The aff’s discourse of China is otherizing and makes it impossible to see any other explanation for China’s action – that forces China to react accordingly and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy
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]
By now, it seems clear that neither China's capabilities nor intentions really matter. Rather, almost by its mere geographical existence, China has been qualified as an absolute strategic "other," a discursive construct from which it cannot escape. Because of this, "China" in U.S. IR discourse has been objectified and deprived of its own subjectivity and exists mainly in and for the U.S. self. Little wonder that for many U.S. China specialists, China becomes merely a "national security concern" for the United States, with the "severe disproportion between the keen attention to China as a security concern and the intractable neglect of China's [own] security con- cerns in the current debate."62
At this point, at issue here is no longer whether the "China threat" argument is true or false, but is rather its reflection of a shared positivist mentality among mainstream China experts that they know China better than do the Chinese themselves.63 "We" alone can know for sure that they consider "us" their enemy and thus pose a menace to "us." Such an account of China, in many ways, strongly seems to resemble Orientalists' problematic distinc- tion between the West and the Orient. Like orientalism, the U.S. construction of the Chinese "other" does not require that China acknowledge the validity of that dichotomous construction. Indeed, as Edward Said point out, "It is enough for 'us' to set up these distinctions in our own minds; [and] 'they' become 'they' accordingly."64
It may be the case that there is nothing inherently wrong with perceiving others through one's own subjective lens. Yet, what is problematic with mainstream U.S. China watchers is that they refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the inherent fluidity of Chinese identity and subjectivity and try instead to fix its ambiguity as absolute difference from "us," a kind of certainty that denotes nothing but otherness and threats. As a result, it becomes difficult to find a legitimate space for alternative ways of understanding an inherently volatile, amorphous China65 or to recognize that China's future trajectory in global politics is contingent essentially on how "we" in the United States and the West in general want to see it as well as on how the Chinese choose to shape it.66 Indeed, discourses of "us" and "them" are always closely linked to how "we" as "what we are" deal with "them" as "what they are" in the practical realm. This is exactly how the discursive strategy of perceiving China as a threatening other should be understood, a point addressed in the following section, which explores some of the practical dimension of this discursive strategy in the containment perspectives and hegemonic ambitions of U.S. foreign policy.