The China threat is a fantasized, falsely constructed threat based on otherization and performances of power.

Imagining China: the construction of threat and political possibility

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

The analysis which follows demonstrates that China ‘threats’ to the United States have to some extent always been established and perpetuated through representation and discourse. Michel Foucault described discourse as ‘the general domain of all statements’, constituting either a group of individual statements or a regulated practice which accounts for a number of statements.Footnote18 American discourse of China can therefore be manifest as disparate and single statements about that country or as collectives of related statements such as the China Threat Theory. Ultimately, American representations of China are discursive constructions of truths or realities about its existence.

The article draws in part from the work of David Campbell who suggests that dangers in the international realm are invariably threats to understandings about the self. ‘The mere existence of an alternative mode of being’, argues Campbell, ‘the presence of which exemplifies that different identities are possible … is sometimes enough to produce the understanding of a threat.’Footnote19 As a result, interpretations of global danger can be traced to the processes by which states are made foreign from one another through discourses of separation and difference.Footnote20 In this analysis it is demonstrated that particular American discourses have historically made the US foreign from China. Case study one for example demonstrates that nineteenth-century racial discourses of non-white immigrant Chinese separated China from a United States largely defined by its presumed Caucasian foundations. In case study two we see that Cold War ideological discourses of communism distanced the PRC from the democratic-capitalist US. These types of discourses are shown to have constituted a ‘specific sort of boundary producing political performance’.Footnote21

Across the history of Sino-US relations then when ‘dangers’ from China have emerged, they have always been perceived through the lens of American identity. In consequence, they have always existed as dangers to that identity. In this analysis it is argued that a key purpose of depicting China as a threat has been to protect components of American identity (primarily racial and ideological) deemed most fundamental to its being. As such, representations of a threatening China have most commonly been advanced by, and served the interests of, those who support actions to defend that identity. The case study analyses which follow reveal that this has included politicians and policymaking circles, such as those within the administration of President Harry Truman which implemented the Cold War containment of the PRC. It also exposes the complicity of other societal individuals and institutions including elements of the late nineteenth-century American media which supported restrictions against Chinese immigration to the western United States.

It is demonstrated that, twice before, this discursive process of separating China from the United States has resulted in a crisis of American identity. Crises of identity occur when the existing order is considered in danger of rupture. The prevailing authority is seen to be weakened and rhetoric over how to reassert the ‘natural’ identity intensifies.Footnote22 Case studies one and two expose how such crises have previously emerged. These moments were characterised by perceived attacks upon core assumptions about what the United States was understood to be: fundamentally white in the late nineteenth century and democratic-capitalist in the early Cold War. Case study three shows that while today's China ‘threat’ to US security is yet to generate such a crisis, we must learn from those of the past to help avoid the types of consequences they have previously facilitated.

As Director Clapper unwittingly confirmed then the capabilities and intentions of a ‘rising’ China are only part of the story. International relations are driven by forces both material and ideational and the processes by which China is made foreign from, and potentially dangerous to, the United States are inseparable from the enactment of US China policy. This is because, to reaffirm, American discourses of China have never been produced objectively or in the absence of purpose or intent. Their dissemination is a performance of power, however seemingly innocent or benign.Footnote23 This is not to claim causal linkages between representation and foreign policy. Rather, it is to reveal the specific historical conditions within which policies have occurred, through an analysis of the political history of the production of truth.Footnote24

Accordingly, this analysis shifts from a concern with ‘why’ to ‘how’ questions. ‘Why’ questions assume that particular practices can happen by taking for granted the identities of the actors involved.Footnote25 They assume, for instance, the availability of a range of policy options in Washington from the self-evident existence of a China threat. ‘How’ questions investigate the production of identity and the processes which ensure that particular practices can be enacted while others are precluded.Footnote26 In this analysis they are concerned with how and why China ‘threats’ have come to exist, who has been responsible for their production and how those socially constructed dangers have established the necessary realities within which particular US foreign policies could legitimately be advanced.

US China policy, however, must not be narrowly conceived as a ‘bridge’ between two states.Footnote27 In fact, it works on behalf of societal discourses about China to reassert the understandings of difference upon which it relies.Footnote28 Rather than a final manifestation of representational processes, then, US China policy itself works to construct China's identity as well as that of the United States. As the case study analyses show, it perpetuates discursive difference through the rhetoric and actions (governmental acts, speeches, etc.) by which it is advanced and the reproduction of a China ‘threat’ continues. In such a way it constitutes the international ‘inscription of foreignness’, protecting American values and identity when seemingly threatened by that of China.Footnote29 As Hixson asserts, ‘[f]oreign policy plays a profoundly significant role in the process of creating, affirming and disciplining conceptions of national identity’, and the United States has always been especially dependent upon representational practices for understandings about its identity.Footnote30

In sum, this article advances three principal arguments. First, throughout history ‘threats’ from China towards the United States have never been explicable in terms of material forces alone. They have in part been fantasised, socially constructed products of American discourse. The physical contours of Sino-American relations have been given meaning by processes of representation so that China has repeatedly been made threatening no matter its intentions. Second, representations of China ‘threats’ have always been key to the enactment and justification of US foreign policies formulated in response. Specifically, they have framed the boundaries of political possibility so that certain policies could be enabled while potential alternatives could be discarded. Third, US China policies themselves have reaffirmed discourses of foreignness and the identities of both China and the United States, functioning to protect the American identity from which the ‘threats’ have been produced.