The construction of the “China threat” is a constructed narrative that shapes perceptions and actions, resulting in the very tensions they predict.

In accordance with the reflectivists, exiles, and dissidents in the ‘Third Great Debate’ of the mid-to-late 1980s and the later post-structuralists, narrative approaches to IR studies highlight the contingency of meaning by problematizing the sense-making process. In other words, the meaning of things and events is constituted through narratives rather than a given, inborn, and objective one held by rationalists and thus potentially open to multiple interpretations. The interface between narrative and IR studies lies in identity formation. Originally borrowed from sociology, there are two broad categories of identity in IR scholarship: one is the pre-social and pre-political essentialist category, typified by ‘the essential state’ proposed by Alexander Wendt; the other, though much more diverse in form, is a discursive one.17 The narrative approach to IR studies embraces the latter one, that is, the ‘narrative identity’ developed by Paul Ricoeur and Margaret Somers.18 This narrative identity presupposes that narrative possesses both epistemological and ontological value. Specifically, we make sense of the world through narratives and in that process acquire our identity; that identity, in turn, serves as the premise for what to do, which further leads to new narratives and actions. Narrative, identity, and actions are hence in a constant, mutually constitutive process, and identity formation turns out to be a narrative construction process.

In this self-other articulation process, we argue that the construction of national threats follows the logic of storytelling. Above all, national threats are narratively constructed rather than having inborn, self-evident, and purely objective existences and are understood in a storied way. We rely on narratives to make sense of the world and create a sense of order, coherence, and certainty to anchor the Self by structuring objects and events in a temporal, spatial, and relational manner. National security narratives ‘weave present challenges, past failures and triumphs, and potential futures into a coherent tale, with well-defined characters and plot lines’.19 Meanwhile, as facts do not speak for themselves and their meaning is contingent, they can be emplotted into different stories, and it is difficult to conclude whether one narrative is more legitimate than another.20 By highlighting certain facts and ruling out other irrelevant ones, narrative makes events meaningful and understandable through the employment devices and skills of a story like characterization and causal explanations and their significance in the whole story.21 In this highly selective appropriation and suppression process, national security narratives are usually autobiographical, with the emplotted self as the hero and the antagonistic one as the villain.22 These narratives often present themselves as pure knowledge, claiming that the threat posed by the villain is real and objective. But their truthfulness cannot walk beyond the stories themselves, for it is just a temporal and spatial configuration of events. Their given meaning in one story can be opposite to that in another one. Just as Chengxin Pan illustrates, the China threat argument, which has typically presented itself as verifiable knowledge, is actually autobiographical in nature. It tells more about the US Self imagination than China itself and has different framings, as China’s rise can be either an opportunity or a threat to the USA.23 Thus, the perceived threats a rival poses largely depend on the rival’s configuration in the national security story, and a national threat occurs when the other is narratively antithetical to the Self. Thus, the debate on national security is essentially a competition between security narratives competing for dominance of the social understanding.

Moreover, national security narratives frame both the way people perceive the world and how they should behave. Once we accept one storied way of representing the national security reality, we will automatically and often unconsciously depend on that cognitive path, and ‘tailor reality’ to meet the expectation of the story, as is shown in the misperception phenomena in international political psychology studies.24 Such narrative representation, in turn, provides people with legitimacy as regards what to do. In fact, no matter the logic of consequence or the logic of appropriateness, both actually come under the umbrella of the logic of storytelling, as either the calculation of interests or the consideration of appropriateness makes sense only when it is emplotted in a security story. Meanwhile, the logic of storytelling does not, in contrast to other logics, directly prescribe specific policies or actions but mainly shapes and restricts the direction and legitimacy of the policy options at stake by providing decision-makers with a coherent understanding of the reality and a storied rationality. And because of this logic of storytelling, a national security story often turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.