China threat discourse is cover the US use to justify their own colonialism.
Kim ’22 [Jodi Kim, Professor in the English and Creative Writing Departments at Dartmouth College, PhD from UC Berkeley; “PERVERSE TEMPORALITIES: Primitive Accumulation and the Settler Colonial Foundations of Debt Imperialism” in “Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries”; Duke University Press; doi.org/10.1215/9781478022923; accessed via University of Michigan Libraries, 07-12-2024] dliang
This asymmetrical relation is now triangulated by China. Unlike the United States, however, China is manipulating debt as a newly emergent creditor. It is deploying what has been called “debtbook diplomacy,” or more pointedly “debt-trap diplomacy,” a strategic leveraging of debts made to economically vulnerable nations across Asia and the Pacific for political influence and eco- nomic advantages.65 Yet as I related in the Introduction, critiques of China’s imperial interests that cohere as “China threat discourse” can be deployed as an alibi to retrench the West’s own imperial and neocolonial interests. The notion that the Chinese threat must be contained, and that vulnerable nations must be protected from that threat, is the covering rationale for what could be seen as a new interimperial competitive “Scramble for Africa” that is at once literal and figurative insofar as the terrain certainly includes but is not limited to Africa.