credibility of Mearsheimer’s stuff is inflated due to his prestige

At the very beginning of this essay, boldly titled “China’s Unpeaceful Rise,” John Mearsheimer, a world-renowned IR scholar, pessimistically predicts the consequences of China’s rise. Mearsheimer’s claim that China’s rise will be “unpeaceful” is clearly in antithesis to the Chinese government’s promise of a “peaceful rise.” In a typical example of the latter, Zheng, a former Chinese official and policy advisor, assures the outside world that “China does not seek hegemony or predominance in world affairs,” and that “China’s development depends on world peace— a peace that its development will in turn reinforce.” 41 People are thus faced with two opposing scenarios for IR in East Asia. Which should one believe? A poststructuralist reading of the above extract suggests that Mearsheimer articulates the China threat theory through the scientific mode of representation. First, there is a process of structural incorporation, whereby the subject of China serves the broader interests of academic enquiry. In short, although this is a serious issue of “hard” security, it is presented as a research topic. The author does not mention the China threat directly in the essay, and his argument develops in a fairly objective tone. Indeed, Mearsheimer emphasizes at the outset the need for a “theory of international politics” that explains the behavior of rising great powers when one tries to “predict” the future of world politics.42 Therefore, the issue of China’s rise and its consequences is fashioned as an academic subject rather than an internationally current topic of passionate debate.

In the scientific mode, the China threat is securitized via “scientific” reasoning. In this regard, the referent object is the national security of the United States, the world’s single remaining superpower and its allies. The subject or audience comprises the intellectual elites and, more important, policy makers of the United States and its allies. The securitizers are IR academics and policy analysts, represented in the above extract by Mearsheimer. From the poststructuralist perspective, these agents perform securitization acts by formulating theories, predicting inevitable outcomes, and advocating policy options. As a result, the distinction between theory and practice disappears at this point. To ensure that the issue of the China threat is situated in the relevant epistemic terrain, the proper language must be adopted for academic debate on the existence and nature of the threat posed by China. Mearsheimer thus claims that his argument is based on a “theory” of rising great powers and the effects of their rise on international politics. As students of international politics will immediately recognize, this “theory” is the “offensive” variant of the realist IR tradition, well documented in Mearsheimer’s 2001 book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. 43

In this influential study, Mearsheimer presents his argument on the China threat issue with consummate professionalism. He first enumerates the five “bedrock” assumptions of offensive realism: an anarchic international system; the inherently offensive military capabilities of great powers; uncertainty about other states’ intentions; survival as the primary goal; and the rationality of state actors. The combined effects of these assumptions are that great powers tend to be fearful of each other, to rely upon themselves for their survival, and to try by any means to maximize their own power.44 Mearsheimer concludes that this “scientific” logic is generally applicable as an explanation of the behavior of great powers that “seek to gain as much power as possible over their rivals.” 45

The issues of power and knowledge are crucial to the scientific mode. Only certain individuals can lay claim to the “knowledge” that is widely accepted as legitimate. The dominant “knowledge” of global affairs is both “arbitrary” (in the sense that it is only one of many interpretations) and “non-arbitrary” (in the sense that certain interpretative practices predominate worldwide).46 For an interpretation of global affairs to become dominant, it requires power and authority in its field. The epistemological and ontological foundations of interpretations of IR thus matter less than their authority. Due to his well-established reputation worldwide as a scholar of IR, Mearsheimer’s acts of securitization have considerable power and authority. One survey ranks him among the scholars with the greatest influence and most interesting output in the field over the past few decades.47 According to Google Scholar, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics has been cited as many as 3,371 times (as of April 2014).

With regard to substantial modality, the main social spheres addressed by the scientific mode of securitization are military and strategic. Unlike China, which defends itself against China threat allegations primarily with reassurances of goodwill, a securitizer, like Mearsheimer, seeks to argue from a “scientific” basis. He reasons that “to predict the future in Asia, one needs a theory of international politics” that is “logically sound.” 48 Mearsheimer builds a specific communicative “sign system” in the use of scientific language to make claims to knowledge.49 He speaks from the perspective of a scientifically trained expert in world politics, thus privileging technical language over everyday language. The threat posed by a rising China to international security is reasoned “scientifically” to be inevitable. This raises the question of what practice or activity this use of language is designed to elicit. By persuading readers of the inevitability of a Chinese threat, for example, Mearsheimer may aim to prompt the action perceived as necessary to prevent this threat. According to a survey titled “The Ivory Tower,” published in Foreign Policy, the majority of both academics and practitioners in the United States consider China’s rise to be the most important U.S. foreign-policy challenge.50 Similarly, both IR scholars and practitioners regularly pinpoint East Asia as the region of greatest strategic importance to the United States today and over the next 20 years. Although most IR scholars agree that China’s political influence has not yet exceeded that of the United States, they predict that the chance of war between the two countries will increase from 13 percent in the next 10 years to 23 percent in the next 30 years.51