China is not any more of a threat now than it was in the past

China's military and economic strengths are far greater today than at any point in the history of Sino-US relations. Yet, the ‘threat’ it presents to American security is no less a social construction than in the past. The modern day proliferation of popular and academic ‘China threat’ literatures in particular is reflective of the increasingly widespread conviction that a ‘rising’ China inevitably constitutes a real or potential danger.Footnote97 Robert Kaplan explains that ‘the American military contest with China in the Pacific will define the twenty first century’.Footnote98 He does not question if or even when China might become a threat. He emphasises its inevitability. Babbin and Timperlake provide a fictional narrative of future Sino-American tensions in which, among other things, China uses cyber warfare to shut down American defence systems. The hostile scenario they present, it is argued, ‘could easily become fact … The Verdict: China means war.’Footnote99 Certainly, and as has been the case throughout history, China is not uniformly perceived in these terms. Among a significant proportion of the American population, however, the China ‘threat’ is an accepted and relatively unproblematic phenomenon.

China now has the world's largest population, the fastest growing economy, the largest army, the largest middle class, a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, a manned space program and a nuclear arsenal.Footnote100 Yet, all of these things do not necessarily make China a threat. Countries which share variations of these, notably the possession of nuclear weapons, a permanent presence in the Security Council and significant standing armies are not perceived in this way. Indeed, and as Director Clapper revealed in the Senate in early 2011, states like Russia with far greater stockpiles of nuclear weapons and significant additional military hardware can be viewed in less threatening terms, even when capability is cited as the critical factor.Footnote101 Furthermore, the PRC has had a large population and a substantial army since its founding in 1949, nuclear weapons since 1964 and a seat on the Security Council since 1971 without consistently being interpreted as a threat. Accordingly, forces additional to those of China's capabilities must still be implicated in understandings about the dangers it is said to present.