Pan is wrong---there is no monolithic “China threat theory” and Pan’s critique gets coopted to justify nationalist violence

Notwithstanding this Western fascination with China and the positive response of former Marxists, such as Jacques, to the new China, Pan discerns an Orientalist ideology distorting Western commentary on the party state, and especially its international relations (6). Following Edward Said, Pan claims that such Western Orientalism reveals ‘not something concrete about the orient, but something about the orientalists themselves, their recurring latent desire of fears and fantasies about the orient’ (16). In order to unmask the limits of Western representations of China’s rise, Pan employs a critical ‘methodology’ that ‘draws on constructivist and deconstructivist approaches’ (9). Whereas the ‘former questions the underlying dichotomy of reality/knowledge in Western study of China’s international relations’, the latter shows how paradigmatic representations of China ‘condition the way we give meaning to that country’ and ‘are socially constitutive of it’ (9). Pan maintains that the two paradigms of ‘China threat’ and ‘China opportunity’ in Western discourse shape China’s reality for Western ‘China watchers’ (3). These discourses, Pan claims, are ‘ambivalent’ (65). He contends that this ‘bifocal representation of China, like Western discourses of China more generally, tell us a great deal about the west itself, its self -imagination, its torn, anxious, subjectivity, as well as its discursive effects of othering’ (65). This is a large claim.¶ Interestingly, Pan fails to note that after the Tiananmen incident in 1989, Chinese new left scholarship also embraced Said’s critique of Orientalism in order to reinforce both the party state and a burgeoning sense of Chinese nationalism. To counter Western liberal discourse, academics associated with the Central Party School promoted an ideology of Occidentalism to deflect domestic and international pressure to democratise China. In this, they drew not only upon Said, but also upon Foucault and the post-1968 school of French radical thought that, as Richard Wolin has demonstrated, was itself initiated in an appreciation of Mao’s cultural revolution. In other words, the critical and deconstructive methodologies that came to influence American and European social science from the 1980s had a Maoist inspiration (Wolin 2010: 12–18).¶ Subsequently, in the changed circumstances of the 1990s, as American sinologist Fewsmith has shown, young Chinese scholars ‘adopted a variety of postmodernist and critical methodologies’ (2008: 125). Paradoxically, these scholars, such as Wang Hui and Zhang Kuan (Wang 2011), had been educated in the USA and were familiar with fashionable academic criticism of a postmodern and deconstructionist hue that ‘demythified’ the West (Fewsmith 2008: 125–29). This approach, promulgated in the academic journal Dushu (Readings), deconstructed, via Said and Foucault, Western narratives about China. Zhang Kuan, in particular, rejected Enlightenment values and saw postmodern critical theory as a method to build up a national ‘discourse of resistance’ and counter Western demands regarding issues such as human rights and intellectual property.¶ It is through its affinity with this self-strengthening, Occidentalist lens, that Pan’s critical study should perhaps be critically read. Simply put, Pan identifies a political economy of fear and desire that informs and complicates Western foreign policy and, Pan asserts, tells us more about the West’s ‘self-imagination’ than it does about Chinese reality. Pan attempts to sustain this claim via an analysis, in Chapter 5, of the self-fulfilling prophecy of the China threat, followed, in Chapters 6 and 7, by exposure of the false promises and premises of the China ‘opportunity’. Pan certainly offers a provocative insight into Western attitudes to China and their impact on Chinese political thinking. In particular, he demonstrates that China’s foreign policy-makers react negatively to what they view as a hostile American strategy of containment (101). In this context, Pan contends, accurately, that Sino–US relations are mutually constitutive and the USA must take some responsibility for the rise of China threat (107). This latter point, however, is one that Australian realists like Owen Harries, whom Pan cites approvingly, have made consistently since the late 1990s. In other words, not all Western analysis uncritically endorses the view that China’s rise is threatening. Nor is all Western perception of this rise reducible to the threat scenario advanced by recent US administrations.¶ Pan’s subsequent argument that the China opportunity thesis leads to inevitable disappointment and subtly reinforces the China threat paradigm is, also, somewhat misleading. On the one hand, Pan notes that Western anticipation of ‘China’s transformation and democratization’ has ‘become a burgeoning cottage industry’ (111). Yet, on the other hand, Pan observes that Western commentators, such as Jacques, demonstrate a growing awareness that the democratisation thesis is a fantasy. That is, Pan, like Jacques, argues that China ‘will neither democratize nor collapse, but may instead remain politically authoritarian and economically stable at the same time’ (132). To merge, as Pan does, the democratisation thesis into its authoritarian antithesis in order to evoke ‘present Western disillusionment’ (132) with China is somewhat reductionist. Pan’s contention that we need a new paradigm shift ‘to free ourselves from the positivist aspiration to grand theory or transcendental scientific paradigm itself’ (157) might be admirable, but this will not be achieved by a constructivism that would ultimately meet with the approval of what Brady terms China’s thought managers (Brady: