Link – the Aff’s rhetorical discourse on China is explicitly violent, racist and dominating all the way down to its scholarship. Their construction of China is premised off contemporary neoliberalist orientalism, and you have an ethical and academic duty to challenge it

China’s economic ascendency has generated a lot of attention in the Western media, particularly in the United States. In recent years, China has emerged as a key player in the balance of powerand economic relationships in the global landscape, serving as a space for global investments of capital, a resource for labor, as well as a Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 281 massive market for products and services manufactured by foreign corporations (Harvey, 2005; Ong, 2006). Economists have pointed to the instability of a world economic orderthat is dominated by ‘‘Chimerica’’: thesupplementary economic and trade relationship between China and the United States on the global landscape(Ferguson & Schularick, 2011). The emergence of Chimerica has also sparked renewed media interest in the ‘‘Chinese success story’’ within the United States. ‘‘Knowing’’ China has emerged as a crucial objective of the tumultuous Chimerican relationship. Set against this backdrop, we argue that contemporary forms of knowledge production on and about China represent the contemporary face of Orientalism, ‘‘the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient*by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it,by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, the Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient’’ (Said, 1978, p. 3). Rather than a vestigial, historical form of knowing harking back to colonial times, we contend that Orientalism has been reinvigorated, resurrected in the backdrop of neoliberalism*the zeitgeist of global capitalism today. In this paper, through an analysis of contemporary accounts of China in popular U.S. news discourse, we explore the connections between Orientalism and neoliberalism.In particular, our analysis documents how Orientalist ‘‘cultural knowledge’ ’about China is constructed within U.S. news discourse. Our ideological analysis points to how Orientalist knowledge claims situate China within the broader economic narrative of neoliberalism, at the center of which is the notion of Chimerica. Neoliberalism and the U.S.􏰀China Relationship Chimerica’s emergence has been intrinsically tied to the neoliberal project, with the increasing articulation of policy and intervention plans that construct China discursively and materially in the agendas of transnational corporations (TNCs) (Ban & Dutta, 2012). Broadly speaking, neoliberalism is embodied within a globalization logic that supports political-economic configurations of control in the hands of TNCs on the basis of free markets with minimum state involvement. This logic is played out through privatization, deregulation, withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision, and the opening up of nation states to foreign investment and foreign capital (Ganesh, Zoller, & Cheney, 2005; Pal & Dutta, 2008). Neoliberalism involves political and economic logics that emphasize the creation of free-market conditions across national boundaries for TNCs to operate under the purview of international financial institutions like the World Bank (WB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) (Giroux, 2008). While it is clear that neoliberalism is associated with global capitalism, the two are often mistakenly equated. Capitalism is an ‘‘assemblage of economic, technical, legal and political arrangements’’ [emphasis ours] (Nonini, 2008, p. 150), concerning the appropriation of surplus value by owners of the means of production; neoliberalism refers to a set of epistemic commitments [emphasis ours] 282 Z. Ban et al.(Mirowski, 2009) about the ‘‘relationships between capitalist markets, the individual, and the state’’(Nonini, 2008, p. 150). There is debate as to whether China’s enthusiastic participation in global capitalism through ‘‘radical marketization’’ (Wang, 2004, p. 7) and structural transformations indicate that it is neoliberal(or at least ‘‘neoliberal with Chinese characteristics’’ (Harvey, 2005, p. 120)); or whether China’s approach warrants re-conceptualizing the theoretical scope of neoliberalism itself (Ong, 2006).