Vote neg to reject the aff’s securitizing, reductionist representation of China
Pan 4 [Chengxin Pan is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences and a member of the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University. He has held visiting positions at the University of Melbourne, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Peking University, Fudan University and the University of Macau, and was an Endeavour Research Fellow at the Australian Studies Centre, Peking University, and is on the editorial board of Series in International Relations Classics. “The ‘China Threat’ in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, vol. 29, no. 3, 2004, pp. 305–31. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40645119. accessed 7-27-2023, HKR-SWY]
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.