by this route, which was completed by the one that the Spaniards opened up through America and the Philippines, that not just goods but cultural products and ideas, including religious ones, circulated. For almost two centuries, the Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism... Catholic missions acted as the utmost exponent of the relations between the Chinese Empire and Europe. The missionaries, especially those of the Society of Jesus, became high-level cross-cultural agents, to the point where some of them attained a position of privilege and entered the court of the emperor as astronomers, engineers or painters.3 Thus, they offered China the friendlier face of the European world, that of the arts and sciences, which they used as an advertisement to spread Christian doctrine among Chinese intellectuals, at the same time conveying to the West a benevolent and friendly view of the Chinese world, interested in justifying their mission and their method. The Jesuits believed that the most effective way of entering the Chinese world meant first converting its governors to the Christian cause; the people then converting should only be a question of time. To do this, they had to adapt to an elaborate and complex culture like that of the Chinese. Consequently, they abandoned their religious habits to adopt the ceremonial robes of the Chinese officials, they learned cultured language, they studied Chinese history and they analysed and translated the Confucian classics. We should not be surprised, then, that the treatises that they wrote about the Chinese world were extremely well documented and that, moreover, they often portrayed the reality of East Asia in sincerely laudatory terms. Confucianism, for example, reached Europe as a moral philosophy that predated the values of Christianity, an idea that was very well received among some 17th-century intellectuals who began to preach the need for a natural religion outside the domain of the Church and who saw in Chinese thought a source of inspiration. (Zhang, 1988, p. 118). This perception gave birth to the Sinophile thought of the 17th and early 18th centuries, which boasted representatives of the intellectual stature of Leibniz, Wolff, Rousseau and Voltaire, who, in their works, praised very diverse aspects of the Chinese world, such as the language, the political system and education. In their works, China became a country governed by a philosopher king with the assistance of literati who are selected by taking into consideration nothing more than their intellectual and moral standing. The respect for laws, the tolerance in ideas and the political excellence are virtues that eclipse the shortcomings –which, nevertheless, did not go unnoticed by some of these thinkers. However, circumstances changed radically in the second half of the 18th century, in both Europe and China, and the Western portrayal of the Chinese world underwent a radical volte-face. On the one hand, the method of the Jesuits of fitting in with Chinese culture was strongly criticised by the other orders, giving rise to the so-called Rites Controversy: the Society of Jesus ended up being dissolved by the Papacy, and the less tolerant Catholic orders expelled by the Chinese emperor. Meanwhile, in Europe the ideas of rationalism gave way to the crystallisation of the enlightened thought of modernity, with its faith in progress. Leibniz and Voltaire were concerned with showing the universality of reason and China was an ideal example of their proposals. Yet, from this point on, enlightened Europeans submitted China to their ideas on historical progress: the stability that had previously been interpreted as an example of the virtues of its political system would become regarded from the mid-18th century onwards as a sign of its lack of evolution and modernity.4 One of the most classic formulations of this Sinophobic thought is seen in J. G. Herder, who in his Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity (1787) said: “The [Chinese] empire is an embalmed mummy painted with hieroglyphics and wrapped in silk; its internal life is like that of animals in hibernation” (XIV, p. 13).5 For Herder, Chinese culture is one that has not evolved for centuries, the vestiges of a distant past, a country without a present, like Egyptian hieroglyphics, which belong to a dead culture. And it was this stereotyped vision that, reproduced and amended, resonated throughout the work of most European intellectuals at the end of the 18th century and throughout the 19th century, from Adam Smith to Marx. However, the one who best defined it was Hegel in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1840), in which he dedicated an entire section to China. Hegel feels that China represents the starting point of the history of humanity, in a formulation that we can consider one of the intellectual bases of the Orientalist representation of Asia: “The History of the World travels from East to West; for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia is the beginning” (Hegel, 2004, p. 13). And he adds: Early do we see China advancing to the condition in which it is found at this day; for [...] every change is excluded, and the fixedness of a character which recurs perpetually takes the place of what we should call the truly historical. China and India lie, as it were, still outside the World’s History, as the mere presupposition of elements whose combination must be waited for to constitute vital progress. (Hegel, 2004, p. 29) Hegel clearly defines the mechanisms of representation of the Chinese world and East Asia, which remained in force for many decades: China is an empire that remains outside historical Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism... processes, with neither evolution nor progress, inert, passive and unable to assume Western modernity by itself. And it is the West that can make the Chinese emerge from this lethargy. The Western world, therefore, becomes a factor –a necessary and sufficient factor– in the transformation of East Asian countries, which becomes the intellectual justification for the colonial actions of the great Euro-American powers in the Pacific and Asia. All the texts which, from the second half of the 19th century, attempt to analyse the modern history of China share this epistemological paradigm, which turned China into an apprentice of the civilising lessons of Western countries.6 China –and East Asia in general– is always described as the passive and feminine part in the relationship it has with the civilised and masculine West (Guarné, 2005). And it is from this perspective that, in the colonial context of the nineteenth century, the Chinese are described as inferior and barbarous, narrow-minded and xenophobic. This is how one of the few texts of the time published in Spain about China describes them, introducing the Fu Manchu stereotype that first literature and then cinema would feed off for decades:

China’s economic ascendency has generated a lot of attention in the Western media, particularly in the United States. In recent years, China has emerged as a key player in the balance of powerand economic relationships in the global landscape, serving as a space for global investments of capital, a resource for labor, as well as a Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 281 massive market for products and services manufactured by foreign corporations (Harvey, 2005; Ong, 2006). Economists have pointed to the instability of a world economic orderthat is dominated by ‘‘Chimerica’’: thesupplementary economic and trade relationship between China and the United States on the global landscape(Ferguson & Schularick, 2011). The emergence of Chimerica has also sparked renewed media interest in the ‘‘Chinese success story’’ within the United States. ‘‘Knowing’’ China has emerged as a crucial objective of the tumultuous Chimerican relationship. Set against this backdrop, we argue that contemporary forms of knowledge production on and about China represent the contemporary face of Orientalism, ‘‘the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient*by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it,by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, the Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient’’ (Said, 1978, p. 3). Rather than a vestigial, historical form of knowing harking back to colonial times, we contend that Orientalism has been reinvigorated, resurrected in the backdrop of neoliberalism*the zeitgeist of global capitalism today. In this paper, through an analysis of contemporary accounts of China in popular U.S. news discourse, we explore the connections between Orientalism and neoliberalism.In particular, our analysis documents how Orientalist ‘‘cultural knowledge’ ’about China is constructed within U.S. news discourse. Our ideological analysis points to how Orientalist knowledge claims situate China within the broader economic narrative of neoliberalism, at the center of which is the notion of Chimerica. Neoliberalism and the U.S.􏰀China Relationship Chimerica’s emergence has been intrinsically tied to the neoliberal project, with the increasing articulation of policy and intervention plans that construct China discursively and materially in the agendas of transnational corporations (TNCs) (Ban & Dutta, 2012). Broadly speaking, neoliberalism is embodied within a globalization logic that supports political-economic configurations of control in the hands of TNCs on the basis of free markets with minimum state involvement. This logic is played out through privatization, deregulation, withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision, and the opening up of nation states to foreign investment and foreign capital (Ganesh, Zoller, & Cheney, 2005; Pal & Dutta, 2008). Neoliberalism involves political and economic logics that emphasize the creation of free-market conditions across national boundaries for TNCs to operate under the purview of international financial institutions like the World Bank (WB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) (Giroux, 2008). While it is clear that neoliberalism is associated with global capitalism, the two are often mistakenly equated. Capitalism is an ‘‘assemblage of economic, technical, legal and political arrangements’’ [emphasis ours] (Nonini, 2008, p. 150), concerning the appropriation of surplus value by owners of the means of production; neoliberalism refers to a set of epistemic commitments [emphasis ours] 282 Z. Ban et al.(Mirowski, 2009) about the ‘‘relationships between capitalist markets, the individual, and the state’’(Nonini, 2008, p. 150). There is debate as to whether China’s enthusiastic participation in global capitalism through ‘‘radical marketization’’ (Wang, 2004, p. 7) and structural transformations indicate that it is neoliberal(or at least ‘‘neoliberal with Chinese characteristics’’ (Harvey, 2005, p. 120)); or whether China’s approach warrants re-conceptualizing the theoretical scope of neoliberalism itself (Ong, 2006).

It can be accepted that the study of the East as a whole was first taken by the decision of the Council in 1312 (Southern, 1962: 72; cited in Said, 2013: 59). Through the Arabic, Greek, Hebraic and Assyrian chairs established within this council, an attempt was made to learn about Eastern cultures (Ibid, 60). East was at that time a geographical East perceived by continental Europe. Greek and Hebraic cultures, which are included in today's ‘West’, were then considered to be part of the ‘East’ (Ibid, 60). In addition, there was no integrity about what and where the West is. For example, in the mediaeval period ‘for Britain the other was France, Catholic Church or others’ (Porter, 2013: 25). However, this started to change with the rise of European imperialism. Unlike the early colonization periods of the Iberian Peninsula, imperialism, which was based on establishing a permanent and dependent system, also started a process of recognition and shaping in parallel with its permanence. The fact that from 1815 to 1914 the area occupied by the European-ruled colonies increased from 35% to 85% of the world (Magdoff, 1974: 893) pointed to the beginning of the construction of a holistic East. In the Eastern construction, the quest to study the AP Hasan Deniz PEKŞEN 210 commonalities of the colonial regions and create ‘collective formulas’ had begun to appear as a method. Islam, which Europeans know most closely, was a convenient area for applying first formulas: (…) Therefore it remains, (…) an important subject of study, not only for abstract reasons connected with the history of law, civilization and religion, but also for practical purposes. The more intimate the relations of Europe with the Muslim East become, the more Muslim countries fall under European suzerainty, the more important it is for us Europeans to become acquainted (Hurgronje, 1899; cited in Bousquet and Schacht, 1957: 257; also cited in Said, 2013: 268). These collective formulas, which were applied to different parts of the East, were an imperialist practice of spreading and domination. A ‘superior West’ and ‘inferior East’ dichotomy took place at the ground of the formula. Within the scope of this dichotomy, three of the elements that Said treats as the four dogmas directly form the basis of Military Orientalism, a derivative form of orientalism: First dogma is the absolute and systematic difference between the West, which is rational, developed, humane, superior, and the Orient, which is aberrant. undeveloped, inferior (Said, 2013: 314- 5). Third dogma is that the Orient is eternal, uniform, and incapable of defining itself (Said, 1985: 97). Therefore it is assumed that a highly generalized and systematic vocabulary for describing the Orient from a Western standpoint is inevitable and even scientifically objective. A fourth dogma is that the Orient is something either to be feared (…) or to be controlled (by pacification, research and development, outright occupation whenever possible) (Said, 2013: 314-315). Although the process of defining the East is a tool for constructing a holistic West (Said, 1994: 336), the main premise has been ‘as Said argues, is always and everywhere about Western superiority’ (Barkawi and Stanski, 2012: 9). At this point, Porter states that the perception of the ‘inferior East’, which is the subject of military orientalism, consists of four components. These are listed as ‘emotive, tribal, irrational and sensuous Orient and Orientals inclined to extremism and violence’ (Porter, 2013: 25). The reflection of the social components listed above appears in the classification of ‘Eastern war.’ According to this perspective, Eastern war based on ‘evasion, delaying and indirectness’ (Keegan, 1993: 387), is different from the Western war. When this argument is examined in a deeper sense, more open orientalist codes emerge. Since the West is ‘settled, creative and productive’, it finds new technologies and methods and therefore prefers face-to-face warfare. The East, on the other hand, is trying to make up for this lack of ‘creativity and Hasan Deniz PEKŞEN Alternatif Politika, 2024, 16 (2): 205-227 https://doi.org/10.53376/ap.2024.08 211 productivity’ with the Eastern War, which it has built on ‘ambush, treachery and deceit’ 1 (Keegan, 2001; cited by Gregory, 2012: 164-165). Thierry Camous, who also describes Eastern war based on the sacrificial culture created by incompetence, also defends his approach with similar statements as other military orientalists. In this approach, the ‘adequate West’ prefers face-to-face war. This approach is demonstrated as the duel culture at the individual level. In the face of this, there is an emphasis that the East, which is described as ‘poor and hopeless’, is trying to cover up its inadequacy in face-toface conflict with self-sacrifice: The case of kamikaze is another very explanatory element in terms of concepts that confront the status of the individual in the Easts and Wests. Westerners cannot understand the meaning of the kamikaze method that terrifies them, because it derives from the notion of another individual status. Kamikaze attacks are rare in the West except for unusual situations. (…) Christian religion and Western morality condemn suicide. The western victim, in particular, does not pursue death, prefer death only from dishonesty and vengeance. On the other hand, in the Muslim East, giving his life for war is regarded as a choice rather than a horror. Moreover, suicide is, first and foremost, a weapon of hopelessness and weak person. The death volunteer is able to reach its purpose much more effectively and with far less opportunity. So voluntary death is a weapon of the mystical, hopeless, and poor East. For the West, the death volunteer is a living symbol of a culturally frightening weapon (Camous, 2011: 439). Another component is the ‘emotive and irrational East’ conceptualization. This conceptualization proposes an ‘Eastern persona’ who motives in the light of cultural positioning rather than rationality. In this context cultural determinants like ‘blood ties’, ‘religious conformity’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘courage in society’ creates emotive motivations for Orientals because of their central position in social life. With this aspect, war in Eastern culture is a scattered reactions that can be made for ‘emotional (hence, often irrational) choices’, rather than an organization made to achieve rational political goals. This perspective can exemplify by evaluations on motivations of participation to war: (...) the death in battle of a Pashtun guerrilla invokes an obligation of revenge among all his male relatives, making the killing of a Taliban guerrilla an act of insurgent multiplication, not subtraction (Johnson and Mason, 2007: 80; cited by Porter, 2013: 152). 1 Derek Gregory was emphasizing that Keegan expresses his ideas in his article on the first armed Predator mission over Kabul and Kandahar. Considering that drone technology can be accepted as the opposite of face-to-face war, the controversy becomes more visible. AP Hasan Deniz PEKŞEN 212 Another component surrounding this emotive-irrational Oriental is the ‘tribal Oriental’. In the tribal Oriental component, images of ‘passive and undecided Oriental’, ‘emotional-irrational (and therefore) self-sacrificing Oriental’ and ‘Oriental, who need a leader since the prophet’ are intertwined. Johnson and Mason’s evaluation on the Taliban exemplify this perspective as well. Their assessment claimed that the focus of the struggle against Taliban should be on their leader Mullah Omar, because the charisma and legitimacy created by the ‘person wearing the cloak of the prophet’ can’t pass to someone else (Ibid, 151). Although it will be observed in the future how wrong it is, 2 it is a good example to reveal the codes. Said emphasizes that this is an orientalist tradition emphasized especially for Islamic societies. The basis of his emphasis is his quote from Grunebaum. Grunebaum states that ‘Islam absolutely and in all cases refuses to see man as the judge or measure of things (...) and is content with psychological truth’ (Von Grunebaum, 1964: 261). Said argues that as a result of this assumption, perception of a passive Oriental individual who acts in the direction of the tribe/leader has been reached (Said, 2013: 311). The components explained above created a basis for future orientalist production processes. However, this re-production process was not constructed in a free environment. The appearance of neo-orientalism and new barbarism concepts provided a general framework for military theorists. Thus, this period should be examined first.

The photo-montage creates a nuclear aesthetic that is found in the world of cinematic make-believe and in the literature and reporting of 9/11. While disaster films make us imagine nuclear disasters that give birth to mutant monsters and desolate urban areas, the 9/11 literature and journalistic reporting mislead us into believing that we have finally witnessed, experienced, and ultimately survived, a “nuclear-like attack”. Accounts of the attacks on the Twin Towers include descriptions of nuclear-like power emanating from the exploding airplanes, the absence of humanity in an urban area, ash-covered streets that are compared with nuclear winter, an American president locked in a bunker command center, and an American government that went into pro- tective hiding. All these nuclear references may have fooled Americans into believing that a nuclear attack can be isolated to a few city blocks, a couple of thousand deaths, with many people able to escape unscathed, a temporarily crippled economy, and a trium- phant presidential return to the White House later that evening. This photo-montage provides similar false hopes. But this is exactly what Fallows calls out against: fear that creates self-inflicting wounds. The photograph undermines Fallows’ thesis by providing us with a scene that scares us (as an event like this should) and yet fools us into believing we can handle a nuclear attack of this magnitude. Fallows reminds us that the fallout of a nuclear attack will be much greater than that of 9/11. But 9/11 seems to have circumscribed our imagination of nuclear devastation, as is evident in this photo-montage. Ritter’s work lends banality to the nuclear attack that Fallows fears.

From a critical and constructivist perspective, on the other hand, the realist hypocrisy matters a great deal. As neorealists acknowledge, critical and constructivist theorists embrace an altogether dissimilar epistemology and ontology, employing reflexive and interpretive, rather than rationalist and positivist, research choices.69 Critical theorists identify the assumptions and practices that undergird power relations and through immanent critique attempt to identify the unsustainable aspects of power relations, which might suggest plausible alternative outcomes. Public criticism of the Iraq war and so-called Bush Doctrine, for instance, may not have stopped war in 2003, but it has created mounting pressure for early withdrawal from Iraq and has clearly influenced the tenor of the public policy debate about Iran. Conceivably, neorealist and other anti war critics have fomented an "Iraq Syndrome" that will significantly constrain American use of force for the fore seeable future. Moreover, the realist hypocrisy matters because critical theorists argue reflexively that IR theory helps make the world what it is-and that IR theorizing itself is vulnerable to the same sort of critical evaluation. Indeed, this article serves essentially as an analytical exercise in critical theory, applying its methods to neorealist arguments about theory and public policy. The fissures identified here could provoke scholars to rethink longstanding assumptions about IR theory and policy. After all, it appears as if there is much wider agreement than previously thought that discussion about world politics matters for determining how a state like the U.S. can and should act in the inter national system. Twenty-five years ago, the critical IR theorist Robert Cox famously argued that "theory is always for someone and for some purpose." Ironically, however, Cox viewed Waltz's neorealism as a theory "ideologically to be a science at the service of big-power management of the inter national system."70 Neorealist theory is not a critical theory, but many of the scholars who have helped develop this theory in the field of international relations behave very much as critical theorists when they partake in foreign policy debates. The neorealists implicitly and explicitly embrace presuppositions about the importance of public debate and political communication that are almost entirely consistent with the premises of critical theory. In the Iraq debate and in other examples, the neorealists are revealing lies, political spin, and other distortions of the debate pro mulgated by government elites and their allies. They chal lenge the legitimacy of established policies and critique what they see as excessive secrecy. Most importantly, these neorealists seek to transform public and elite conscious ness so as to produce social pressures for alternative out comes. For critical theorists, this contradiction between realist theorizing and policy action is logically unsustain able and suggests an opening for alternative outcomes. It would strongly imply the significant need for an under standing of foreign policy, and likely a theory of inter national relations, that accounts for communicative action.

In reimagining the West and articulating the problem of difference or heterology in international relations, scholars contend that ‘difference is marked and contained as international difference’ with the emergence of territorially bounded modern sovereign states that ‘defines the problem of difference principally as between and among states’ (Naeem & David, 2004). It is claimed that the insistence on the maintenance of order in the international system generates a ‘pervasive suspicion of difference’ as a source of disorder, degeneration and armed conflict. The ‘problem of difference emerges and intensifies under modern conditions of relative equality, often leading to the reassertion of (illicit or informal) forms of social hierarchy’ and the marking of others as inferior, dependent and threatening (Naeem & David, 2004, p. 23). The doubt and anxiety generated with the discovery of difference is to be contained by locating it ‘at some distance from the self’ and insisting on structural uniformity. These managerial exercises compound the problem of difference by their failure to account for the injuries suffered as a result of a violent and exploitative colonial practices of imperialism. Barkawi and Stanski (2012) further suggest that war among states is ‘a difference of opinion pursued through violent means’ (Barkawi & Stanski, 2012, pp. 2–3) It is the act of splitting of inside/outside that ‘deflect (s) our responses to difference in the direction of ‘putrefying hatred’ and constitutes the ‘political and ethical limits and possibilities of modern life’ (Naeem & David, 2004, pp. 44–45). These conditions of sovereign political community foster ‘ethically limited and tragic interactions of these separate states’ (Naeem & David, 2004, pp. 44–45). The tragic interactions during war entail ‘recognition as well as Othering’ through war propaganda (Porter, 2013). But such propaganda exercises are often undertaken as preliminary measures prior to the catalytic event that leads to the outbreak of actual war. This othering takes place through deployment of techno-racial stereotyping. It is differences in technology and race that are emphasized to produce stereotypes. John W. Dower (1986) argues that ‘portraits of the enemy’ are sketched through ‘gross simplification and reductionism’ generating two forms of stereotyping (Dower, 1986, p. 30). The ‘first kind of stereotyping could be summed up in the statement: You are the opposite of what you say you are and the opposite of us, not peaceful but warlike, not good but bad…In the second form of stereotyping, the formula ran like this: you are what you say you are, but that itself is reprehensible’ (Dower, 1986, p. 30).