Description
Chinese rise and the future of Sino-American relations have been popular research topics and have given birth to a flourishing literature. Most questions being addressed are if China’s rise will be peaceful or if China and the US are “destined to war” (Allison, 2017). Another vivid research topic involving China, especially since 2014 is about the future of the international order and if China aims to be accommodated or aims to profoundly change the nature of the existing international order.
This paper proposes to investigate these questions from the perspective of Chinese official discourses related to the South China Sea issue. The main assumption of this article is that what matters more to understand how the Chinese view the international order is not what they say but how they say it (the narratives used, the emotions and analogies mobilized, etc.). To unpack the implicit meaning narratives and views Chinese officials have of the international order, this article uses a mixed-method approach to critical discourse analysis. This mixed approach is supported by the use of QDA Miner software to unsure consistency and reliability in the analysis of the dataset, which is composed of approximately 500 documents collected from the Chinese Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defense between 2014 and 2021.
The quantitative analysis of these speeches reveals that emotions (humiliation, anger, and feelings of superiority) appear in 19.5% of the speeches, as well as the political use of History (22% of cases). These narrative structures use the metaphors “strict father” conceptualized by George Lakoff (2008) and a “hero, villain, and victim” narrative. These narratives aim to legitimize China’s desire to remove the United States from the management of Asia-Pacific issues.
The paper will also show that while the Chinese discourse remains the same under all US administrations, the Chinese legal discourse has fluctuated as the dispute has evolved. These narrative shifts can be explained in part by the underlying presence of emotional motivations in the legal discourses. These reveal the existence of narratives about an alternative world order based on regionalism and a Chinese interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine on the one hand, and history as political legitimacy versus law on the other. Such findings provide a better understanding of Chinese positions and discourses.
