China threat discourse racist

In China, IR scholars were also quick to link the China-Threat discourse to the yellow peril fear and the genealogy of racist western doctrine pertaining to China (Shi, 1997; Luo, 1997; Li, 1999; Shi, 2004; Chen, 2005). My analytical focus here is not on revealing whether the U.S. mediatic portrayal of Lee borrowed from yellow peril imageries in its construction of China as a security threat—although Hanser (2013) found racist footprints in major U.S. print-media coverage of scandals involving defective/contaminated products manufactured in China. Rather, what I am concerned with is how racial profiling appears to have played a role in Dr. Lee’s case. Racist or not as a discourse, the China-Threat is racist in its consequence. For instance, in 1997 when the CIA and other security-related agencies took stock of China’s sudden advance in nuclear design, some voices of reason noted that more than a few thousand scientists and federal workers had had access to the W-88 warhead blueprint design, so it was premature to think the alleged theft had occurred at Los Alamos. But, once Los Alamos was nevertheless “established” as the institutional source of the said leak, mostly because the W-88 was originally designed there, the suspicion quickly fell on Dr. Lee, one of the few scientists with Chinese heritage who had had contacts with Mainland Chinese colleagues in the 1980s.