K comes first - the aff's discourse is prior to the plan's effects, because the ideas and assumptions that go into justifying the plan shape the solutions we see as valuable - claims to plan 'objectivity' mask the political interests underlying the aff's representations

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).

A clearly-defined and coherent China Threat Discourse has been employed to protect particular US interests, and elements that constitute it will be unpacked in order to demonstrate how it interacts with particular discourses of US national security which, in the postCold War era, have become increasingly linked to critical infrastructure (Collier & Lakoff, 2008, p. 31). The 2017 USNational Security Strategy directly ties issues of critical infrastructure to national security because ‘securing vital systems in the face of various potential disruptions [is] now a core responsibility of government’ (Collier & Lakoff, 2015, p. 42). Policy documents tend not to articulate their theoretical assumptions, but US critical infrastructure policy is based on realist security logic defined by objective threats. While they list them, documents like the National Security Strategy are not able to articulate how threats came to be. Nyman posits that ‘in the existing literature, “threats” to energy security are defined in a way that implies objectivity in the designation, with negligible analysis given over to the process by which threats are socially constructed’(2014:, p. 47) and energy security is ‘contested and contingent, rather than an objectively identifiable goal’ (2014:, p. 47). This article will explore critical infrastructure via discursive analyses of energy and cyber security to examine how they have become primary components of, and intertextually linked with the China Threat Discourse.