Alternatives 29 (2004), 305-331

The "China Threat" in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics
Chengxin Pan'*
We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are. The Talmud China and its relationship with the United States has long been a fascinating subject of study in the mainstream U.S. international relations community. This is reflected, for example, in the current heated debates over whether China is primarily a strategic threat to or a market bonanza for the United States and whether containment or engagement is the best way to deal with it.* While U.S. China scholars argue fiercely over "what China precisely is," their debates have been underpinned by some common ground, especially in terms of a positivist epistemology. Firstly, they believe that China is ultimately a knowable object, whose reality can be, and ought to be, empirically revealed by scientific means. For example, after expressing his dissatisfaction with often conflicting Western perceptions of China, David M. Lampton, former president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, suggests that "it is time to step back and look at where China is today, where it might be going, and what consequences that direction will hold for the rest of the world."2 Like many other China scholars, Lampton views his object of study as essentially "something we can stand back from and observe with clinical detachment."^ Secondly, associated with the first assumption, it is commonly believed that China scholars merely serve as "disinterested observers"

Department of Political Science and International Relations, Faculty of Arts, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia. Chengxin.Pan@anu. edu.au

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and that their studies of China are neutral, passive descriptions of reality. And thirdly, in pondering whether China poses a threat or offers an opportunity to the United States, they rarely raise the question of "what the United States is." That is, the meaning of the United States is believed to be certain and beyond doubt. I do not dismiss altogether the conventional ways of debating China. It is not the purpose of this article to venture my own "observation" of "where China is today," nor to join the "containment" versus "engagement" debate per se. Rather, I want to contribute to a novel dimension of the China debate by questioning the seemingly unproblematic assumptions shared by most China scholars in the mainstream IR community in the United States. To perform this task, I will focus attention on a particularly significant component of the China debate; namely, the "China threat" literature. More specifically, I want to argue that U.S. conceptions of China as a threatening other are always intrinsically linked to how U.S. policymakers/mainstream China specialists see themselves (as representatives of the indispensable, security-conscious nation, for example). As such, they are not value-free, objective descriptions of an independent, preexisting Chinese reality out there, but are better understood as a kind of normative, meaning-giving practice that often legitimates power politics in U.S.-China relations and helps transform the "China threat" into social reality. In other words, it is self-fulfilling in practice, and is always part of the "China threat" problem it purports merely to describe. In doing so, I seek to bring to the fore two interconnected themes of self/other constructions and of theory as practice inherent in the "China threat" literaturethemes that have been overridden and rendered largely invisible by those common positivist assumptions. These themes are of course nothing new nor peculiar to the "China threat" literature. They have been identified elsewhere by critics of some conventional fields of study such as ethnography, anthropology, oriental studies, political science, and international relations.* Yet, so far, the China field in the West in general and the U.S. "China threat" literature in particular have shown remarkable resistance to systematic critical refiection on both their normative status as discursive practice and their enormous practical implications for international politics.^ It is in this context that this article seeks to make a contribution. I begin with a brief survey of the "China threat" argument in contemporary U.S. international relations literature, followed by an investigation of how this particular argument about China

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is a discursive construction of other, which is predicated on the predominant way in which the United States imagines itself as the universal, indispensable nation-state in constant need of absolute certainty and security. Finally, this article will illustrate some of the dangerous practical consequences of the "China threat" discourse for contemporary U.S.-China relations, particularly with regard to the 1995-1996 Taiwan Strait missile crisis and the 2001 spy-plane incident.

The "China Threat" Argument That China constitutes a growing "threat" to the United States is arguably one of the most important "discoveries" by U.S. IR scholars in the post-Cold War era. For many, this "threat" is obvious for a variety of reasons concerning economic, military, cultural, and political dimensions. First and foremost, much of today's alarm about the "rise of China" resolves around the phenomenal development of the Chinese economy during the past twenty-five years: Its overall size has more than quadrupled since 1978. China expert Nicholas Lardy of the Brookings Institution suggested that "the pace of China's industrial development and trade expansion is unparalleled in modern economic history." He went on: "While this has led to unprecedented improvements in Chinese incomes and living standards, it also poses challenges for other countries."^ One such challenge is thought to be job losses in the United States. A recent study done for a U.S. congressional panel found that at least 760,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs have migrated to China since 1992.^ Associated with this economic boom is China's growing trade surplus with the United States, which, according to Time magazine journalists Richard Bernstein and Ross Munro, increased nearly tenfold from $3.5 billion in 1988 to roughly $33.8 billion in 1995. This trade imbalance, as they put it, is a function of a Chinese strategy to target certain industries and to undersell American competition via a system of subsidies and high tariffs. And that is why the deficit is harmful to the American economy and likely to become an area of ever greater conflict in bilateral relations in the future.^ For many, also frightening is a prospect of the emergence of socalled "Creater China" (a vast economic zone consisting of mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan). As Harry Harding points out, "Although [Greater China] was originally intended in [a]

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benign economic sense, . . . in some quarters it evokes much more aggressive analogies, such as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere or Greater Germany. "^ In this context, some believe that China's economic challenge inevitably gives rise to a simultaneous military threat. As Denny Roy argues: "A stronger, wealthier China would have greater wherewithal to increase its arsenal of nuclear-armed ICBMs and to increase their lethality through improvements in range, accuracy, and survivability. If China continues its rate of economic expansion, absolute growth in Chinese nuclear capabilities should be expected to increase."i" Furthermore, U.S. Congressman Bob Schaffer claimed that China's military buildup, already under way at an alarming rate, was aimed at the United States.^i In addition to what they see as a worrying economic and military expansion, many U.S. China scholars believe that there exist still other dimensions to the "China threat" problem, such as China's "Middle Kingdom" mentality, unresolved historical grievances, and an undemocratic government.^^ Warren I. Cohen argues that "probably the most ethnocentric people in the world, the Chinese considered their realm the center of the universe, the Middle Kingdom, and regarded all cultural differences as signs of inferiority. "13 As a result, it is argued, the outside world has good reason to be concerned that "China will seek to reestablish in some form the political and cultural hegemony that it enjoyed in Asia during the Ming and early Qing dynasties."'^ At another level, from a "democratic peace" standpoint, a China under the rule of an authoritarian regime is predisposed to behave irresponsibly. As Bernstein and Munro put it: If the history of the last two hundred years is any guide, the more democratic countries become, the less Hkely they are tofightwars against each other. The more dictatorial they are, the more war prone they become. Indeed, if the current Beijing regime continues to engage in military adventurismas it did in the Taiwan Strait in 1996there will be a real chance of at least limited naval or air clashes with the United States.'^ Subscribing to the same logic, Denny Roy asserts that "the establishment of a liberal democracy in China is extremely unlikely in the foreseeable future. . . . Without democratization within, there is no basis for expecting more pacific behavior without."!^ However, for other observers, even if China does become democratized, the threat may still remain. Postulating what he calls the "democratic paradox" phenomenon, Samuel Huntington suggests

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that democratization is as likely to encourage international conflict as it is to promote peace.''' Indeed, many China watchers believe that an increase in market freedom has already led to an upsurge in Chinese nationalism, the only thing that allegedly provides the glue to hold contemporary China together.i^ It is argued that such nationalist sentiment, coupled with memories of its past humiliation and thwarted grandeur, will make China an increasingly dissatisfied, revisionist powerhence, a threat to the international status quo. Furthermore, some point out that what is also troublesome is an entrenched realpolitik strategic culture in traditional Chinese thought. Harvard China expert Alastair Iain Johnston, for example, argues that Chinese strategic culture is dominated by the parabellum (prepare for war) paradigm. This paradigm believes that warfare is a relatively constant feature in international relations, that stakes in conflicts with the adversary are zero-sum in nature, and that the use of force is the most efficacious means of dealing with threat.'9 From this, Warren Cohen concludes that if Johnston's analysis of China's strategic culture is correctand I believe that it isgenerational change will not guarantee a kinder, gentler China. Nor will the ultimate disappearance of communism in Beijing. The powerful China we have every reason to expect in the twenty-first century is likely to be as aggressive and expansionist as China has been whenever it has been the dominant power in Asia.2" Apart from these so-called "domestic" reasons for the "China threat," some commentators arrive at a similar conclusion based on the historical experience of power realignment as a result of the rise and fall of great powers. China, from this perspective, is regarded as the most likely candidate to fill the power vacuum created by the end of U.S.-Soviet rivalry in East Asia. This, according to Kenneth Lieberthal at the University of Michigan (and formerly of the U.S. State Department), "will inevitably present major challenges to the United States and the rest of the international system since the perennial question has been how the international community can accommodate the ambitions of newly powerful states, which have always forced realignment of the international system and have more often than not led to war."2' For this reason, the rise of China has often been likened to that of Nazi Cermany and militarist Japan on the eve of the two world wars. For example, Richard K. Betts and Thomas J. Christensen argue:

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Like Germany a century ago, China is a late-blooming great power emerging into a world already ordered strategically by earlier arrivals; a continental power surrounded by other powers who are collectively stronger but individually weaker (with the exception of the United States and, perhaps, Japan); a bustling country with great expectations, dissatisfied with its place in the international pecking order, if only with regard to international prestige and respect. The quest for a rightful "place in the sun" will, it is argued, inevitably foster growing friction with Japan, Russia, India or the United States.22

At this point, it seems there has been enough reason and empirical evidence for the United States to be vigilant about China's future ambition. While there are debates over the extent to which the threat is imminent or to which approaches might best explain it, the "objective" quality of such a threat has been taken for granted. In the words of Walter McDougall, the Pulitzer Prizewinning historian and strategic thinker at the University of Pennsylvania, recognizing the "China threat" is "commonsense geopolitics."23 For Huntington, the challenge of "Greater China" to the West is simply a rapidly growing cultural, economic, and political "reality. "24 Similarly, when they claim that "China can pose a grave problem," Betts and Christensen are convinced that they are merely referring to "the truth."25 In the following sections, I want to question this "truth," and, more generally, question the objective, self-evidentiary attitudes that underpin it. In my view, the "China threat" literature is best understood as a particular kind of discursive practice that dichotomizes the West and China as self and other. In this sense, the "truism" that China presents a growing threat is not so much an objective reflection of contemporary global reality, per se, as it is a discursive construction of otherness that acts to bolster the hegemonic leadership of the United States in the post-Cold War world. Therefore, to have a better understanding of how the discursive construction of China as a "threat" takes place, it is now necessary to turn attention to a particularly dominant way of U.S. self-imagination.

The "China Threat" in the American Self-imagination

American Self-imagination and the Construction of Otherness

In 1630, John Winthrop, governor of the British-settled Massachusetts Bay Colony, described the Puritan mission as a moral beacon

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for the world: "For wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies [eyes] of all people are uppon us."26 Couched in a highly metaphoric manner, the "city on the hill" message greatly galvanized the imagination of early European settlers in North America who had desperately needed some kind of certainty and assurance in the face of many initial difficulties and disappointments in the "New World." Surely there have been numerous U.S. constructions of "what we are," but this sense of "manifest destiny," discursively repeated and reconstructed time and again by leading U.S. politicians, social commentators, the popular press, and numerous school textbooks, has since become a pivotal part of U.S. self-consciousness. In 1992, Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote: America is a remarkable nation. We are, as Abraham Lincoln told Congress in December 1862, a nation that "cannot escape history" because we are "the last best hope of earth." The president said that his administration and Congress held the "power and . . . responsibility" to ensure that the hope America promised would be fulfilled. Today . . . America is still the last best hope of earth, and we still hold the power and bear the responsibility for its remaining so.2'' This sentiment was echoed by Madeleine K. Albright, the former secretary of state, who once called the United States "the indispensable nation" and maintained that "we stand tall and hence see further than other nations."28 More recently, speaking of the U.S. role in the current war on terrorism. Vice President Dick Cheney said: "Only we can rally the world in a task of this complexity against an enemy so elusive and so resourceful. The United States and only the United States can see this effort through to victory."29 It is worth adding that Cheney, along with several other senior officials in the present Bush administration, is a founding member of the Project for the New American Century, a project designed to ensure U.S. security and global dominance in the twenty-first century. Needless to say, the United States is not unique in ethnocentric thinking. For centuries, China had assumed it was the center of the world. But what distinguishes U.S. from Chinese ethnocentric selfidentities is that while the latter was based largely on the Confucian legacy, the former is sanctioned by more powerful regimes of truth, such as Christianity and modern science. For the early English Puritans, America was part of a divine plan and the settlers were the Chosen People blessed by covenant with God.^o With the advent of the scientific age, U.S. exceptionalism began taking on a secular, scientific dimension. Charles Darwin once argued that "the

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wonderful progress of the United States, as well as the character of the people, are the results of natural selection."3' The United States has since been construed as the manifestation of the law of nature, with its ideas and institutions described not as historically particular but as truly universal. For example, in his second inaugural address in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson declared that U.S. principles were "not the principles of a province or of a single continent. We have known and boasted all along that they were the principles of a liberated mankind. "^^ j ^ short, "The US is Utopia achieved."^s It represents the "End of History."s* What does this U.S. self-knowledge have to do with the way in which it comes to know others in general and China in particular? To put it simply, this self-knowledge is always a powerful analytical framework within which other societies are to be known. By envisioning a linear process of historical development with itself at its apex, the United States places other nations on a common evolutionary slope and sees them as inevitably traveling toward the end of history that is the United States. For example, as a vast, ancient nation on the other side of the Pacific, China is frequently taken as a mirror image of the U.S. self. As Michael Hunt points out, we imagine ourselves locked in a special relationship with the Chinese, whose apparent moderation and pragmatism mirror our own most prized attributes and validate our own longings for a world made over in our own image. If China with its old and radically different culture can be won, where can we not prevail?^^ Yet, in a world of diversity, contingency, and unpredictability, which is irreducible to universal sameness or absolute certainty, this kind of U.S. knowledge of others often proves frustratingly elusive. In this context, rather than questioning the validity of their own universalist assumptions, the people of the United States believe that those who are different should be held responsible for the lack of universal sameness. Indeed, because "we" are universal, those who refuse or who are unable to become like "us" are no longer just "others," but are by definition the negation of universality, or the other. In this way, the other is always built into this universalized "American" self. Just as "Primitive . . . is a category, not an object, of Western thought,"^^ so the threat of the other is not some kind of "external reality" discovered by U.S. strategic analysts, but a ready-made category of thought within this particular way of U.S. self-imagination. Consequently, there is always a need for the United States to find a specific other to fill into the totalized category of otherness.

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In the early days of American history, it was Europe, or the "Old World," that was invoked as its primary other, threatening to corrupt the "New World."3^ Shortly after World War II, in the eyes of U.S. strategists, the Soviet Union emerged as a major deviance from, hence an archenemy of, their universal path toward progress via the free market and liberal democracy. And after the demise of the Soviet Union, the vacancy of other was to be filled by China, the "best candidate" the United States could find in the post-Cold War, unipolar world. Not until the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington had China's candidature been suspended, to be replaced by international terrorism in general and Saddam's Iraq in particular's At first glance, as the "China threat" literature has told us, China seems to fall perfectly into the "threat" category, particularly given its growing power. However, China's power as such does not speak for itself in terms of an emerging threat. By any reasonable measure, China remains a largely poor country edged with only a sliver of affiuence along its coastal areas. Nor is China's sheer size a self-evident confirmation of the "China threat" thesis, as other countries like India, Brazil, and Australia are almost as big as China. Instead, China as a "threat" has much to do with the particular mode of U.S. self-imagination. As Steve Chan notes: China is an object of attention not only because of its huge size, ancient legacy, or current or projected relative national power. . . . The importance of China has to do with perceptions, especially those regarding the potential that Beijing will become an example, source, or model that contradicts Western liberalism as the reigning paradigm. In an era of supposed universalizing cosmopolitanism, China demonstrates the potency and persistence of nationalism, and embodies an alternative to Western and especially U.S. conceptions of democracy and capitalism. China is a reminder that history is not close to an Certainly, I do not deny China's potential for strategic misbehavior in the global context, nor do I claim the "essential peacefulness" of Chinese culture."fO Having said that, my main point here is that there is no such thing as "Chinese reality" that can automatically speak for itself, for example, as a "threat." Rather, the "China threat" is essentially a specifically social meaning given to China by its U.S. observers, a meaning that cannot be disconnected from the dominant U.S. self-construction. Thus, to fully understand the U.S. "China threat" argument, it is essential to recognize its autobiographical nature.

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Indeed, the construction of other is not only a product of U.S. self-imagination, but often a necessary foil to it. For example, by taking this /jariicw/ar representation of China as Chinese reality per se, those scholars are able to assert their self-identity as "mature," "rational" realists capable of knowing the "hard facts" of international politics, in distinction from those "idealists" whose views are said to be grounded more in "an article of faith" than in "historical experience."41 On the other hand, given that history is apparently not "progressively" linear, the invocation of a certain other not only helps explain away such historical uncertainties or "anomalies" and maintain the credibility of the allegedly universal path trodden by the United States, but also serves to highlight U.S. "indispensability." As Samuel Huntington puts it, "If being an American means being committed to the principles of liberty, democracy, individualism, and private property, and if there is no evil empire out there threatening those principles, what indeed does it mean to be an American, and what becomes of American national interests?"^2 In this way, it seems that the constructions of the particular U.S. self and its other are always intertwined and mutually reinforcing. Some may suggest that there is nothing particularly wrong with this since psychologists generally agree that "individuals and groups define their identity by differentiating themselves from and placing themselves in opposition to others."^3 This is perhaps true. As the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure tells us, meaning itself depends on difference and differentiation.'i'* Yet, to understand the U.S. dichotomized constructions of self/other in this light is to normalize them and render them unproblematic, because it is also apparent that not all identity-defining practices necessarily perceive others in terms of either universal sameness or absolute otherness and that difference need not equate to threat.
The Discursive Construction of China as Other in the "China Threat" Literature

Having examined how the "China threat" literature is enabled by and serves the purpose of a particular U.S. self-construction, I want to turn now to the issue of how this literature represents a discursive construction of other, instead of an "objective" account of Chinese reality. This, I argue, has less to do with its portrayal of China as a threat per se than with its essentialization and totalization of China as an externally knowable object, independent of historically contingent contexts or dynamic international interactions. In this sense, the discursive construction of China as a threatening other cannot be detached from (neo)realism, a positivist.

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ahistorical framework of analysis within which global life is reduced to endless interstate rivalry for power and survival. As many critical IR scholars have noted, (neo) realism is not a transcendent description of global reality but is predicated on the modernist Western identity, which, in the quest for scientific certainty, has come to define itself essentially as the sovereign territorial nation-state. This realist self-identity of Western states leads to the constitution of anarchy as the sphere of insecurity, disorder, and war. In an anarchical system, as (neo) realists argue, "the gain of one side is often considered to be the loss of the other,"''5 and "All other states are potential threats."'^ In order to survive in such a system, states inevitably pursue power or capability. In doing so, these realist claims represent what R. B. J. Walker calls "a specific historical articulation of relations of universality/particularity and self/Other."^^ The (neo) realist paradigm has dominated the U.S. IR discipline in general and the U.S. China studies field in particular. As Kurt Campbell notes, after the end of the Cold War, a whole new crop of China experts "are much more likely to have a background in strategic studies or international relations than China itself. ""^^ As a result, for those experts to know China is nothing more or less than to undertake a geopolitical analysis of it, often by asking only a few questions such as how China will "behave" in a strategic sense and how it may affect the regional or global balance of power, with a particular emphasis on China's military power or capabilities. As Thomas J. Christensen notes, "Although many have focused on intentions as well as capabilities, the most prevalent component of the [China threat] debate is the assessment of China's overall future military power compared with that of the United States and other East Asian regional powers."''^ Consequently, almost by default, China emerges as an absolute other and a threat thanks to this (neo) realist prism. The (neo) realist emphasis on survival and security in international relations dovetails perfectly with the U.S. self-imagination, because for the United States to define itself as the indispensable nation in a world of anarchy is often to demand absolute security. As James Chace and Caleb Carr note, "for over two centuries the aspiration toward an eventual condition of absolute security has been viewed as central to an effective American foreign policy."50 And this self-identification in turn leads to the definition of not only "tangible" foreign powers but global contingency and uncertainty per se as threats. For example, former U.S. President George H. W. Bush repeatedly said that "the enemy [of America] is unpredictability. The enemy is instability. "5' Similarly, arguing for the continuation of U.S. Cold War alliances, a high-ranking Pentagon official asked, "if we pull out, who knows what nervousness will result? "^2

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Thus understood, by its very uncertain character, China would now automatically constitute a threat to the United States. For example, Bernstein and Munro believe that "China's political unpredictability, the always-present possibility that it will fall into a state of domestic disunion and factional fighting," constitutes a source of danger.s^ In like manner, Richard Betts and Thomas Christensen write: If the PLA [People's Liberation Army] remains second-rate, should the world breathe a sigh of relief? Not entirely. . . . Drawing China into the web of global interdependence may do more to encourage peace than war, but it cannot guarantee that the pursuit of heartfelt political interests will be blocked by a fear of economic consequences. . . . U.S. efforts to create a stable balance across the Taiwan Strait might deter the use of force under certain circumstances, but certainly not all.54 The upshot, therefore, is that since China displays no absolute certainty for peace, it must be, by definition, an uncertainty, and hence, a threat. In the same way, a multitude of other unpredictable factors (such as ethnic rivalry, local insurgencies, overpopulation, drug trafficking, environmental degradation, rogue states, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and international terrorism) have also been labeled as "threats" to U.S. security. Yet, it seems that in the post-Cold War environment, China represents a kind of uncertainty par excellence. "Whatever the prospects for a more peaceful, more democratic, and more just world order, nothing seems more uncertain today than the future of post-Deng China,"55 argues Samuel Kim. And such an archetypical uncertainty is crucial to the enterprise of U.S. self-construction, because it seems that only an uncertainty with potentially global consequences such as China could justify U.S. indispensability or its continued world dominance. In this sense, Bruce Cumings aptly suggested in 1996 that China (as a threat) was basically "a metaphor for an enormously expensive Pentagon that has lost its bearings and that requires a formidable 'renegade state' to define its mission (Islam is rather vague, and Iran lacks necessary weights)."56 It is mainly on the basis of this self-fashioning that many U.S. scholars have for long claimed their "expertise" on China. For example, from his observation (presumably on Western TV networks) of the Chinese protest against the U.S. bombing of their embassy in Belgrade in May 1999, Robert Kagan is confident enough to speak on behalf of the whole Chinese people, claiming

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that he knows "the fact" of "what [China] really thinks about the United States." That is, "they consider the United States an enemy or, more precisely, the enemy. . . . How else can one interpret the Chinese government's response to the bombing?" he asks, rhetorically.5'^ For Kagan, because the Chinese "have no other information" than their government's propaganda, the protesters cannot rationally "know" the whole event as "we" do. Thus, their anger must have been orchestrated, unreal, and hence need not be taken seriously.^^ Given that Kagan heads the U.S. Leadership Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and is very much at the heart of redefining the United States as the benevolent global hegemon, his confidence in speaking for the Chinese "other" is perhaps not surprising. In a similar vein, without producing in-depth analysis, Bernstein and Munro invoke with great ease such all-encompassing notions as "the Chinese tradition" and its "entire three-thousandyear history. "59 In particular, they repeatedly speak of what China's "real" goal is: "China is an unsatisfied and ambitious power whose goal is to dominate Asia. . . . China aims at achieving a kind of hegemony. . . . China is so big and so naturally powerful that [we know] it will tend to dominate its region even if it does not intend to do so as a matter of national policy."^^ Likewise, with the goal of absolute security for the United States in mind, Richard Betts and Thomas Christensen argue: The truth is that China can pose a grave problem even if it does not become a military power on the American model, does not intend to commit aggression, integrates into a global economy, and liberalizes politically. Similarly, the United States could face a dangerous conflict over Taiwan even if it turns out that Beijing lacks the capacity to conquer the island. . . . This is true because of geography; because of America's reliance on alliances to project power; and because of China's capacity to harm U.S. forces, U.S. regional allies, and the American homeland, even while losing a war in the technical, military sense.*>' By now, it seems clear that neither China's capabilities nor intentions really matter. Rather, almost by its mere geographical existence, China has been qualified as an absolute strategic "other," a discursive construct from which it cannot escape. Because of this, "China" in U.S. IR discourse has been objectified and deprived of its own subjectivity and exists mainly in and/or the U.S. self. Little wonder that for many U.S. China specialists, China becomes merely a "national security concern" for the United States, with the "severe

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disproportion between the keen attention to China as a security concern and the intractable neglect of China's [own] security concerns in the current debate."^^ At this point, at issue here is no longer whether the "China threat" argument is true or false, but is rather its reflection of a shared positivist mentality among mainstream China experts that they know China better than do the Chinese themselves.^^ "We" alone can know for sure that they consider "us" their enemy and thus pose a menace to "us." Such an account of China, in many ways, strongly seems to resemble Orientalists' problematic distinction between the West and the Orient. Like orientalism, the U.S. construction of the Chinese "other" does not require that China acknowledge the validity of that dichotomous construction. Indeed, as Edward Said point out, "It is enough for 'us' to set up these distinctions in our own minds; [and] 'they' become 'they' accordingly. "64 It may be the case that there is nothing inherently wrong with perceiving others through one's own subjective lens. Yet, what is problematic with mainstream U.S. China watchers is that they refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the inherent fluidity of Chinese identity and subjectivity and try instead to fix its ambiguity as absolute difference from "us," a kind of certainty that denotes nothing but otherness and threats. As a result, it becomes difficult to find a legitimate space for alternative ways of understanding an inherently volatile, amorphous China^^ or to recognize that China's future trajectory in global politics is contingent essentially on how "we" in the United States and the West in general want to see it as well as on how the Chinese choose to shape it.^^ Indeed, discourses of "us" and "them" are always closely linked to how "we" as "what we are" deal with "them" as "what they are" in the practical realm. This is exactly how the discursive strategy of perceiving China as a threatening other should be understood, a point addressed in the following section, which explores some of the practical dimension of this discursive strategy in the containment perspectives and hegemonic ambitions of U.S. foreign policy.

The "China Threat" Discourse and the New U.S. Containment Policy The discursive construction of the U.S. self and the "Chinese threat" argument are not innocent, descriptive accounts of some "independent" reality. Rather, they are always a clarion call for the practice of power politics. At the apex of this power-politics agenda

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is the politico-strategic question of "what is to be done" to make the United States secure from the (perceived) threats it faces. At a general level, as Benjamin Schwarz proposes, this requires an unhindered path to U.S. global hegemony that means not only that the United States must dominate wealthy and technologically sophisticated states in Europe and East Asia America's "allies"but also that it must deal with such nuisances as Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic and Kim Jong II, so that potential great powers need not acquire the means to deal with those problems themselves. And those powers that eschew American supervisionsuch as Chinamust be both engaged and contained. The upshot of "American leadership" is that the United States must spend nearly as much on national security as the rest of the world combined.6' This "neocontainment" policy has been echoed in the "China threat" literature. In a short yet decisive article titled "Why We Must Contain China," Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer insists that "containing China" and "undermining its ruthless dictatorship" constitute two essential components of "any rational policy toward a rising, threatening China." Not only is a policy other than containment considered irrational, but even a delay to implement it would be undesirable, as he urges that "containment of such a bully must begin early in its career." To this end, Krauthammer offers such "practical" options as strengthening regional alliances (with Vietnam, India, and Russia, as well as Japan) to box in China; standing by Chinese dissidents; denying Beijing the right to host the Olympics; and keeping China from joining the World Trade Organization on the terms it desires.^^ Containing China is of course not the only option arising from the "China threat" literature. More often than not, there is a subtle, business-style "crisis management" policy. For example, Bernstein and Munro shy away from the word containment, preferring to call their China policy management.^^ Yet, what remains unchanged in the management formula is a continued promotion of controlling China. For instance, a perusal of Bernstein and Munro's texts reveals that what they mean by management is no different than Krauthammer's explicit containment stance. By framing U.S.China relations as an issue of "crisis management," they leave little doubt of who is the "manager" and who is to be "managed." In a more straightforward manner, Betts and Christensen state that coercion and war must be part and parcel of the China management policy:

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In addressing the China challenge, the United States needs to think hard ahout three related questions:first,how to avoid crises and war through prudent, coercive diplomacy; second, how to manage crises and fight a war if the avoidance effort fails; third, how to end crises and terminate war at costs acceptable to the United States and its allies.^^ This is not to imply that the kind of perspectives outlined above will automatically be translated into actual China policy, but one does not have to be exceedingly perceptive to note that the "China threat" perspective does exert enormous influence on U.S. policy making on China. To illustrate this point, I want now to examine some specific implications of U.S. representations of the "China threat" for U.S.-China relations in relation to the 1995-1996 Taiwan Strait missile crisis and the "spy plane" incident of 2001.
Theory as Practice 1: The Taiwan Strait Missile Crisis

In the eyes of many U.S. China watchers, China's approach to the Taiwan question is a microcosm of its grand strategy to dominate Asia. The argument is that nowhere is the threatening ambition more palpable than in China's saber-rattling missile tests near Taiwan's coast in 1995-1996, in addition to its long-standing refusal to renounce the use of force as a last resort to settle the dispute.^2 While the 1995-1996 missile crisis has been a favorite "starting point" for many pundits and practitioners to paint a frightening picture of China and to justify U.S. firm response to it, what is often conveniently overlooked is the question of how the "China threat" discourse itself had played a constitutive role in the lead-up to that crisis. Limits of space forbid exploring this complex issue here. Simply put, the Taiwan question was created largely as a result of widespread U.S. perceptions of China as a "Red Menace" in the wake of the "loss of China" and the outbreak of the Korean War. To thwart what it saw as an orchestrated Communist offensive in Asia, the United States deployed the U.S. Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Strait as part of its Cold War containment strategy, thereby effectively preventing the reunification of Taiwan with mainland China. While the United States abandoned its containment and isolation policy toward China in the 1970s and the two countries established full diplomatic relations in 1979, the conventional image of the "Red Menace" lingered on in the United States. To manage such a "threat," the U.S. Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act shortly after the normalization of U.S.-China relations, renewing U.S. commitment to Taiwan's defense even though diplomatic ties with the island had been severed.^^

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This confrontational policy serves not only to shore up Taiwan's defense capabilities but also to induce its independent ambition and further complicate cross-strait relations. As former U.S. defense official Chas Freeman remarked, "U.S. arms sales to Taiwan no longer work to boost Taipei's confidence that it can work out its differences with Beijing. Instead, they bolster the view that Taiwan can go its own way."'74 pgr instance, amid growing sympathy from the Republican-dominated Congress and the elite media as well as the expanded ties with the United States, Taiwan responded coolly to Beijing's call for dialogue in January 1995. In June 1995, Taiwan's flexible diplomacy, designed to burnish its independent image, culminated in its president Lee Teng-hui's high-profile visit to the United States. This in turn reinforced Beijing's suspicion that the real U.S. intention was to frustrate its reunification goal, leaving it apparently no other choice but to prepare militarily for what it saw as a worst-case scenario. All this constituted the major context in which the 1995-1996 Taiwan Strait missile exercises took place. For most Chinese, the carrying out of these military exercises, well within their own territory, had little to do with attacking Taiwan, much less with challenging U.S. security interests in the western Pacific. Rather, it was about China's long-cherished dream of national unity, with its "sabre rattling" tactics serving merely as a warning to the United States, as well as to Taiwan. However, interpreting such exercises as China's muscle-flexing with direct security implications for the region, with "an almost 19th-century display of gunboat diplomacy,"^^ the United States dispatched two nuclearpowered aircraft carriers to the region of Taiwan. While not denying the potential security repercussions of China's missile tests for the region, I suggest that the flashpoint of Taiwan says as much about the danger of this U.S. approach to China as about the threat of Beijing's display of force itself. "Had Bill Clinton projected a constancy of purpose and vision in China policy . . . in 1993-1994," David M. Lampton argues, "he might not have been challenged in the Taiwan Strait in 1995-1996 with missile exercises."'7S Indeed, it was primarily in the context of this U.S. intervention that Zhongguo keyi shuo bu (China can say no), one of the most anti-U.S. books ever produced in China, emerged and quickly became a best-seller in the Chinese reading world.^'^ Meanwhile, some Chinese strategic thinkers were so alarmed by the U.S. show of strength that they told Helmut Sonnenfeldt, one of Henry Kissinger's close associates, that they were rereading the early works of Ceorge F. Kennan because "containment had been the basis of American policy toward the Soviet Union; now that the United States was turning containment against China, they wanted to learn how it had started and evolved. "'^^

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If such a scary interaction between the United States and China remained somehow obscured here, it would soon be manifested again in another standoff in U.S.-China relations; namely, the spyplane incident of 2001.
Theory as Practice 2: The 2001 Spy-Plane Incident

Following the 1995-1996 missile crisis, mainstream China observers have continued to take the Taiwan question as a purely geopolitical or security issue, which accordingly should be understood and dealt with simply from the time-honored balance-of-power, zero-sum game perspectives. For example, Bernstein and Munro insist that Taiwan's reunification with the mainland "will leave China in possession of yet another immense economic prize. . . . Complete Chinese reunification, in other words, would further upset the balance of power and vastly enhance China's economic and strategic strength." Commenting on this typical way of representing the Taiwan question, the Taiwan-based scholar Chih-yu Shih suggests that the national security analysis may seem to be a more tangible approach to dissecting the rationale behind Beijing's "policy of coercion" and, because it appears sensible to us, can alleviate our need to pursue Beijing's motivations more deeply. Not only can we thus camouflage our embarrassment at not really knowing China, but also Beijing's discomforting behavioural patterns become comfortably familiar.^" Clearly, the practical implications of this kind of representation go far beyond that. After perceiving a power imbalance in the Taiwan Strait in favor of China, James Lilley (former U.S. ambassador to China) and Carl Ford proposed: "The name of the game for Taiwan, then, is deterrence," which means that the United States must help Taiwan's military maintain "a qualitative edge over the
PRC'Si The 2002 Report to Congress of the U.S.-China Security Review

Commission reached similar conclusions, recommending, among other things, "deterring China attacking Taiwan" and "supporting Taiwan's ability to defend itself without outside assistance." In its formal conclusion, the review commission, made up of well-known U.S. China experts as well as influential policymakers, vows to continue monitoring China in every aspect relating to "our national security concerns. "^2 In fact, U.S. monitoring activity, such as conducting reconnaissance flights along Chinese borders, had always been part of its China policy. So went the rationale:

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The Chinese say they have the right to use force to reclaim Taiwan because it belongs to them, and they regularly practice for an
invasion. This threat of force is why on April 1st [2001], the U.S. Navy's EP-3 surveillance plane was in the area to monitor China's military preparations.^^

Yet it turned out that the EP-3 spy plane collided with a Chinese navy fighter jet that was tailing it over the South China Sea, some fifty miles from the coast of China's Hainan Province. The Chinese jet crashed into the waters below, while the crippled spy plane landed on Hainan island. Washington demanded immediate return of its crew and plane, while Beijing insisted that the United States bear the responsibility for the midair collision and apologize for the incident. Rather than reflecting on how their new containment policy might have contributed to this incident in the first place, many U.S. realist analysts hastily interpreted it as further objective proof of the long-suspected "China threat." As Allen S. Whiting put it, the collision "focused attention anew on Beijing's willingness to risk the use of force in pursuit of political objectives."^^ It was as if the whole incident had little to do with U.S. spying, which was seen as "routine" and "normal." Instead, it was the Chinese who were said to be "playing a dangerous game," without regard to the old spy etiquette formulated during the Cold War.^^ For other observers, China's otherness was embodied also in its demand for a U.S. apology. For example. Merle Coldman, a history professor at Boston University, said that the Chinese emphasis on apologies was rooted in the Confucian value system: "This kind of internalized consensus was the way China was ruled for thousands of years."86 From this perspective, China's request for an apology was preordained by a fixed Chinese tradition and national psyche and had nothing whatsoever to do with the specific context of this incident in which China was spied on, its sovereignty violated, and one of its pilots lost. Thus, even in the face of such a potentially explosive incident, the self-fulfilling effect of the "China threat" discourse has not been acknowledged by mainstream U.S. China analysts. To the contrary, deterring and containing China has gained new urgency. For example, in the aftermath of this standoff, neoconservative columnists Robert Kagan and William Kristol (chairman of the Project for the New American Century) wrote that "not only is the sale of Aegis [to Taiwan] . . . the only appropriate response to Chinese behavior; We have been calling for the active containment of China for the past six years precisely because we think it is the only way to

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keep the peace. "^^ Although the sale of the Aegis destroyers was deferred, President George W. Bush approved an arms package for Taiwan that included so-called "defensive" weapons such as four Kidd class destroyers, eight diesel submarines, and twelve P-3C submarine-hunting aircraft, as well as minesweeping helicopters, torpedoes, and amphibious assault vehicles. On this arms sale, David Shambaugh, a Washington-based China specialist, had this to say: "Given the tangible threats that the Ghinese military can present to Taiwanparticularly a naval blockade or quarantine and missile threatsthis is a sensible and timely package."^^ Given the danger and high stakes involved, some may wonder why China did not simply cooperate so that there would be no need for U.S. "containment." To some extent, China has been cooperative. For example, Beijing was at pains to calm a disgruntled Chinese public by explaining that the U.S. "sorry" letter issued at the end of the spy-plane incident was a genuine "apology," with U.S. officials openly rejecting that interpretation. On the Taiwan question, China has dropped many of its previous demands (such as "one China" being defined as the People's Republic). As to the South China Sea, China has allowed the ASEAN Regional Forum to seek a negotiated solution to the Spratly Islands dispute and also agreed to join the Philippines as cochairs of the working group on confidence-building measures.^9 In January 2002, China chose to play down an incident that a presidential jet outfitted in the United States had been crammed with sophisticated satellite-operated bugs, a decision that, as the New York Times puts it, "illustrates the depth of China's current commitment to cultivating better relations with the United States, "^o Also, over the years, China has ratified a number of key nonproliferation treaties and pledged not to assist countries in developing missiles with ranges that exceed the limits established under the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR). More recently, China has collaborated with the United States in the war on terrorism, including issuing new regulations to restrict the export of missile technology to countries usually accused by the United States of aiding terrorists. Indeed, as some have argued, by any reasonable measure China is now more responsible in international affairs than at any time since 1949.9' And yet, the real problem is that, so long as the United States continues to stake its self-identity on the realization of absolute security, no amount of Chinese cooperation would be enough. For instance, Iain Johnston views the constructive development of China's arms-control policy as a kind of "realpolitik adaptation," rather than "genuine learning."92 From this perspective, however

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China has changed, it would remain a fundamentally threatening other, which the United States cannot live with but has to take full control of.

I have argued above that the "China threat" argument in mainstream U.S. IR literature is derived, primarily, from a discursive construction of otherness. This construction is predicated on a particular narcissistic understanding of the U.S. self and on a positivist-based realism, concerned with absolute certainty and security, a concern central to the dominant U.S. self-imaginary. Within these frameworks, it seems imperative that China be treated as a threatening, absolute other since it is unable to fit neatly into the U.S.-led evolutionary scheme or guarantee absolute security for the United States, so that U.S. power preponderance in the post-Cold War world can still be legitimated. Not only does this reductionist representation come at the expense of understanding China as a dynamic, multifaceted country but it leads inevitably to a policy of containment that, in turn, tends to enhance the influence of realpolitik thinking, nationalist extremism, and hard-line stance in today's China. Even a small dose of the containment strategy is likely to have a highly dramatic impact on U.S.-China relations, as the 1995-1996 missile crisis and the 2001 spy-plane incident have vividly attested. In this respect, Chalmers Johnson is right when he suggests that "a policy of containment toward China implies the possibility of war, just as it did during the Cold War vis-a-vis the former Soviet Union. The balance of terror prevented war between the United States and the Soviet Union, but this may not work in the case of China."^^ For instance, as the United States presses ahead with a missiledefence shield to "guarantee" its invulnerability from rather unlikely sources of missile attacks, it would be almost certain to intensify China's sense of vulnerability and compel it to expand its current small nuclear arsenal so as to maintain the efficiency of its limited deterrence. In consequence, it is not impossible that the two countries, and possibly the whole region, might be dragged into an escalating arms race that would eventually make war more likely. Neither the United States nor China is likely to be keen on fighting the other. But as has been demonstrated, the "China threat" argument, for all its alleged desire for peace and security, tends to make war preparedness the most "realistic" option for both sides. At this juncture, worthy of note is an interesting comment made by Charlie Neuhauser, a leading CIA China specialist.

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on the Vietnam War, a war fought by the United States to contain the then-Communist "other." Neuhauser says, "Nobody wants it. We don't want it, Ho Chi Minh doesn't want it; it's simply a question of annoying the other side."94 And, as we know, in an unwanted war some fifty-eight thousand young people from the United States and an estimated two million Vietnamese men, women, and children lost their lives. Therefore, to call for a halt to the vicious circle of theory as practice associated with the "China threat" literature, tinkering with the current positivist-dominated U.S. IR scholarship on China is no longer adequate. Rather, what is needed is to question this un-self-reflective scholarship itself, particularly its connections with the dominant way in which the United States and the West in general represent themselves and others via their positivist epistemology, so that alternative, more nuanced, and less dangerous ways of interpreting and debating China might become possible. Notes I wish to thank Jim George, Katrina Lee Koo, Derek McDougall, and R. B. J. Walker for their comments and help on earlier versions of this article. 1. It is impossible to give a complete list of the relevant literature here. For some reviews of this dehate, see David Shambaugh, "Containment or Engagement of China? Calculating Beijing's Responses," International Security 21, no. 2 (1996): 180-209; Owen Harries, "A Year of Debating China," The National Interest 58 (1999/2000): 141-147; James Morris, "Containment or Engagement: America's Choice," Pacijica Review 12, no. 2 (2000): 197-201; and Enhao Wang, "Engagement or Containment? Americans' Views on China and Sino-US Relations,"/ourraa/ of Contemporary China 11, no. 31 (2002): 381-392. 2. David M. Lampton, "China," Foreign Policy 110 (1998): 13. 3. R. B. J. Walker, One World, Many Worlds (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1988), p. 22. 4. Among the enormous relevant literattire, see Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper & Row, 1984); Johannes Fahian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Txventieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vantage Books, 1978); Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983); Michael J. Shapiro, The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in Biography, Photography, and Policy Analysis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991); R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Jim Ceorge, Discourses of Global Politics: A Critical (Re)Introduction to International Relations

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(Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1994); Michael J. Shapiro, Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, rev. ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Charles Nathanson, "The Social Construction of the Soviet Threat: A Study in the Politics of Representation," Alternatives 13, no. 4 (1988): 443-483; and Simon Dalby, "Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union As Other," Alternatives 13, no. 4 (1988): 415-442. For more philosophical inquiries into these themes, see, for example, Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other and Additional Essays, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, Penn.: Duquesne University Press, 1987); Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1977); and Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Cohn Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, et al. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980). 5. In varying degrees, there are a few notable exceptions at the margin of or outside the mainstream U.S. China studies community. See, for example, Richard Madsen, China and the American Dream: A Moral Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Bruce Cumings, "The World Shakes China," The National Interest iS (1996): 28-41; Tani E. Barlow, ed.. Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997); and Peter Hays Gries, "A 'China Threat'? Power and Passion in Chinese 'Face Nationalism,'" World Affairs 162, no. 2 (1999): 63-75. 6. Quoted in Evelyn Iritani and Maria Dickerson, "People's Republic of Products," Los Angeles Times, October 20, 2002: www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-chinaloct20. story. 7. Ibid. 8. Richard Bernstein and Ross H. Munro, The Coming Conflict with China (New York: Knopf, 1997), pp. 132-135. 9. Harry Harding, "The Concept of "Greater China": Themes, Variations and Reservations," in David Shambaugh, ed.. Greater China: The Next Superpower? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 31. 10. Denny Roy, "Rising China and U.S. Interests: Inevitable vs. Contingent Hazards," Orbis47, no. 1 (2003): 130. 11. Congressional Record, March 14, 2002. www.fas.org/irp/congress/ 2002_cr/ h031402. 12. Richard K. Betts and Thomas J. Christensen, "China: Getting the Questions Right," The National Interest 66 (2000/2001): 17. 13. Warren I. Cohen, America's Response to China: A History of SinoAmerican Relations, 3d ed. (New York: Coltimbia University Press, 1990), p. 3. 14. Harry Harding, China's Second Revolution: Reform after Mao (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987), p. 258. For a study of the "Sinocentric" world order, see John K. Fairbank, ed.. The Chinese World Order: Traditional China's Foreign Relations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968). 15. Bernstein and Munro, note 8, p. 18. 16. Denny Roy, "Hegemon on the Horizon? China's Threat to East Asian Security," International Security 19, no. 1 (1994): 157. 17. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (London: Touchstone Books, 1996), p. 94. 18. John F. Copper, "The 'Glue' That Holds China Together," The World & in, no. 7 (2002): 20-25.

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19. Alastair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Crand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995). 20. Warren I. Cohen, "China's Strategic Culture," Atlantic Monthly 279, no. 3 (1997): 105. 21. Kenneth Lieherthal, "A New China Strategy," Foreign Affairs 74, no. 6 (1995): 36; Nicholas D. Kristof, "The Rise of China," Foreign Affairs 72, no. 5 (1993): 74. 22. Betts and Christensen, note 12, p. 23. For the Germany analogy, see also Edward Friedman, "The Challenge of a Rising China: Another Germany?" in Robert J. Lieber, ed.. Eagle Adrift: American Foreign Policy at the End of the Century (New York: Longmans, 1997), pp. 215-245. 23. See Bernstein and Munro, note 8, p. 216. 24. Huntington, note 17, p. 169. 25. Betts and Christensen, note 12, p. 18. 26. Quoted in Siobhan McEvoy-Levy, American Exceptionalism and US Foreign Policy: Public Diplomacy at the End of the Cold War (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 24. 27. Colin L. Powell, "U.S. Forces: Challenges Ahead," i^oreign A//am 71, no. 5 (1992): 32. 28. See Samuel P. Huntington, "The Lonely Superpower," Foreign Affairs 78, no. 2 (1999): 37. 29. David E. Sanger, "Allies Hear Sour Notes in 'Axis of Evil' Chorus," Nezu York Times, February 17, 2002, p. A18. See also Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 1990); and Owen Harries, ed., America's Purpose: New Visions of U.S. Foreign Policy (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1991). 30. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), p. 33. 31. Quoted in Julius W. Pratt, Expansionists of 1898: The Acquisition of Hawaii and the Spanish Islands (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1936), p. 3. 32. Quoted ibid., p. 21. 33. Jean Baudrillard, America (London: Verso, 1988), p. 77. 34. Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History," The National Interest 16 (1989): 3-18. 35. Michael H. Hunt, "Chinese Foreign Relations in Historical Perspective," in Harry Harding, ed., China's Foreign Relations in the 1980s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 40-41. 36. Fabian, note 4, p. 18. 37. See Daniel J. Boorstin, America and the Image of Europe: Reflections on American Thought (New York: Meridian Books, 1960), pp. 19-20; Jack P. Greene, The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), p. 122; and Samuel P. Huntington, "The Erosion of American National Interests," ForagTi A//am 76, no. 5 (1997): 29-31. 38. However, as terrorism proves too elusive to take on, and some of its reified symbols (e.g., Saddam Hussein) can be relatively easily dealt with, China might again emerge as the "preferred" enemy. Indeed, even during the height of the war on terrorism, both the Pentagon's 2002 Annual Report on the Military Power of the People's Republic of China and the 2002 Report to Congress of the U.S.-China Security Review Commission painted China as a clear and present danger. See also Joseph Perkins, "The China Threat Has Not Gone Away," San Diego Union-Tribune, ]u\y 19, 2002; and

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Lev Navrozov, "China's Threat Grows as Everyone Watches Iraq": www. newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/10/8/154035. 39. Steve Chan, "Relating to China: Problematic Approaches and Feasible Emphases," World Affairs 161, no. 4 (1999): 179. In this sense, this is in fact not the first time that China is seen by the United States as an abnormal, formidable other. When it emerged from its devastating civil war in 1949, shaken, vulnerable, and much weaker than it is now, China was nevertheless feared by the United States as a threat, for most people in the United States were uneasy about the facts that even after receiving so much "help" from "us," China still went its own way and that there was little they could do to change that. See John K. Fairbank, China: The People's Middle Kingdom and the U.S.A. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1967), pp. 107-108. 40. To counter the "China threat" argtiment, some scholars stress the "inherent peacefulness" of Chinese culture. See, for example, Chen Jian, "Will China's Development Threaten Asia-Pacific Security?" Security DiaIogue24, no. 2 (1993): 193-196; and Li Shaojun, "The Peaceful Orientation of Chinese Civilization: From Tradition to Reality: A Response to Those Who See China as a Menace," unpublished paper (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, 1998), pp. 1-9. 41. Betts and Christensen, note 12, p. 23. 42. Huntington, note 37, pp. 29-30. 43. Ibid., pp. 30-31. 44. See Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 56-57. 45. Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 203. 46. John Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War," International Security 15, no. 1 (1990): 12. See also Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979). 47. R. B. J. Walker, "The Subject of Security," in Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams, eds., Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 69. 48. Kurt M. Campbell, "China Watchers Fighting a Turf War of Their Own," New York Times, May 20, 2000, p. B13. 49. Thomas J. Christensen, "Posing Problems Without Catching Up: China's Rise and Challenges for U.S. Security Policy," International Security 25, no. 4 (2001): 5. 50. James Chace and Caleb Carr, America Invulnerable: The Quest for Absolute Security from 1812 to Star Wars (New York: Summit Books, 1988), p. 12. 51. Quoted in James Der Derian, "The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard," in David Campbell and Michael Dillon, eds.. The Political Subject of Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 95. 52. Benjamin Schwarz, "Permanent Interests, Endless Threats: Cold War Continuities and NATO Enlargement," World Policy Journal 14, no. 3 (1997): 30. 53. Bernstein and Munro, note 8, p. 21. 54. Betts and Christensen, note 12, pp. 19, 22, 26 (emphases added). 55. Samuel S. Kim, "China," in Edward A. Kolodziej and Roger E. Kanet, eds.. Coping with Conflict after the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 135.

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56. Cumings, note 5, p. 39. 57. Robert Kagan, "China's No. 1 Enemy," New York Times, May 11, 1999, p. A23 (emph. added). 58. But as Owen Harries observed, when one did go to China in the aftermath of the incident, one could immediately grasp why the Chinese did not simply "accept" NATO's "accident" explanations (as Robert Kagan strongly believes they should have done). Harries wrote that when he passed through Hong Kong, he "did not meet a person thereeither Chinese or Westernwho accepted the accident thesis": Harries, note 1, p. 145. 59. Bernstein and Munro, note 8, pp. 15, 36. 60. Ibid., pp. 4, 11, 53 (emph. added). 61. Betts and Christensen, note 12, pp. 18, 28. 62. Yongjin Zhang, "Problematizing China's Security: Sociological Insights," Paciftca Review 13, no. 3 (2001): 241. 63. Indeed, many U.S. analysts often claim to be the knowing ones on the subject of China. For example, according to Lucian Pye, it is the West that has long been able to know where Chinese interests lie, whereas, unfortunately, the (irrational) Chinese not only are unable to recognize their own interests but have frequently frustrated Western well-wishers who want only to help them out. As Pye puts it: "From the time of Lord Palmerston's efforts to get the Chinese to accept the conventions of Western diplomacy, to President Bush's humiliating attempts to alter the behavior of Beijing's current rulers, China seems impelled to reject the helping hand and to act in ways that seem perversely self-damaging in the eyes of those who believe they have that country's interests at heart": Lucian W. Pye, "China: Erratic State, Frustrated Society," Foreign Affairs 69, no. 4 (1990): 56. 64. Said, note 4, p. 54. 65. For instance, most of China's neighbors, while presumably more vulnerable to a "China threat" if there is one, do not share the U.S. alarmist view. See Herbert Yee and Ian Storey, eds.. The China Threat: Perceptions, Myths, and Reality (London: Routledge Curzon, 2002). 66. The dominant U.S. IR literature on China does not, for example, allow us to see the possibility that China's aggressiveness may have resulted from its heartfelt vulnerability in the face of U.S. containment, rather than from its increased sense of powerfulness. See Zhang, note 62, pp. 241-253. 67. Schwarz, note 52, p. 29. 68. Charles Krauthammer, "Why We Must Contain China," Tme, July 31, 1995, p. 72. 69. Bernstein and Munro, note 8, p. 203. 70. The main components of Bernstein and Munro's management policy include using most-favored-nation status as a leverage to pressure China, supporting Chinese dissident groups, embarrassing China by lending sympathy to Taiwan and Tibetan exile leaders, maintaining and upgrading the U.S. military presence in Asia, strengthening Japan and the U.S.-Japan alliance, and, last but not the least, courting the younger, more modern generation in China: ibid., pp. 205-221. 71. Betts and Christensen, note 12, p. 28. 72. See, for example, Bernstein and Munro, note 8; Ross Munro, "Taiwan: What China Really Wants," National Review 51, no. 19 (1999): 45-49; Denny Roy, 'Tensions in the Taiwan Strait," Survival 42, no. 1 (2000): 76-96; Evan A. Feigenbaum, "China's Challenge to Pax Americana," Washington

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Quarterly 24, no. 3 (2001): 31-43; Allen S. Whiting, "China's Use of Force, 1950-96, Taiwan," International Security 26, no. 2 (2001): 103-131; Robert S. Ross, "Navigating the Taiwan Strait: Deterrence, Escalation Dominance, and U.S.-China Relations," International Security 27, no. 2 (2002): 48-85; and Thomas J. Christensen, "The Contemporary Security Dilemma: Deterring a Taiwan Conflict," Washington Quarterly 25, no. 4 (2002): 7-21. 73. The Taiwan Relations Act considers "any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States": www.taipei.org/tra/TRA-Law. 74. Quoted in Martin L. Lasater, The Taiwan Conundrum in U.S. China Policy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2000), p. 15. 75. Chalmers Johnson, "Containing China: U.S. and Japan Drift Toward Disaster,"/apan Quarterly 43, no. 4 (1996): 10. 76. David M. Lampton, Same Bed, Different Dreams: Managing U.S.China Relations, 1989-2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 366. 77. Song Qiang, Zhang Zangzang, Qiao Bian, et al., Zhongguo keyi shuo bu {China Can Say No) (Hong Kong: Mingbao chubanshe, 1996). 78. Quoted in Johnson, note 75, p. 12. 79. Bernstein and Munro, note 8, p. 6. See also Andrew Nathan, "China's Goals in the Taiwan Strait," China Journal 36 (1996): 87-93. 80. Chih-yu Shih, "National Security Is a Western Concern," China JournalSQ (1996): 106-107. 81. James Lilley and Carl Ford, "China's Military: A Second Opinion," The National Interest 57 (1999): 76-77. 82. www.uscc.gov/anrpO2. 83. Richard Lindley and Chris Oxley, Dangerous Straits, PBS Frontline program, October 18, 2001: www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ china/etc/script (emph. added). 84. Whiting, note 72, p. 103. 85. Michael R. Gordon, "A Dangerous Game," New York Times, April 3, 2001, p. Al. 86. Fox Butterfield, "China's Demand for Apology Is Rooted in Tradition," New York Times, April 7, 2001, p. A6. 87. Robert Kagan and William Kristol, "A National Humiliation," Weekly Standard^, no. 30 (2001): 11 (emph. added). 88. Michael R. Gordon, "Breathing Room for Taiwan: U.S. Weapons Can Stave Off Threat," New York Times, April 25, 2001, p. A8. 89. Johnson, note 75, p. 15. 90. Elisabeth Rosenthal, "Espionage? By the U.S.? China Prefers to Stay Quiet," New York 77mi, January 23, 2002, p. A5. 91. Yongjin Zhang and Greg Austin, eds.. Power and Responsibility in Chinese Foreign Policy (Canberra: Asia Pacific Press, 2001). 92. Alastair Iain Johnston, "Learning versus Adaptation: Explaining Change in China's Arms Control Policy in the 1980s and 1990s," China Journals (1996): 27-61. 93. Johnson, note 75, p. 12. 94. Quoted in Lampton, note 76, p. 356.