Description
This paper problematizes the contemporary dominance of the 'China threat' discourse in US foreign policy circles by tracing the emergence and evolution of knowledge production about a 'Chinese threat' within the US national security field. It draws on poststructuralist, sociological and historical IR to develop a genealogy of the 'China threat' debate within the US that goes beyond the top-level policy-makers and that questions the debate's prominence in the Trump administration by going as far back as the late nineteenth century to understand its production. Through archival research and discourse analysis, the paper undertakes a 'history of the present' that investigates the different iterations of a 'China threat' according to three different stages of US imperial development: hegemonic ascendency (1776–1945); hegemonic maturity (1946–1973); and hegemonic decline (1974 to the present). The paper contributes an account of the relational nature of threat perceptions by developing a wider matrix of threats within which the 'China threat' discourse can be examined. In doing so, it questions the wisdom of the mainstream schools of thought (realist and liberal–institutionalist) that deem materially-rising powers as dangerous, without accounting for why alternative non-Western powers are not seen as a ‘threat’ that can overtake the ‘China threat’. It sheds light on the contingencies (and power relations) that have made the 'China threat' discourse possible throughout the decades, moving beyond prevalent understandings of US identity as fixed and exceptional, evaluating the impact of Eurocentric narratives of older East-West encounters and exploring the dynamics between the 'China threat' and US imperial processes of ordering.
