The China impact is an inaccurate social construct that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy – challenging the hegemony of China threat discourse is key to effective policy

The modern day China ‘threat’ to the United States is not an unproblematic, neutrally verifiable phenomenon. It is an imagined construction of American design and the product of societal representations which, to a significant extent, have established the truth that a ‘rising’ China endangers US security. This is an increasingly acknowledged, but still relatively under-developed, concept within the literature.121 The purpose of this article has been to expose how ‘threats’ from China towards the United States have always been contingent upon subjective interpretation. The three case studies chosen represent those moments across the lifetime of Sino-US relations at which China has been perceived as most threatening to American security. The ‘threats’ emerged in highly contrasting eras. The nature of each was very different and they emerged from varying sources (broadly speaking, from immigration in the nineteenth century and from ‘great power’ rivalry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries). Yet in this way they most effectively demonstrate how China ‘threats’ have repeatedly existed as socially constructed phenomenon. Collectively they reveal the consistent centrality of understandings about the United States in perceptions of external danger. They demonstrate that, regardless of China's ability to assert material force or of the manner in which it has been seen to impose itself upon the United States, the reality of danger can be manufactured and made real. China ‘threats’ have always been threats to American identity so that the individual sources of ‘danger’ – whether a nuclear capability or an influx of (relatively few) foreign immigrants – have never been the sole determining factors. As James Der Derian notes, danger can be ascribed to otherness wherever it may be found.122 During the mid-to-late nineteenth century and throughout the early Cold War, perceptions of China ‘threats’ provoked crises of American identity. The twenty-first-century China ‘threat’ is yet to be understood in this way but it remains inexplicable in simple material terms. As ever, the physical realities of China are important but they are interpreted in such a way to make them threatening, regardless of Beijing's intentions. Most importantly, this article has shown how processes of representation have been complicit at every stage of the formulation, enactment, and justification of US China policy. Their primary purpose has been to dislocate China's identity from that of the United States and introduce opportunities for action. Further, those policies themselves have reaffirmed the discourses of separation and difference which make China foreign from the United States, protecting American identity from the imagined threat. Ultimately, this analysis has sought to expose the inadequacy of approaches to the study of US China policy which privilege and centralise material forces to the extent that ideas are subordinated or even excluded. Joseph Nye argues that the China Threat Theory has the potential to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Based upon a crude hypothetical assumption that there exists a 50 per cent chance of China becoming aggressive and a 50 per cent chance of it not, Nye explains, to treat China as an enemy now effectively discounts 50 per cent of the future.123 In such way he emphasises the ideational constitution of material forces and the power of discourse to create selected truths about the world so that certain courses of action are enabled while others are precluded. Assessments such as those of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in March 2011 should therefore not only be considered misguided, but also potentially dangerous. For while they appear to represent authoritative statements of fact they actually rely upon subjective assumptions about China and the material capabilities he describes.