The risk you assign their China conflict scenario is not neutral or informed by China’s behavior, but shaped by their representations of China---rhetoric shapes how we understand Chinese behavior, not the other way around

To forge articulations and convince others of the validity of their interpretation of reality, participants in policy debates can utilize different rhetorical strategies (Jackson , pp. 28–45). They might try to fix their preferred meaning of a commonplace (specifying), or challenge an opponent’s formulation, for instance by undermining the legitimacy of the speaker, distracting the audience or challenging the accuracy of the claims advanced by the opponent (breaking). Other options are to apply an established resource, such as widely available narratives, metaphors or analogies, to a new situation; to introduce a commonplace on the fringes or outside of the debate; or to develop a new commonplace (joining). That said, deploying existing rhetoric resources with which audiences are already familiar is far easier than developing entirely novel articulations (Krebs and Jackson , p. 45). Paying attention to the broader political arena in which different policy concerns compete is therefore crucial; we can assume that this context at any given time provides a substantial supply of rhetoric resources familiar to the audience that skilled speakers can draw on to develop more specific representations in a concrete debate.

In this rendition of the role of rhetoric in politics, state behaviour provides a necessary background context that allows for the emergence of different representations and policies. However, which representation persists depends on the more specific mobilization of rhetoric resources. Dueck (), for instance, demonstrates that Soviet behaviour during the Cold War provided an important, albeit indeterminate background context that could have supported different policy options for US foreign policymakers – such as rollback, spheres of influence or cooperation. Nonetheless, containment was able to establish itself despite these other plausible options. For our purposes, we can assume that China’s international and domestic conduct over the years have provided a necessary background condition for the general interpretation of a threatening China without which the more specific representation of an ideological threat – brought about through the mobilisation of rhetoric – would not have been possible.

China’s rapid rise, moreover, combined with concerns about America’s future that became particularly salient under the Trump administration, can be seen as a critical juncture that has opened the discursive space, and thus enabled the emergence of novel articulations, such as China as an ideological threat. At the same time, diverging representations of reality – such as what kind of threat China is – do arguably not compete simply among themselves, but exist in a broader political arena where issues vye for the interest of policymakers and broader publics. Therefore, it is necessary to be attentive to how representations of China interact with adjacent policy debates. For instance, it is reasonable to assume that directing attention to the China threat can constitute a rhetorical strategy to divert attention from different policy issues. It is here that rhetoric scholarship is particularly helpful, since most of the literature on representations of China treats policy debates on China as a special case that warrants undivided analytical attention. While this can often be warranted for reasons of research interest, it has meant that adjacent policy issues and their influence on the China debate have been left out of the analysis (see e.g. Pan ; Turner ).