The aff’s narrative of a “rising” China rely on China occupying a position of otherness oppositional to the moral liberal order

Narrating the modern-day ‘rise’ of China in IR and beyond A third wave of revisionist/status quo literature came with post-Cold-War debates over the US-led world order and emergence of ‘rising powers’. Authors in this wave utilize the logic of the PTT to interrogate the contemporary ‘rise’ of China in particular (see for example Lim 2015; Goldstein 2007). As Lemke (1997, 32) explains, threats to the post-war ‘Long Peace’ have now seemingly emerged, notably from ‘Chinese growth unaccompanied by a change in attitude toward the status quo’. To assuage these threats, ‘the United States and other leading satisfied Great Powers should continue patient cooperation with [China, and others such as Russia] … to encourage democratization and liberalization’. For Gerald Segal (1996, 108), ‘China is a powerful, unstable non-status quo power.’ China is also now argued to be demonstrating ‘significant revisionist objectives’ in the South China Sea (Lim et al. 2017) as well as by creating the AIIB (Wilson 2017, 150). Graham Allison writes that ‘war between the U.S. and China is more likely than recognized at the moment’, as his interpretation of the historical record stipulates that, in the majority of cases ‘in which a rising power has confronted a ruling power, the result has been bloodshed’ (Allison 2015).5 Beyond the PTT, a significant subliterature explores whether rising powers in general, and especially a rapidly rising China, represent revisionist or status quo powers (see for example Ding 2010; Feng 2009; Kastner and Saunders 2012). We return to the role of these narratives in the policy realm in the next sub-section on public narratives. Third-wave IR debates around rising powers, then, quietly sustain the logics of the ordering narratives of morality and civilizational progress central to the first and second waves, perpetuating largely unquestioned understandings that international revisionism must inevitably emanate from beyond the Western core of international order. To begin with, the term ‘rising power’ is not neutral, bringing powerful connotations of instability and danger absent in such alternatives as ‘modernizing’ or ‘developing’. Crucially, the term ‘rising’, like ‘revisionist’, powers has most typically been used to refer only to nonWestern states (see Turner 2014, 152–154). As noted earlier, the EU is rarely labelled ‘revisionist’ despite revisionism forming part of its self-identity. Explorations of the US as revisionist are also relatively absent, though counternarratives exist, as examined shortly. The selective formations and constraining boundaries of mainstream conceptual IR narratives prevent the inclusion of the US and EU because the term does not logically fit the known character or plotline. The assumption here is not of an unproblematic separation between the ‘West’ and ‘non-West’, or of timeless challenges the latter poses to the former. Fears over a ‘rising’ India, for instance, rarely enter US security discourse as do those of a ‘rising’ China, despite numerous material similarities and both typically being identified as residing beyond the West. Moreover, and as already shown, earlier waves of IR revisionism–status-quo debate interrogated the vulnerabilities of the Anglo-American/Western order to Imperial and Nazi Germany. That Germany is now routinely located within the West, alongside members of the ‘Anglo-American world’, demonstrates the fluidity of such imagined geographies. Indeed, India’s broad absence from US threat discourses is explained partly by its (re)construction as a pseudo-member of the Western world (Turner 2016). Similarly, while post-1945 Japan quickly became seen as part of the Western Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) world, by the 1970s and 1980s it was ‘orientalized’ because its economic growth generated concerns of a challenge to US economic hegemony (Nymalm 2017). Today, it is those actors commonly labelled ‘nonWestern’, in particular China, that have in many ways been seamlessly maneuvered into spaces of IR debate once occupied by Wilhelmine and Nazi Germany. Members of ‘the West’ escape such interrogation, while China, like others before it, is now ideationally tied to well-rehearsed discourses of the enemy because its imagined Otherness makes it seemingly logical to do so (see Rousseau 2006). Mainstream scholarly/conceptual narratives of a ‘rising’ China are thus in important ways autobiographical narratives of Western authorship, with their meanings contingent on the worldview of a particular, prevailing (Western) disciplinary tradition.6 The ‘cognitive map’ of this tradition locates uncertainty and disorder, and an unravelling of gains made by the so-called liberal world order, as coming not from the central characters within it but from the global peripheries. China has become locked within narrativized understandings of what constitutes international order, on the one hand, and disorder (or chaos/ backwardness/barbarism), on the other, and not only within academic circles. For centuries within wider US politics and society, China has been represented as lacking the essential standards of civilization and as a corresponding threat to US security and its enlightened, progressive values (Turner 2013). Chengxin Pan points to self-reflecting Western narrations of the ‘China threat’ when he argues that the ‘threat’ derives at least partly from the American self. ‘Thus, to fully understand the U.S. “China threat” argument, it is essential to recognize its autobiographical nature’ (Pan 2004, 313). This equally applies to expectations of China developing according to the Western model of liberal democratic capitalism. This kind of convergence thinking has been a recurrent theme in US China policy (Nymalm 2013). As highlighted earlier, among those who directly interrogate the question of whether ‘rising’ China exists as a revisionist or a status quo actor, most agree that it more closely resembles the latter. Despite this, it is China and other ‘rising powers’ that are routinely interrogated as potential sources of instability. This apparent contradiction is enabled by the power of narratives to steer and select our knowledges of the world and its constituent actors. First- and second-wave IR debates around international revisionism and the status quo cemented the disciplinary (conceptual) narrative of an imperial/ unsatisfied non-Western threat to a stable Anglo-American/Western world order. Third-wave debates over China’s ‘rise’ align with, and reinforce, this story by retaining its authors as the central protagonists, most notably the US, before introducing China as the latest outsider to a functioning system, which it necessarily threatens to destabilize. The findings of the recent sub-literature within these debates on the explicit question of China as a revisionist or a status quo actor have not disrupted the more ingrained, overarching ‘truth’ that China should remain the principal object of study.