The affs description of China as militarist and pursuing imperialism is the same logic pro-hegemony authors use when comparing China or Nazi Germany or Militarist Japan- an act of securitization.

Here, the China threat issue is securitized in a value-laden manner that is qualitatively different from the scientific mode. Nicholas Kristof, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and longtime commentator on China, does not simply state that China is threatening because it is not democratic; rather, he pursues the more nuanced argument that increasing nationalism in China is a major source of potential conflict with other nations. Yet even a careless reader of the above text may notice that the author adeptly links the alleged threat posed by China with the historical precedents of Nazi Germany and militarist Japan in the past century. Drawing such analogies between history and the present constitutes a securitization act. Using this mode of analogical reasoning, the China threat argument is structurally incorporated into a higher level of security discourse, situated among the “macro-securitising discourses” of political ideology,55 which involve certain ethical and subjective sets of doctrines, ideals, and worldviews about the governance of human societies, usually a blueprint for a specific social order. It is important for poststructuralist discourse analysts to bear in mind the perspective on social goods communicated in this use of language.56 Kristof attributes the possibility of a China threat to the Chinese government’s ill-intentioned promotion of “ferocious nationalism.” As one of the West’s veteran commentators on China, Kristof noticed the country’s vigorous rise much earlier than many others. Twenty years ago, in his early Foreign Affairs essay “The Rise of China,” he warned that although China is neither a “villain” nor a “renegade country,” it is “an ambitious nation.”57 In this and other works, he has sought to define the possible China threat arising from Chinese nationalism. Such arguments involve the politics of identity. The poststructuralist approach to identity formation emphasizes the dualism that structures human experience, particularly the “interior/exterior (inside/outside) binary, according to which the inside is deemed to be the self, good, primary, and original while the outside is the other, dangerous, secondary, and derivative.”58 However, when one tries to build one’s own identity, the outside is always central to the composition of the inside. Conversely, when one builds an antagonist identity, the inside is essential to the construction of the outside. An interior/exterior binary is exactly what authors like Kristof seek to achieve in their securitization of the China threat issue. Kristof’s argument fundamentally, if not overtly, differentiates China from the democracies of the West. Linking China with Nazi Germany and militarist Japan in the first half of the 20th century lends weight to his criticism of the Chinese government and its deliberate instigation of “ferocious nationalism” among the Chinese people. In this way, China is depicted as different from “normal” Western countries, which are represented as right, good, proper, and valuable. Within the broader context of political ideology, the mode of normative analogy requires an appropriate episteme terrain. In other words, securitizers must use the right language in the right contexts to successfully articulate China’s threat to the world at large through analogy. Unlike securitizers speaking in the scientific mode, whose audience comprises academics and policy analysts, normative-analogy securitizers address an attentive, well-informed, and usually well-educated public. Therefore, successful securitizers in the latter mode are usually those well placed to communicate with the relevant audiences in the correct venues and in the appropriate language. Kristof, for example, writes for 158 Weiqing Song the New York Times, a widely circulated newspaper with well-informed and well-educated readers in the United States and other Western countries. His essays appear in Foreign Affairs, a scholarly journal published by an important U.S. think tank that focuses on foreign policy and provides an international forum for new ideas, analysis, and debate regarding significant world issues. The audience of Foreign Affairs includes government officials, academics, business leaders, and the representatives of nongovernmental groups such as human rights organizations, all of whom need to communicate with their own audiences using appropriate linguistic styles and registers. Historical analogies are an effective means of communicating with such audiences, who usually find concrete examples and precedents from history to be rhetorically persuasive.59 Kristof is not alone. The same securitizing role is played by many opinion leaders with wide influence in their respective social groups. For example, John Ikenberry, a well-known IR scholar, has expressed concerns about China’s rise due to its different political system, although he believes that China can eventually be absorbed peacefully into a West-dominated and institutionalized world.60 Robert Kagan, a Washington Post columnist, shares Kristof’s view that China’s rise will not be peaceful on the grounds that it is not willing to be “integrated” into the liberal world system.61 Although these opinion leaders offer different policy recommendations, all of them define a real or potential Chinese threat to both U.S. security and the security of the world at large. In the analogical mode, the substantial modality of the threat posed by China to the outside world is largely concerned with the political sphere. Political threats are usually defined in terms of “constituting principles” such as sovereignty and ideology.62 The referent objects under threat are units that include the nation or the state but may exceed these designations, as in the cases of the military and strategic spheres. The referent objects may be states with similar political systems, such as the so-called “democracies” or the “free world.” In their political warnings against the “China threat,” securitizers such as Kristof discursively construct the Chinese identity by linking it with bellicose Nazi Germany and militarist Japan, thereby differentiating it from the identity of the “peace-loving” Western democracies.63 Securitizers working in the normative-analogy mode conduct “conversations” with their audiences in which they relate major themes, debates, or motifs that are familiar to the social groups concerned.64 Securitization of the “China Threat” Discourse: A Poststructuralist Account 159 This approach is more likely to result in the audience absorbing maximum knowledge, which in turn leads to a more effective excision of power. Kristof, for example, constructs the possibility of a China threat by focusing on Chinese nationalism in his “conversations” with educated and well-informed readers in the United States and other Western countries. This is a judicious strategy, as such audiences are more receptive to nationalism, the promotion of democracy and other forms of ideological reasoning. As Buzan suggests, existential threats in the political sector may also be ideologically defined.65 Therefore, the arguments of opinion leaders can contribute to the act of securitizing the alleged impending threat: “Yet what worries me about China isn’t its upgrade of its nuclear arsenal and its military acquisitions to project power beyond its borders. … No, what troubles me, as one who loves China and is rooting for it to succeed, is the growing nationalism that the government has cultivated among young people.”66 Unlike the scientific mode, in which securitizers reason deductively, the normative-analogy mode has an inductive logic, as it reaches its conclusions on the basis of a number of historical and contemporary examples.