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Constituting United States-China relations: from the open door to the responsible stakeholder debate

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CONSTITUTING UNITED STATES-CHINA RELATIONS: FROM THE OPEN
DOOR ERA TO THE RESPONSIBLE STAKEHOLDER DEBATE

by

Eric Michael Blanchard

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS)

August 2009

Copyright 2009 Eric Michael Blanchard
ii

Dedication

To the memory of Hayward R. Alker.
iii

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge the generous support of the School of
International Relations, Center for International Studies, the U.S.-China Institute, and the
East Asian Studies Center, all at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles,
California.

iv

Table of Contents

Dedication ii

Acknowledgements iii

List of Tables v

Abstract vi

Chapter 1: Threat and the Constitution of Sino-American Relations 1

Chapter 2: Threat and IR Theory: From the Perception of Threat to the Production of
Danger 34

Chapter 3: Discourse Analysis as Interpretive Method 84

Chapter 4: Opening the Door: The Role of Metaphor in the Discourses of Early Sino-
American Relations 139

Chapter 5: Significant Others? The United States and the Evolution of China’s Great
Power Status 171

Chapter 6: “Uncle Wen Says Hello”: US National Security Discourse, Technoscience,
and “Chinagate” 1999 203

Chapter 7: What’s at Stake in US-China Relations? Interpretation, Discourse Analysis
and the “Responsible Stakeholder” Debate 238

Chapter 8: Conclusion 278

References 287

v

List of Tables

Table 1: Summarizing Theories of Threat 78

Table 2: Some Tools Used for Discourse Analysis in IR 94

vi

Abstract

Whether another state is represented as irrelevant, a source of threat, a rival
amenable to negotiation, or a partner matters greatly for the conduct of international
politics. This dissertation examines key episodes in the history of United States-China
relationship, focusing on the political production of meaning to argue that Sino-American
relations should be seen in terms of the roles that China and the United States have
played in the other’s orderings of international politics, not inevitable threats. It
understands the processes of threat construction by linking ordering, identity and culture
to discursive practices, exploring the implications of taking Sino-American relations as
constitutive relations and viewing threat construction as a social process.
I first synthesize and critique prevailing rationalist, cognitive and constructivist
conceptualizations of “threat” in International Relations theory, contributing to the
constructivist research program by integrating previously estranged or partially
incongruent approaches, focusing them on discursive practices, and deploying them to
understand the politics of threat and the constitution of U.S.-China relations. An
interdisciplinary, interpretive approach to political science, discourse analysis brings
together insights from literary theory, history, linguistics, and area-studies to form a
powerful framework for understanding international politics. Bridging the positivist-
post-positivist divide, I introduce tools from the cognitive sciences as they relate to
problems of meaning, borrowing as well from social and political theory.
With this framework I undertake four interpretive case studies which, using a
broad range of governmental documents, scholarly, media and Chinese language
vii

materials, analyze formative periods in nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century
Sino-American relations. The results of this study demonstrate how, while the identities
of the U.S. and China can be maneuvered into exclusivist opposition, it is also the case
that the opposite can occur; significant Others that were once understood as threats can
come to be represented as partners or stakeholders. The U.S. discourse of China, though
still dominated by liberal assumptions and confidence in American agency, has moved
from early constructions of China as purely an object with no control over its fate, to a
representation that takes China as a member, even a potential stakeholder in the U.S.-led
international order.
1

Chapter 1: Threat and the Constitution of Sino-American Relations

“Wherever the standard of freedom or independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her
benedictions, and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to slay.”
—US Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in 1821
“When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world and we knew exactly who they were. It was us versus
them and it was clear who them was. Today, we’re not so sure who they are, but we know they’re there.”

—George W. Bush, during the 2000 United States presidential campaign, as quoted by Chinese scholar
Lanxin Xiang (Xiang 2001, 7).

“America is the world's living myth. There's no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame
America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes
that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We’re here to accommodate.
Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing.”

—Don DeLillo. The Names

Introduction

In April 2001 when a United States EP-3 surveillance plane on a routine mission
over the South China Sea collided with a fighter airplane from the People’s Republic of
China (PRC), the two countries appeared to be, to some observers, “on the brink of a new
Cold War” (Keefe 2002). Yet, with neither side wishing to derail the US-China
relationship, the impasse, which started when the Chinese refused to return the plane or
its crew without an American apology, was ended after 13 days when the US agreed to
deliver an ambiguous letter that professed the American side was “very sorry” for
elements of the incident, although it declined to take responsibility for the collision.
1

Reflecting upon the George W. Bush Administration’s cautious and restrained
strategy of reaching an agreement with a Communist state holding its military personnel

1
On the EP-3 “Spyplane” Incident, see also Keefe 2001; Mulvenon 2002; Blair and Bonfili 2006; from an
IR perspective, see Slingerland, Blanchard, and Boyd-Judsen 2007; from a Chinese perspective, see
Tuosheng Zhang 2006.
2

in a virtual hostage situation, it was not the ambiguity of the crisis’ resolution that was
novel; much of the relationship has been built upon purposefully ambiguous diplomacy,
as symbolized most famously by the Shanghai Communiqué, a compromise document
produced on the occasion of Richard Nixon’s 1972 rapprochement, which massaged
Sino-American relations through carefully crafted ambiguities concerning Taiwan’s
political status. Nor was it any newfound identification with the Chinese government. In
the previous administration, President Bill Clinton had declared the Chinese to be on the
“wrong side of history” (Cohen 2000, 236). At a Republican debate on the Larry King
Show in February during his campaign for the 2000 election, Bush himself had raised
eyebrows in China by signaling his intentions to view China not as America’s “strategic
partner,” but as a “strategic competitor.” Was the Bush Administration’s accommodation
in the case of the EP-3 collision evidence of a larger shift in US views or understandings
of the role of China?
China is indeed viewed by many as an ambiguous potential threat. China’s
neighbors in the international community are concerned with how China’s rapid
economic growth might translate into military power in the future, worried about the
consequences of the persistence of the PRC’s authoritarian, Leninist political system,
haunted by memories of the Tiananmen Square massacres in 1989, troubled by its
increased military spending during a time of relative peace and upgraded regional
military capabilities, and anxious over its view of Taiwan as a renegade province.
American policy makers, government officials and security specialists are particularly
concerned with the PRC and the “power transition” they see implied in the rise of China.
According to the US Department of Defense’s 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review report,
3

“Of the major and emerging powers, China has the greatest potential to compete
militarily with the United States and field disruptive military technologies that could over
time off set traditional U.S. military advantages absent U.S. counter strategies” (US
Department of Defense 2006, 29). Reviewing international history, Michael Swaine and
Ashley Tellis find that no rising power—not Spain, France, Germany, Japan, the US or
USSR—has acquiesced to the existing international order and peacefully integrated into
it without challenging the hegemon (Swaine and Tellis 2000, 224). The threat seen
emanating from China plays a key role in influential realist John Mearsheimer’s
argument that American “engagement” policy towards China is encouraging the very
economic growth that will make a rising China a formidable and dangerous competitor.
Mearsheimer argues that it is in the United States’ interest to try to curb China’s rise,
otherwise the US should expect a 21
st
century challenger potentially more dangerous than
any of the other hegemons the US faced in the 20
th
century (Mearsheimer 2001).

I. US-China relations and threat in historical perspective

The ‘threatful’ quality of US-China relations is historically mutable, but has been
a significant presence in bilateral relations since 1949. The first major shift towards the
understanding of China as a threat can be traced back to the years before 1950, a time
historian Warren Cohen calls the “great aberration” in US China policy (Cohen 2000,
180). In the 1920s and 1930s, US planners, consumed with responding to European
fascism, gave only intermittent attention to a divided and weakened China. It was not
until Japan joined the Axis powers that Americans latent fascination with things Chinese
4

could have a significant analogue in the foreign policy world, and over the course of
World War II the United States came to be involved twice in Chinese civil conflict,
supporting the Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek while alienating the increasingly
powerful Chinese Communist movement. In part a result of the United States support of
the Nationalists, a hostile Chinese Communist party (CCP) first made the Chinese state
tangible as a danger to the United States. A combination of international and domestic
pressures led to Mao Zedong’s decision to “lean to one side” and ally the PRC with the
Soviet Union (Chen 1994), though debate continues over what possibilities existed for a
less antagonistic Sino-American relationship (Borg and Heinrichs 1980, Harding and
Ming 1989, Cohen et al 1997). Upon his death, President Roosevelt left few clues for
Truman as to under what principles diplomacy towards China had been conducted
(Leffler 1992, 25). The position that the Truman Administration ended up taking was
signified by Dean Rusk’s declaration that “China had become an instrument of
international Communism, a ‘Slavic Manchukuo,’ to be opposed no less vigorously than
the Soviet Union” (Cohen 2000,176). Under the Truman administration, the containment
of Communism outside Europe moved from sideshow to growing concern and prompted
re-involvement in the Chinese civil war. The American government’s subsequent refusal
to recognize the Communist regime (Tucker, 1983), an overdrawn understanding of the
degree to which China was under Soviet control (Milliken 2001, Peck 2006), hostile
actions on the part of the Chinese Communists (Chen 1993) and Chinese intervention in
1950 into the Korean War against the US (Chen 1994) all were precursors to Truman’s
intervention in the Taiwan Straits and revision of US East Asia policy. Lack of adequate
channels of communication between Washington and Beijing, as well as a “domestic
5

need to maintain a degree of anticommunism in China policy while Truman mobilized
support for containment in Europe” on the US side, have been put forth as contributing
factors as well (Christensen 1996, 77). Built upon this initial foundation of threat and a
legacy of mistrust, US-PRC relations have been subject to fluctuations that spanned the
hostility of the Kennedy administration, Johnson’s gradual softening (Lumbers 2008),
Nixon’s rapprochement and Carter’s normalization (Harding 1992; Ross 1995), George
H.W. Bush’s accommodation after Tiananmen (Suettinger 2003), and Clinton’s
engagement policy (Lampton 2001). With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and
cessation of Cold War hostilities, there was a brief interregnum before the events of
September 11, 2001 turned American attention to the War on Terror.
Contemporary Chinese conditions and the prospects for Sino-American cooperation
Should Sino-American relations be conceptualized in terms of the potential threat
the “rise of China” (Zheng 2005a) poses to the United States and the West in general? At
the beginning of the 21
st
century, such questions are part of most serious considerations
of US foreign policy and world politics. Even in the context of the post September 11
th

2001 American-led “War on Terror,” the bilateral relationship between the United States
and China is still a touchstone for many discussions of international security, particularly
future-oriented debates over the character of future world orders. Even scholars working
in other areas feel the need to make connections with the “rise of China” discourse to
legitimate their work and demonstrate its relevance.
From the American perspective, tremendous changes within China have made
assessments of Chinese security behavior difficult, and China policy a moving target in
the era of globalization. After decades of market-based reform, China can no longer be
6

comfortably situated in an ideological frame. In the words of one journalist, “the
Revolution has become a dinner party” in that contemporary China is contaminated with
capitalism and is no longer revolutionary (Maggie Farley cited in Chang, 2001). Mao
Zedong’s “continuous revolution” is over and the ideological bankruptcy of the ruling
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is perhaps best symbolized by the movement to allow
the admission of capitalist businessmen into the communist party membership under
former Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin. Meanwhile, the US-China relationship now
must be navigated within the confines of a set of processes often indicated by the term
“globalization.” Specifically, US-China relations must now be conducted in light of the
globalization of “contingency” –the dangers of nuclear exchange, radical environmental
changes, contagious economic crisis, and permanent terrorist threats—challenges the
solutions of which exceed the grasp of any one state, and for which the politics of
enclosed territories are sometimes seen as no longer sufficient (Connolly 1995, xxiii).
Amidst this phenomenon, the post-9/11 international political climate has served as a
reminder of the power of invocations of security to effect widespread domestic and
international sea changes. Further, prompted by the American financial crisis and the
global economic slowdown’s impact on China dating from the end of 2008, some voices
in the US media have drawn attention to the Sino-American economic interrelationship
and the way globalization, in the guise of the rise of global telecommunications,
attenuates the US-China relationship, for instance, when China’s “regulation problem”
(uninspected, unregulated counterfeit drugs being sold over the internet) intersects with
the United States’ “health care problem,” as more Americans turn to the internet for
affordable medicine (Bogdanich 2007). The interrelationship is increasing visible in the
7

writings of some members of the Western punditocracy, who use Niall Ferguson’s term
“Chimerica” to indicate the implicit partnership between savers and producers on the
Chinese side and consumers and borrowers on the US side, and to understand and predict
the consequences of global financial crisis (Friedman 2008).
For their part, China specialists with expertise in policy, history, and political
science have presented a wide range of assessments of China’s status, and the prospects
for cooperative or conflictual US-China relations. Outside of a handful of contrarian
views,
2
China is widely understood as being on the precipice of genuine great power
status, if not already arrived. In terms of its external security environment, China has
historically managed its rise to prominence in a very hostile environment, with many
major powers at its doorstep, surrounded by potential enemies at fourteen land borders
and many sea borders (Nathan and Ross 1997). China derives its current status in part
from a variety of material sources: its demographic weight as world’s most populous
country, territorial size, modernizing military and large armed forces, membership in
almost all important global institutions, along with its permanent membership and veto
power on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and most prominently, its
economic status as 6
th
largest economy (or 2
nd
largest depending on how it’s measured)
(Kim 2006, 39). China’s ruling CCP has predicated its legitimacy on sustained economic
growth and the enjoyment of continued improvements in China’s international status.

2
From a perspective that questioned the assumption that China has even reached the status accorded to it
by some of those who warn of its collapse, Gerald Segal (1999) stirred controversy with his interpretation
of China as a second-rank middle power that has mastered the art of diplomatic theater, arguing that the
fabled China market is actually small, and matters little to the world outside of Asia. Writing in 1999,
Segal found that China could only currently be said to “matter” to the extent that it poses a regional threat
to US interests. For Segal, China’s weakness stems from ambiguity over how to manage the consequences
of modernity and interdependence. See also Arthur Waldron’s (2003) assessments and the commentary in
Swaine et al 2003.
8

However, June Teufel Dreyer’s (2004) sober assessment of the challenges facing China
warns of the folly of predicting or assuming unlimited growth. Depleting domestic
sources, dependence on imports and access to energy sources, and growing disparities of
income levels complicate party efforts to improve living standards, while inadequate
safety nets, corruption, and the challenge of globalization all leave China vulnerable to
domestic and international pressures. In the long-term, Dreyer warns that one aspect of
China’s symbiotic relationship with the world, its overwhelming success as the
“workshop of the world,” may ironically (and tragically) handicap China in its efforts to
develop the indigenous innovations necessary to enhance its competitive abilities.
3

Going further, others such as Gordon Chang (2001) predict that there are too
many challenges for CCP to handle, and that economic collapse, political upheaval,
territorial disintegration, and nationalism will result in China withering away as a
potential international power. Chang lists among these challenges, the bankruptcy of
communist ideology, the unpopularity of the Party, the wide disparity between China’s
rich costal and poor interior regions, labor strikes, farmer protests, and riots. For Chang,
who raises the specter of “armies of unemployed roaming China,” the reform process is
just the privatization of public assets by the powerful, and an unstable China will collapse
under the weight of its hopelessly insolvent state-owned banks.

3
As Dreyer writes: “China may also have difficulty moving beyond its unquestioned successes in
manufacturing goods for overseas companies and into developing its own product lines. China’s advantage
in low manufacturing costs is so overwhelming as to disincentivize investment in innovation. The PRC’s
companies devote few resources to research and development. Selling well in China depends on one’s
knowledge of the country’s arcane distribution networks, exploiting relationships with local government
officials, and pricing strategies. These skills have little relevance to evolving a brand, producing creative
industrial design, or even employing generally accepted supply-chain management methods. Hence they do
not equip Chinese companies to sell anywhere else in the world” (Dreyer 2004, 245).
9

More conservative estimates point to a variety of external threats to continued
progress, for example, the military and energy challenges facing China, that have
significant impacts on the character of China’s foreign relations. As Bates Gill (2004)
notes, China’s woeful defense-industrial base has largely been unable to develop and
produce the high-technology weapons and systems that the People’s Liberation Army
(PLA) needs to become a more expansive regional military power. The result is that,
over the course of the 1990s, China invested heavily in foreign, especially Russian,
systems and technologies. For Gill, Chinese reliance on Russia for the provision of
advanced weapons systems (spare parts and maintenance are tightly controlled by Russia)
is more a marriage of convenience than a real firm foundation for China’s security.
China faces similar vulnerabilities in terms of its energy needs. Though once self-
sufficient, as the world’s second largest energy consumer China has increasingly and
aggressively looked abroad to satisfy the energy needs brought about by its rapid
economic growth. The Chinese statist and mercantilist response to this insecurity
includes strengthening and diversifying its supply relationships, acquiring equity stakes
in existing and prospective oil fields, strengthening investment ties with important
exporting states, enacting an active oil and gas diplomacy, pursuing maritime territorial
claims that would lead to the control of energy resources, and the development of a
strategic petroleum reserve (Herberg 2004, 350-354). China’s influence on the global
energy market is already being felt, its rising import demand for crude oil being blamed
for rising fuel prices while concerns over its growth-first strategy are leading to criticisms
over environmental impact (Cornelius and Story 2007; c.f. Economy 2005). While it is
unclear how recent financial turbulence in the world economy will affect China’s energy
10

insecurity, it seems likely that Western control of sea-lanes and Persian Gulf sources will
continue to be sources of Chinese insecurity.
Turning to the prospects for US-China relations, some scholars find a flexible,
pragmatic China and an increasingly pragmatic, proactive and cooperative Chinese
policy-academic community, an inward focus predominating Chinese strategic thinking
along with a new appreciation for multilateral diplomacy, and a preference for peaceful
dispute resolution and avoidance of confrontation with the United States. For example,
assessing whether China should be seen as a revisionist or status quo state, Alastair Iain
Johnston (2003a) finds that neither his evaluation of Chinese leaders’ orientations
towards three indicators of revisionism (the extent to which an actor challenges the
diplomatic, economic and security institutional rules of the game, towards
disadvantageous distributions of material power, and towards the existing status
hierarchy), nor China’s performance on five indicators of compliance with the
international status quo—adherence to norms of sovereingty, free trade, non-proliferation
and arms control, self-determination, human rights—would allow him to categorize
China as a revisionist state. Medeiros and Fravel argue that a flexible, sophisticated “new
diplomacy” is replacing old revolutionary, reactive and counterproductive diplomatic
strategies, towards Taiwan for example (Medeiros and Fravel 2003). As Medeiros and
Fravel relate, while some Chinese commentators suggest the abandonment of the victim
mentality (shouhaizhe xintai)
4
for a great power mentality (da guo xintai), along with the
downgrading of China’s identification with the interests of developing countries and an

4
The pinyin system has been used in this dissertation for all romanization of Chinese words except when
names, such as Chiang Kai-shek, still commonly retain their older form.
11

accompanying emphasis on great power relations (daguo guanxi) (32), Beijing’s
attentions in the near future will be on domestic problems. Susan Shirk (2007) concurs,
characterizing Beijing as a “fragile” authoritarian regime, and argues that the insecurity
of leaders has led them to focus on domestic issues. China’s leaders, she writes, “feel like
midgets, struggling desperately to stay on top of a society roiled by economic change”
(6).
Bates Gill (2007) further develops the argument that China is in the midst of
developing a more moderate, proactive, and efficient approach to its diplomatic strategy.
Gill discusses these trends in the context of China’s “new security diplomacy,” of which
he finds evidence in China’s behavior towards regional security mechanisms, arms
control and nonproliferation, sovereignty and intervention. China’s new security
orientation, Gill argues, is not merely a tactical response to the conditions presented by
the September 11 attacks, and indeed predates the war on terror, finding its roots in Deng
Xiaoping’s early 1980s reversal of Maoist security thought. As Gill explains, Deng
realized that world war was increasingly unlikely and the stability and peaceful
tendencies of the international environment could afford China the chance to focus on
internal development. At the Cold War’s end, China had survived the international
ostracism resulting from the Tiananmen massacre, the domino-like fall of former iron
curtain Communist states, and the 1991 triumph of the US military in Iraq and Kuwait.
This external environment, less multipolar than Chinese strategists expected, combined
with domestic challenges wrought by reform and opening and the continued pressures of
economic development to prompt a round of reevaluation. According to Gill, the
Chinese reaction to this new environment coalesced around three goals which can be seen
12

at work in different security-related spheres: the maintenance of a stable external
environment so as to free leadership to deal with pressing internal problems, the pursuit
of continued, yet reassuring economic growth that magnifies China’s peaceful intentions,
and the subtle countering of US global influence in a non-threatening manner. While
their ideas are not always accepted, these new thinkers emphasize that China’s strategic
interests include regional cooperation, and reassurance of neighbors, and even point to
the positive impact US hegemonic presence could have on Chinese security. If the ideas
of the New Thinkers are implemented, Gill argues that this will have a moderating effect
on China’s foreign policy.
According to Avery Goldstein (2005) there is a post-1996 rough consensus
among Chinese policy makers that constitutes a de facto “grand strategy” (the central
logic which informs the choice of means by which a state seeks to safeguard its national
interests) aimed at leveraging China’s growing capabilities to navigate China’s
emergence in a unipolar world. The new grand strategy aims to increase China’s power
without activating an American counteraction by focusing on diplomatic partnership and
reputation maintenance. The evidence suggests to Goldstein that there are little grounds
for expecting that China would exchange its current conservative approach to grand
strategy for one that sought to challenge, rather than tweak or reform, the current
international order. For Goldstein, the unintended consequences of China’s strategy are
the real danger (211).
In sum, based on recent scholarship, how should scholars assess Sino-American
relations? Goldstein’s realism suggests that, since anarchy cannot be eradicated, the hope
is to “mitigate” the intensity of the Sino-American security dilemma by recognizing the
13

strategic logic behind Chinese policies (16-17). Gill and Shirk suggest that the China’s
new thinking is the result of material conditions—changes in external and internal
environments—which necessitate an inward turn, and demand an American response
sensitive to both opportunities and challenges that a moderate turn presents. Taking
assessments such as these into account, policymakers in the US and elsewhere struggle to
assess the extent to which China’s current status quo foreign policy approach reflects an
increasingly socialized acceptance of the norms of international society, or is a forced or
unhappy accommodation to be jettisoned when Chinese prosperity and power affords it
more flexibility. Others contest the idea that China is a threat, pointing to material power
disparities, and emphasizing the insurmountable challenges facing China’s leaders:
enormous restless multiethnic populations, grinding poverty, unemployment, corruption
and resource scarcity, and the leadership of a regime that has effectively abandoned its
ideological commitments and encouraged in their place a virulent nationalism, a regime
that’s security is predicated on continued economic success.

II. Argument

This dissertation takes a different approach to these questions by examining key
episodes in the history of US-China relationship, using a focus on the production of
meaning to argue that US-China relations should be seen in terms of politically possible
relationships, not inevitable threats. It understands the processes of threat construction by
linking ordering, identity and culture to discursive practices. Fitzgerald (1993) argues
that culture can be usefully seen as a frame through which “people derive a sense of who
they are, how they should act, and where they are going” while identity has an “executive
14

role” in that it is “fundamentally the problem-solving tool for coping in particular
environments” (it is the “action unit of culture”) (Fitzgerald 1993, xi, 186, cited in Lapid
1996, 9). Following this promising way of conceptualizing the link, we can understand
identity and culture as, respectively “the construction of boundaries and the production of
meaning” (Nagel 1994, 152, cited by Lapid 1996, 19 fn.2). If threat can be seen as a
cultural phenomenon, how do threats become significant? In other words, if threat is not
given solely by material or environmental factors, then how do threats become possible?
The hypothesis of the current study is that discursively constituted threats ultimately
resonate when they pose challenges to identity but also when they throw into question
another state’s preferred order. Ultimately, the approach taken here gives us insight into
how threats form within (and constitute) a state’s ordering practices and sometimes,
particular international orders. More locally, we can study how threats are discursively
constructed through meaning giving practices that flow between the domestic and
international discourses of foreign policy.
My approach has three main prongs. First, I take seriously the constructivist
perspective that views international relations as social relations. Constructivists argue
that social threats are not natural but constructed and focus on how beliefs, goals, and
identities can change in the encounters that make up these social relations. If this is so,
what does it mean for how we study international relations in general and Sino-American
relations in particular? While sometimes misidentified as a solely causal approach to
idealist optimism (Friedberg 2005), constructivism also stresses the role of meaning in
these social relations. Applied to the case of US-China relations, we can ask in what
ways have the US and China relied upon each other for meaning?
15

The study draws upon a rich literature that treats the perennial issues of
knowledge and meaning construction about China through an analysis of “images” of
China in the Western and American imagination (Thomson, Stanley, and Perry 1981,
Madsen 1995, Jespersen 1996, Spence 1998). These studies give great insight into the
consequences of viewing China through evangelical and commercial lenses, and the
impact of understanding China exclusively in Western terms. Concerned with the
avoidance of ethnocentrism, Paul A. Cohen’s (1984) seminal discussion of American
historical work on China picks up on Edward Said’s influential theory of Orientalism to
criticize the “intellectual imperialism” of American historians of China. The paradigms
used to understand China, in Cohen’s estimation, robbed China of its agency (or
“autonomy”) while formulating China as an “intellectual possession of the West” (151),
tying “significant” historical change to the Western experience of modernization and thus
the “possibility of modernizing change taking place without the West becomes
unthinkable” (151-2). Adding to the tradition through which scholars have sought to
examine the mythology of China and appraise the impact of exotic, sentimental or
romantic understandings of the Chinese Other, a constructivist approach can illuminate
the ways political communities—the states-people, policy-makers, scholars, and publics
that speak in their name—manage potentially threatening Otherness through diplomatic
and foreign policies.
Second, I develop and contest prevailing conceptualizations of security studies,
particularly the concept of “threat.” Where some influential approaches encourage the
application of timeless wisdom, a more historicized view allows us to identify a broader
set of possible relationships while arguing that international insecurities are in part
16

cultural, opening up a broad new avenue of research. Threats to security call for
particular responses on the part of state actors, and whether another state is represented
and constructed as irrelevant, a source of threat, a rival amenable to negotiation, or a
partner matters greatly for the study of international politics. Following constructivist
work in IR, difference can be constructed as a threatening “Otherness,” the location of an
existential danger, or a subversive force, but it can also be subject to more benign or even
cooperative interpretation. It is this interpretive process, I argue, that needs more
attention. It is helpful to see threat as only one position on a continuum of responses
(made up of representations) to the Other, and pay attention to the knowledgeable
practices whereby an Other comes to be understood, or made intelligible, highlighting the
relationship between Others and order. The situating of a self vis-à-vis a particular Other
is a fundamental practice of state representatives, spokespeople, and decision-makers,
one so common we often barely notice it. A focus on the practice of ordering—the
preferred arrangements by which a national self is situated by the elites in charge of
foreign policy—gives us insight into understanding the potentialities of world politics
beyond that offered by gestures to the anarchy principle or the timeless wisdom of
political realism. The historical presence of Chinese in America, highlighted in this
thesis during an examination of the Chinese Exclusion Acts and Chinagate of the 1990s,
has added an interesting twist to this ordering-threat dynamic. I focus here less on the
political clout or activism of Chinese in America, though both are interesting topics, and
more on the ramifications for the production of American identity, and the way attempts
to resolve contradictions among various components of the self shed light on the political
production of boundaries between political communities.
17

Third, I argue for an analytic focus on political language and discourse, contrary
to most rationalist and some constructivist theory. This need not be understood as
endorsing naïve “idealism,” nor is a move to reduce all social phenomenon to their
linguistic aspects. I synthesize and apply discourse theory to US-China relations,
systematizing and adding analytic scaffolding to a useful but still chaotic literature.
Simply put, discourse theory directs our attention to two particular features of
international social life, 1) how discourses selectively appropriate some features of the
world, backgrounding some interpretations while others become “dominant,” in other
words, comprising the taken-for-granted background assumptions that enable, constrain,
and constitute objects, events, and actors, and 2) how meaning is fixed, if only
temporarily. Recognizing discourse is key to understanding the exchange of meaning,
the delineation of self and Other and thus identity, and suggests the use of a wide range of
research materials across the domestic, international and other divides. As a practice,
discourse naturalizes and legitimates certain representations over others, and this analysis
shows not only that certain political realities are the result of this process, but also that
discourse presents opportunities to construct new political realities. Discourse also
offers a way to address the broad question of how history “matters”, in this case by
historicizing US-China relations to show the mutability of the relationship in contrast to
some recent IR theory. We can trace the influence of history through narratives,
emplotted stories “told” by selves about identities, goals, and Others. Narratives lend
coherence and direction to social life, but they also preserve and transfer historical
memory to new or novel situations. Finally, by giving systematic treatment to
phenomena that are intuitive and widely shared (such as narratives or metaphors), I hope
18

to link academic knowledge to the pursuit of policy relevant understandings, leading to
increased communicative exchange between knowledge producers in different realms.

III. Research methods, definitions, and procedures

Constructivism and constitutive theorizing
Constructivism in academic IR has generally been interpreted as reflecting a new
recognition of the importance of culture, norms, and identity in international politics.
According to Alexander Wendt, a leading constructivist, many critical IR theorists agree
on two broad constructivist claims: that international political structures are
fundamentally social as opposed to material, and contra rationalism, these social
structures shape the identities and interests of actors rather than just their behavior
(Wendt 1995, 71-2).
Constructivists answer the question of what forms of action are permissible under
social conditions through the use of constitutive theory. Because the objective of
constitutive theorizing is “to account for the properties of things by reference to the
structures in virtue of which they exist” (Wendt 1998, 105), such an approach can help us
look at the ways in which one political community (in this case a state) is implicated in
the identity-building and maintenance projects of the other. Constitutive theorizing
poses how-possible questions instead of traditional why-questions (Wendt 1998). How-
possible questions “examine how meanings are produced and attached to various social
subjects/objects, thus constituting particular interpretive dispositions which create certain
possibilities and preclude others” (Doty 1993, 298). Constitutive and causal questions can
19

be distinguished in that “rather than asking how a temporally prior X produced an
independently existing Y,” constitutive theory attempts to explicate “the structures that
constitute X or Y in the first place” (Wendt 1999, 83). Identity questions, such as the
ones involved in the US-China relationship, involve constitutive questions, violating the
assumptions of the “independent existence and temporal asymmetry” that causal
explanations depend upon (ibid.). While rationalist (such as behavioralist or game
theoretic) “strategic” approaches view interactions as having no effect on actors’
preferences, constitutive approaches view beliefs and goals as endogenous to the
interaction, viewing the acting subject as “constituted by the process of interaction”
(Banerjee 1998).
Culture and threat
The context of this interaction is also important. Recent research in IR and
political science has suggested that threat emanates at least in part from the cultural
sphere or the influence of cultural factors. Samuel Huntington (1996), for example,
claimed that future conflicts would be along cultural-civilizational fault lines, an
argument some believe born out by the events of September 11
th
2001. Huntington
describes a cultural “reconfiguration” of world politics wherein cultural difference leads
to conflict because of: the increasing importance of cultural identities relative to other
identities, the stimulation of individual dislocation and the growing power of non-
Western societies, the need for an “other” for self-identification, the inherent non-
negotiability of cultural difference (as opposed to material difference), and the
timelessness of human hatred. To make his argument, Huntington casts culture in
20

militarized terms: “In a world where culture counts, the platoons are tribes and ethnic
groups, the regiments are nations, and the armies are civilizations” (1996, 128).
Huntington’s claims were met with resistance too wide-ranging to survey here.
From a dissident Chinese perspective, Liu Binyan questioned Huntington’s idea that a
unified Confucian culture could serve as the basis for conflict; though undergoing
revival, the influence of Confucian culture in the recent past paled in comparison to the
impact of Western culture (Liu 1993, 20). While Huntington drew attention to the
importance of cultural factors in international relations, because he understood culture
purely as antagonistic, he focused on the forces that maneuver cultural identities into
exclusivist opposition. Perhaps most importantly for the current study, this position
forecloses on the possibilities of culturally-inspired cooperation or understanding.
The emergence of the PRC during the twentieth century would seem to provide a
neat case study of liberalism’s confrontation with illiberalism, democracies’
confrontation with authoritarian socialism, and capitalism’s recoding of anti-capitalism,
while a “clash” of Western and Sinic world orders looms in the background waiting for
resolution. Yet Huntington’s argument does not exhaust the ways in which threat can be
seen as a cultural phenomenon. Another way of placing a study of threats and orders
within a cultural frame is with reference to the idea of “cultural encounters.” Inayatullah
and Blaney (1996) “identify the human urge to meaningfully ‘discover the other’ as the
deep motive for both individual and collective encounters” (Lapid 1996, 14). We can
further recognize that “insecurities are cultural in the sense that they are produced in and
out of ‘the context within which people give meanings to their actions and experiences
21

and make sense of their lives’” (Weldes et.al. 1999, 1). A fuller study of threat
necessitates a constitutive study of meaning directed at specific cultural encounters.
Ordering
Implicitly, questions about contemporary Sino-American relations are questions
about whether rising powers can be integrated into existing international orders without
conflict. Some doubt the more dire predictions of power transition theory, such as John
Ikenberry, who argues that “[t]oday’s Western order…is hard to overturn and easy to
join”(Ikenberry 2008, 24). This suggests that American strategy towards China’s
emergence be geared towards strengthening the existing international liberal order—the
framework of rules and institutions—on terms that continue to benefit the US even as it
declines relatively. For others, the evidence suggests that there are little grounds for
expecting that China would exchange its current conservative approach to grand strategy
for one that sought to challenge, rather than tweak or reform the current international
order. Instead, the unintended consequences of China’s strategy are the real danger
(Goldstein 2005, 211).
Talk of “order” has been a sore point in the relationship. After Tiananmen,
Chinese thinkers disparaged globalism as evidenced in Bush’s “new world order,” as the
kind of hegemonic American “peaceful evolution” agenda that lay behind the uprising.
When “globalization” made its way into Chinese discourse in mid 1990s, liberal-leaning
thinkers such as Li Shenzhi (former vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences) argued that classic Chinese ti-yong
5
notion should be reversed, with western

5
Tiyong is the separation of (Chinese) essence from function (of Western technology), as promulgated by
Confucian reformer Zhang Zhidong (Hughes 1995, 433). The full formulation, zhong xue wei ti, xi xue wei
22

globalization embraced as essence while Chinese characteristics be seen as utility (Kim
2006, 280). Further, there are reasons to avoid the hasty assumption that China is being
integrated into the American order. Some critics look at the concessions made by
American internet firms like Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft; if the firms that symbolize
Western technological and cultural dominance are altering their rules to do business in
China, who’s changing whom? Somewhat polemically, James Mann asks if the US is
“now integrating China into a new international economic order based upon free market
principles” or is it more accurate to say that China is “now integrating the United States
into a new international political order where democracy is no longer favored and where
a government’s continuing eradication of all organized political opposition is accepted or
ignored?” (Mann 2007, 105).
“World order” is a concept that has a long history in China studies, most
prominently seen in John K. Fairbank and his collaborators’ efforts to explicate the
Chinese state’s relations with other states in the Qing dynasty (1644-1912), debating the
existence and practical consequences of a persistent Chinese Order (Fairbank 1968). In
the study of IR, order is a concept with varied definitions that has been deployed for
varying purposes. As Steve Chan notes, “world order” has multiple meanings, three of
which are particularly salient for the present study: existing patterns and arrangements of
actors’ status in the empirical world, normative ideals that describe preferred
arrangements among those actors, or a particular state’s approach to strategic behavior
(Chan 1999). Mainstream neorealist approaches take order in the final analysis to be an

yong acknowledges the benefits of Western technology but stresses the retention of the Chinese ideology
and worldview (Waley-Cohen 1999, 205).
23

artifact of the material distribution of power as conditioned by a state of anarchy, the
existence of equal sovereign states with no adjudicating higher power (Waltz 1979).
Contrasted with the hierarchical nature of domestic order, order in the international
system is said to be arranged (structured) according to the “ordering principle” of anarchy
which is seen as a constant, while the concentration of material power resources
determines the variation. Neorealism (and classical realism) prescribe international and
regional balances of power as the method of attaining order (Hall and Paul 1999, 5).
However, the material structure given by the distribution of capabilities may be an
important consideration for students of order, but it is too simplified and tells us little
about the ideational or cultural character of ordering. As Alexander Wendt has argued,
explanations that rely on material forces must be accompanied by inquiry into “the
discursive conditions which make them work” (Wendt 1999, 135). Hedley Bull in the
course of important work clarifying the existence of a social element in international
politics presented order—a patterned activity that sustains the goals of international
society—as a value in competition with demands for justice (Bull 1977). The World
Order Models Project (WOMP) of Richard Falk and his collaborators aimed at reforming
the existing order so as to be consonant with the goal of realizing the values of peace,
economic well-being, justice, and ecological balance (see for example Falk 1987, 17).
Alker (1981), Alker and Biersteker (1984), and Alker, Biersteker, and Inoguchi (1989) as
part of their Dialectics of World Order project, review the rationales and implementation
of a multiplicity of historical, interpenetrating, security-seeking attempts at building
world order (such as balance of power, collective security, or people’s wars) across
security, political economy, political community, and geographic-environmental sectors.
24

Though it draws upon these works, the notion of order I use here is comparatively
limited and modest. First, building on, but departing from this literature, I focus on the
practice of ordering. Ordering as a practice is constitutive in that it relies upon
representations and interactions between contending approaches to international politics
and depends on the interpenetration of often-divergent systems of meaning. A focus on
ordering sets threat in a wider context, one more sensitive to culturally bounded,
meaningful practices by which states understand their own and others’ conduct. Second,
I stress the role of the “Other” in the preferred arrangements of a given state in the
international realm. For instance, Robert Latham has argued that “the political structure
of international liberal order …was the foundation upon which emerged the East-West
confrontation” of the Cold War (Latham 1995, 120). Yet, while the US assumed the role
of post WWII order builder, international liberalism was not “US interest writ large”
(114) but a collaborative international project. The USSR, Latham argues, was a
significant other to the West not merely because of its challenge to US interests, but
because of the threat it posed to the nascent liberal order (119). In Latham’s terms,
“making an order is making an other,” and thus boundary drawing is a key component of
order building. Third, following Bially Mattern (2005) I connect orders to identities and
the narratives that enact them. Identity is source of international order, it is shared
knowledge that allows states to imagine and design relations among them. Once states
get involved in identity processes, they are situated relative to others and are “collectively
implicated in an international order” (Bially Mattern 2005, 6).

25

Threat
I resist the term “security” in favor of an examination of “threat” for several
reasons. First is the general concern that invoking security, even in academic contexts,
both reinscribes the idea that security is an unproblematic good while reinforcing the
concept’s seepage into the multiplying practices that are conducted in its name. This is
not the same as the worry that defining new, non-military issues—environment, people,
etc.—as security risks “stretching” the concept beyond all meaningful utilization (Walt
1991), but instead notes the ways in which the “saturation of the political and social
landscape with the logic of security has been accompanied by the emergence of an
academic industry churning out ideas about how to defend and improve it” (Neocleous
2008, 3). Even “critical” debates about security are motivated by the assumption that
“security is the foundation of freedom, democracy and the good society, and that the real
question is how to improve the power of the ‘state’ to secure us” (4). However, as Mark
Neocleous asks:
But what if at the heart of the logic of security lies not a vision of freedom or
emancipation, but a means of modeling the whole of human society around a
particular vision of order? What if security is little more than a semantic and
semiotic black hole allowing authority to inscribe itself deeply into human
experience? (4)
6

Second, while it would both be impossible and ill advised to avoid the legacy and
contributions of security and critical security studies, the subfield finds itself at
loggerheads over several issues. Debates over widening the notion of security to
encompass a broader agenda, along with disagreements over whether the provision of

6
Provocatively, Neocleous volunteers instead a definition of security as a “mode of governing, a political
technology through which individuals, groups, classes, and ultimately, modern capital is reshaped and
reordered” (4).

26

more security is better in the first place have brought the subfield to a standstill if not to a
state of mild incoherence. It would be difficult to present an argument intelligible to IR
scholars without reference to the rich tradition of security studies, yet this legacy should
be problematized, without devolving into a “critique of critical criticism” in Marx’s turn
of phrase (Neocleous 2008, 5).
Third, there is still relatively little analytic work in IR that explicitly deals with
“threat.” As Thomas Schmalberger argued in the late 1990s, “One of the major lacunas of
the existing scholarship is that threats have mostly been examined as a behavioral or a
psychological, but not as a social phenomenon” (Schmalberger 1998, 3). The last ten
years of IR scholarship have not improved this situation appreciably, and as I
demonstrate in the next chapter, threat has thus far not been given a satisfactory
theoretical articulation.
Interpretive case studies and discourse analysis
In the interests of managing this project theoretically, I adopt an “analytically
eclectic” approach which recognizes that dogmatic adherence to particular research
traditions can lead to the tendency to accept the naturalization of certain elements of the
Asian security dynamic (Suh, Katzenstein and Carlson 2004). While situated in the
interpretive social science tradition, the thesis borrows liberally from qualitative and
interpretive political science, as well as cognitive linguistics, literary and social theory, in
an attempt to bring the strengths of an interdisciplinary approach to bear on the US-China
relationship. While the interpretive framework I use departs from some practices of
social science as it is practiced in IR and political science and I do not take causally
oriented qualitative research as unproblematic, my study is similar to much qualitative
27

case study-oriented research in that it applies theory to cases with the goal of interpreting
the cases (Ragin 1987, 11) under the assumption that the goal should be to choose tools
that best illuminate the subject at hand. A comparative approach, whether explicit or
implicit, is probably unavoidable, an insight summed up nicely in the statement:
“Thinking without comparison is unthinkable” (Swanson 1971, 145 cited in Ragin 1987,
1). Thus, the study is partly comparative, deploying a case-study methodology usually
restricted to the realm of causally-oriented research in order to probe unsettled periods of
US-China relations, often during periods when world orders were either being formulated
or asserted. In social science terms, variation on the “dependent variable” was sought;
cases were selected so as to not only reflect “successful” threat production, but also to
include “failure,” i.e., representations of the other that promote positive, cooperative
understandings, and even partnership in the context of a historically threat-based, if
ambiguous relationship.
Interpretive comparative case studies have received less attention, although in an
article that touches on some of the concerns of my approach, Friedrich Kratochwil
(Kratochwil 2006) has recently emphasized the place of narrative constellations in the
analysis of cases in IR. Kratochwil argues that case studies concentrate “on the issue of
delimiting the case by providing a narrative ‘plot’ and examining its coherence and
‘followabilty’ critically” while stressing that “getting the context right and making
judgment calls as to the important dimensions that develop throughout the observation is
the actual puzzle” (Kratochwil 2006, 22). To carry out the case studies, this thesis draws
upon a long interpretivist tradition of social scientific inquiry, integrating a relatively new
form of analysis to link interaction to threat, threat to identity, and identity to political
28

language and practice. This approach, discourse analysis has grown in popularity, but
not progressed in terms of systematization. This lack of systematization, and the failure
of any consensus approaches to develop, can of course be lauded in a disciplinary sense
as a refusal to foreclose on the meaning and usage of discourse analysis. But viewed in
practical terms, it is a hindrance in terms of producing concrete research. As presented in
depth in the methodological portion of this thesis, the systematization pursued here is in
its preliminary stages, but I hope will lead to further development because without
comparison and trial and error, there is less hope of methodological development within
interpretive social science.

IV. Chapter overview

Analysis of these encounters shifts perspective, with the first three cases primarily
concerned with the American constructions of the Chinese state and Chinese and the
forth mainly presented from perspective of Chinese thinkers. That these three cases are
presented mainly from the US perspective reflects both the hierarchical position of the
US as an international order-maker, and its historically shifting view of China as victim,
partner, and danger. Reflecting China’s growing power within an order defined and
maintained by the West, the final case “goes where the action is,” shifting strategies to
lay more emphasis on the “Chinese perspective” and pointing to a more comprehensive,
multi-sided view of constitutive processes. These analytic shifts follow the focus on the
production of knowledge about the Chinese Other (and the US Other), whether it is
29

situated in “high” diplomatic exchanges, popular culture, or academic security studies,
and allow a demonstration of the flexibility of discourse analysis across levels.
Chapters two, three and part of chapter four present theoretical and
methodological explications. The second part of chapter four, as well as chapters five,
six and seven, treat case studies that range from the age of imperialism in the late 1900s
to the age of globalization at the turn of the 21
st
century. Faced with such a broad and
rich history, the thesis makes its task more manageable by narrowing the scope of
analysis to foreign policy practices, admittedly still a large task. The encounters selected
for further consideration were located at pivotal times in 19
th
, 20
th
and 21st century Sino-
American relations, when the formation of international political orders was still very
much under way: the age of imperialism, the end of World War II, the end of the Cold
War and the commencement of the War on Terror. The identities of the US and China at
these points were unstable, and international relations too, were dominated by unsettled
meanings. While the analysis is not variable-oriented, leaving open the question of
whether China was constituted as partner, threat or something else is a valuable move
even in a constitutive (not causal) approach because it allows us to compare different
outcomes of similar processes. The case studies should be seen as snapshots awaiting a
more comprehensive future historical survey. They aim, not at an all-inclusive
constructivist assessment of almost 200 years of US-China relations, but at establishing
the plausibility and usefulness of such an interpretation.
The second chapter reviews the ways IR scholars have conceptualized “threat”
politics, arguing that despite their contributions, rationalist, psychological, and
mainstream constructivism are inadequate to the task of understanding the politics of
30

threat construction within Sino-American relations. The approach I offer synthesizes and
improves upon the constructivist research program by integrating previously estranged or
partially incongruent approaches to constructivism, focusing them on discursive
practices, and deploying them to understand the politics of threat constitution. My
constitutive approach focuses on the co-constitution of state identities within foreign
policy practice, and the possibilities foregone in each concrete instance of the recognition
of the other as threat or partner.
The third chapter presents an interpretivist discourse analysis methodology.
Outlining an interdisciplinary approach to discourse analysis that draws upon linguistics,
cognitive linguistics, ethnomethodology, and social theory, I first make the case for a
discursive approach to international politics addressing the strengths and limitations of
the method. I then outline and discuss the key components of this approach and discuss
how discourse analysis can be usefully calibrated for the study of international
interactions, particularly the challenging study of the discourse of the Chinese state.
Chapter four adds political metaphor analysis to the discourse analytic tools
developed in chapter three for answering constitutive questions in International Relations
(IR) theory. I then examine the key metaphors within American political discourse that
guided and structured early Sino-American interactions. The United States’ management
of the Chinese Other in this era confronted the problem of the weakness of the Chinese
state and had long-lasting influence on US policy. I focus on US Secretary of State John
Hay’s 1899 “Open Door” notes, which sought to protect American interests in China
while maintaining a modicum of Chinese sovereignty (all without the meaningful
participation of the Chinese) and the Chinese Exclusion Acts (from 1882). I apply both
31

the social constructivist metaphor perspective and the cognitive perspective, which builds
on the seminal applications of cognitive linguistics and cognitive metaphor theory to
international relations found in the work of George Lakoff, Paul Chilton and others.
Used in tandem, these two approaches to the constitutive role of political metaphor shed
light on the processes by which metaphors win out over competing discourses to become
durable features of international social relations.
The fifth chapter looks at the significance of the particular American
representation of China that followed upon its “Open Door” construction, initiated in the
closing years of World War II by US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Attempting
to manage both Chinese political disarray and the Japanese threat, US policy, though
ultimately a failure, aimed at building a cooperative partnership in Asia. This process
temporarily constituted the Nationalist ROC as a (nominal) world power and constituted
US identity as not only world orderer, but also as “China’s champion.” The case presents
a puzzle for IR theories that rely solely upon materialist approaches: the privileges
accorded Nationalist China by American, British and Soviet postwar planners— the
status of one of the “Four Policeman” of the post WWII order and an important veto—
were incommensurate with China’s material capabilities; China was not among the world
powers at the time and the increasingly weakened Nationalist regime and war of
resistance to Japanese occupation threw doubt on China’s candidacy for global
“policeman.” How did it become possible for a weak, divided China to climb into the
“the cockpit of global security politics” (Kim 2006, 293)? I examine how the Chinese
state’s entry into the UNSC became possible through its construction in American foreign
policy and domestic discourses.
32

Chapter six examines the domestic discourses of espionage, technological
security, and ethnicity in post-Cold War America, and moves from a more “positive” to a
“negative” representation of China, highlighting the role of internal threat construction in
US-China relations. Here I focus on the Los Alamos Espionage Case, and the
prosecution of Taiwanese-American Wen Ho Lee. Surveying the American and Chinese
constructions of and reactions to the case, I then argue that the case throws particular
constructions of American and Chinese identity into relief, while spotlighting the role of
intelligence and technology in the future of US-China relations.
Chapter seven inquires into the 2005 “responsible stakeholder” debate, shifting
the analytic focus to understandings of US China policy within Chinese policy-making
and analyzing circles. This chapter is a study of one of the more significant moves in
post-Cold War US-China relations: the shift in US policy from one that approaches China
as a candidate for integration into the Western-led international system, to one that urges
the role of responsible partner in that system. A key interaction in this regard developed
over the concept of China as a “responsible stakeholder,” introduced in US Deputy
Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick’s September 2005 remarks to the National
Committee on US-China Relations. In this heavily metaphoric speech, Zoellick pressured
China on a host of US issues—intellectual property, trade, energy security, the Korean
peninsula, terrorism, and non-proliferation—but framed his policy overture by suggesting
China take a new, responsible role in the international system. A brief concluding chapter
summarizes the findings and implications of the study.
To take Sino-American relations as social, and constitutive relations and threat
construction as a social process is to offer a new perspective on US-China relations. The
33

cases show that threat is not immutable and offer lessons for building a more cooperative
relationship in the future. The intuition that motivates this study is that IR theorists have
approached Sino-American relations with a dated and restrictive toolbox. New tools,
including constitutive theorizing and discourse analysis, can help scholars develop a
fuller understanding of the meaningful roles the two states have played in their significant
other’s foreign policies. As noted, an exhaustive treatment of the rich, enormous history
of Sino-American relations may be beyond the scope of a single book. This thesis is
primarily an exercise in IR theory, not China studies or Chinese historiography, though it
draws upon and aims at adding to both. I have not tried to produce a definitive diplomatic
history of US-China relations since the late 19
th
century. Instead, the goal is to provide a
historicized, interpretive account aimed at establishing the value of a constructivist
approach to one of the world’s most important bilateral relationships.
34
Chapter 2: Threat and IR Theory: From the Perception of Threat to the
Production of Danger

“It has been a threatful world, and still is.”
—Klaus Knorr (1976, 78)

Whether the proponents of what can be called a new “China Threat School,” are
viewed as Cassandra’s or accurate assessors of future risks to international security
(Bernstein and Munro, 1998), they are now part of the architecture of all discourse on
international relations and world politics. The title of a recent collection of essays, The
China Threat: Perceptions, Myths and Reality (Yee and Storey 2002), captures the
academic dimension of the China threat phenomenon which has taken the form of a
debate over the extent to which China objectively poses a threat to the international
system and particular states. Yee and Story argue that the prominence of China threat
theory in IR can be accounted for by the legacy of historical approaches to the rise and
fall of great powers, the pre-eminence of the realist school of IR and particularly “power
transition theory” (the main idea of which is that progress in industrialization is more
important than power politics in generating power redistribution in the international
system), and cultural sources of Chinese strategic behavior. Despite the contextualization
of what could be called the social construction of China Threat theory, the contributors to
the volume go on to provide objective assessments of China’s threat to its neighbors.
Thus, the discourse—a set of statements linked to practices—of the China threat is a
prominent feature of official, scholarly, and public discussions of international relations
and about the future of the United States. While questions remain as to whether China has
achieved and can maintain a durable “rise,” China’s “emergence” in the discourses of
35
international relations more broadly is undisputable. Taken at face value, the aims of the
US debate are clear: determine whether China poses a current or future threat to
American interests, ruminate on the impact of any potential Sino-American tensions or
conflict on the international system, and formulate policy responses.
Yet the limits of this debate in the US, along with further clues from domestic
Chinese discussions, demonstrate that scholars can benefit from more attention to the
social construction of China as a threat. Within Chinese discourse, this Western
construction of the Chinese threat, formulated as “China Threat Theory” (Zhongguo
weixie lun) has played an important role both as an object of scholarly debate and as a
catalyst for official policy initiatives. For Chinese scholars, the meaning of China’s rise is
as self-evident as it is portentous: it will “make the world more civilized,” bring about a
global economic boom and make a substantial contribution to scientific progress (Yan
2001). Perhaps predictably, CCP state spokesmen have marshaled their intellectual
recourses to contest vehemently the China threat discourse, which they see as impugning
Party motives, factually deficient, and a rhetorical attack emanating from a segment of
the West stuck with a Cold War mentality and bent on derailing China’s peaceful
development. The policy impact of this debate is seen clearly, both in policy-makers’
self-conscious efforts to counteract pejorative interpretations by regional partners and
Western competitors, by positioning growing Chinese power in the framework of a
“peaceful rise” (heping jueqi) (Zheng 2005a), and in scholarship aimed at debunking the
more deleterious effects of Western theoretical discussions, such as “Power Transition
Theory” or developing non-threatening accounts of China’s “soft power.” Within
Chinese IR, the discourse of China threat is linked closely to illegitimate Western efforts
36
at containing China (ezhi Zhongguo), which, in turn, are linked historically to previous
Western misunderstandings, as evidenced in the Chinese perspective by the existence and
resilience of Yellow Peril (huang huo lun) theory.
These policy debates also have deeper implications for the construction of
knowledge about China and the US in each country, as well as bearing on vital security
concerns and identity questions. In an important study, Yong Deng argues that China’s
threat reputation, to the extent that it hardens China’s outlier status as a hostile other,
could lead to an intensified security dilemma (Deng 2006). Yong argues that, born out
of concern for these reputational effects, China’s accute sensitivity to “threat imputation”
has given rise to a multitude of indigenous Chinese interpretations, which identifying
Japan, the US, India, and Taiwan as its originary sources, understand “China Threat
theory” as a threat to China, whether as a catylist for Taiwanese independence, a pretext
for Japanese remilitarization, or a cover for American “hegemonism” (ba quan zhuyi).
Yong recognizes the effect that a preoccupation with China threat theory can have on
domestic audiences, and the importance of contesting the theory has for the regime’s
domestic legitimacy. Yet Yong is interested less in the interactive relationship between
boundary demarcation and threat imputation (which he raises on p.191), and more in how
“this discourse, if not countered, could intensify to cause irreparable damage to China’s
international status and translate into an insurmountable security dilemma” (191).
William Callahan (2005), in contrast, places the identity-building function of
“China Threat theory” within Chinese policy circles front and center. Instead of treating
the threat of China as an empirical question only amenable to objectivist analysis, in
which “writers take the meaning of the ‘China Threat’ as self-evident, and then proceed
37
to either agree or disagree with it” (704), Callahan considers the political consequences of
representational politics, an interpretive choice that attunes him to the role of this
discourse in generating national identity within the domestic sphere. To support his
argument that Chinese writers unify a diverse group of criticisms, vilifying them for the
purpose of building identity out of difference, Callahan finds that between 1994 and
2004, China threat articles published inside China far outnumbered the number of foreign
articles that they purportedly rebuked; the disproportionate response was part of a
“discussion of how to understand China through a negative logic of estrangement”
(Callahan 2005, 713).
Taking up Callahan’s challenge to contemporary understandings of threat in
international politics, the purpose of this chapter is to review and synthesize the study of
threat
1
within the IR literature, and thus establish the conceptual background for the
eclectic approach promised in the introductory chapter. Rather than approach the
conceptual history of threat within the IR literature strictly according to the most
dominant schools of thought, like some valuable previous efforts (Rousseau 2006), I trace
threat as it has been actually conceived within the discipline, paying close attention to
those theories that make threat a central part of their arguments. The importance of threat
construction to international relations is too serious to disregard non-mainstream
approaches or rule out certain epistemological or ontological formulations of threat

1
The Oxford English Dictionary offers the following definitions of threat: 1. A throng, press, crowd,
multitude of people; a troop, band, body of men (Beowulf). Obs. 2. Painful pressure, oppression,
compulsion; vexation, torment; affliction, distress, misery; danger, peril. Obs. 3. A denunciation to a
person of ill to befall him; esp. a declaration of hostile determination or of loss, pain, punishment, or
damage to be inflicted in retribution for or conditionally upon some course; a menace. Also fig. an
indication of impending evil. 4. Zoological. Animal behavior that keeps other animals at a distance or
strengthens social dominance without physical conflict.

38
processes. To this end, the scope of this chapter is broad, spanning positivist and post-
positivist, realist and anti-realist, and rationalist and constructivist conceptualizations of
threat.
2
Some “lumping” of disparate schools of thought is unavoidable in order to
facilitate the development of useful categorizations, but this can be mitigated to some
extent by a focus on specific authors’ arguments. For ease of exposition, I arrange threat
scholarship into two ‘generations,’ a move not meant to imply any unreflective notions of
linear progress, but instead to capture the context of theoretical development as
accurately as possible.

I. The First Generation of Rationalist Conceptualizations of Threat: Realist and
Cognitive Approaches

In this section, I first discuss the three most prominent strains of realist rationalist
theory: balance of power (structural) theories, balance of threat theories, and power
transition theory. Following this, I treat cognitive decision-making and psychological
theories, confining the scope of discussion to how these theories illuminate threat
processes. Since the vast literature on balance of power alone would make chapter-length
treatment impossible, I further narrow the focus by discussing balance of power in
relation to the more manageable recent literature on US-China relations and Chinese
foreign policy.

2
In order to focus on the IR theories that in my judgment, are more ‘threat-centered,’ I pass over the
‘liberal’ tradition in IR theory, but note that as seen in democratic peace theory, regime type, particularly
the existence of liberal regimes, would no doubt be one pertinent factor in a liberal (as it is understood in
IR) theory of threat. For an excellent review of how liberals understand threat, see Rousseau 2006,
particularly pp.28-38.

39
I organize approaches to threat into two broad categories: rationalism and
constructivism. The categorizing term “rationalism” also bears further discussion.
Leaving aside its use in the English School to denote a Grotian middle-ground between
realism and cosmopolitanism (see for example Linklater 1996), the term ‘rationalism’ is
commonly used in IR to refer to applications of rational choice theory to IR, scholarship
drawing on microeconomics, and positivist utilitarianism in general (Fearon and Wendt
2002, 54). Robert Keohane’s (1988) contrast of ‘rationalistic’ and ‘reflectivist,’
sociological, constructivist theories helped this dichotomy become an enduring
organizing scheme for the study of post-Cold War IR (see Katzenstein, Keohane and
Krasner 1998). Rationalism in IR is often viewed as a shared commitment among
neorealist and neoliberal scholars, to a “meta-theoretical tenet which portrays states as
self-interested, goal-seeking actors whose behavior can be accounted for in terms of the
maximization of individual utility (where the relevant individuals are states)”
(Hasenclever, Mayer, Rittberger 1997, 23). While some treatments of rationalism place
the assumption of instrumental rationality at its core (Katzenstein, Keohane and Krasner
1998, 679), according to Fearon and Wendt’s sympathetic account, rationalists are more
committed to their “effort to explain a whole—an outcome, or pattern of actions—in
terms of component parts” than "to any particular assumption of rationality” (Fearon and
Wendt 2002, 56). Rationalist approaches to methodological issues share a number of
common assumptions, including utilitarian and individualist premises, as well as the
privileging of individual actors over social collectives (Ashley 1984). In addition to a
utilitarian approach to the preference functions of actors, rationalists do not generally
problematize actors’ beliefs, perceptions, or identities, taking actors as given. When they
40
do hold that ideas ‘matter,’ rationalists take ideas in their explanatory, causal sense; ideas
are a “causal mechanism like any other, existing independently of other causal
mechanisms and explaining some portion of the variance in actors’ behavior” (Fearon
and Wendt 2002, 60). Also, rationalist individualism rules out the “possibility that social
structures have constitutive effects on agents, since this would mean that structures
cannot be reduced to the properties or interactions of ontologically primitive individuals”
(Wendt 1999, 27).
David Baldwin’s (1971) effort to call attention to the need for more explicit study
of threat, and his shift in emphasis from nuclear deterrence and game theory,
foreshadowed the development of the study of threat within IR. According to Baldwin
thinking about threats is “too important to be left to game theorists” (1971, 71). Baldwin
separates conceptualizations of threat into three categories—undertaking, outcome, and
relationship—and importantly notes that these are not necessarily referring to the same
object. Game theorists (viewing threat as undertaking) see it as a strategic move made
with the goal of changing the other’s behavior. For social psychologists, threat has more
to do with the anticipation of harm on the part of the threatened party, and as such, is the
outcome of intended future actions, as understood by the other. The third, relational
understanding of threat places efforts to threaten another in the context of a relationship.
Building on Baldwin, we can first distinguish threats that are issued or declared
(in Baldwin’s terms “strategic moves”) from the threat processes that are the main subject
of this review, that is threats posed, understood, or constructed by one state (or state
component) in relation to another. Schmalberger (1998) calls this first sense the
“behavioral” view of threat, as it conceives of threat as the credible communication of the
41
intention to harm. Along these lines, Cohen (1978) delineated what he called the passive
sense of ‘threat,’ the “anticipation of impending danger” from the active sense of threat,
as an “undertaking by one actor to impose sanction on another” (95). In contrast to the
behavioral or active threats, the rest of this chapter will mainly treat threats not as they
are issued from one state to another (a transactional notion), but as processural (the
process by which the image or representation presented by one entity comes to be salient
to another as danger or opportunity). Processural threats are variously seen as objectively
given and anticipated (realist), as cognitively perceived (psychological), and as social
constructions (constructivist and critical theory).
Balance of power theory and threat
Perhaps the most well-known analytical tradition among policymakers and
academics alike is the balance of power. Balance of power, traditionally the preserve of
realist theories of International Relations, is at once pervasive, controversial and
ephemeral in meaning (Elman 2003, Little 2007). Asia has been seen as a refuge of
balance of power theories, due in part to the region’s resistance to European and North
Atlantic-style security community formation and the continuing importance of the logic
of military balancing no longer integral to Western European politics (Katzenstein 1996d,
521). The balance of power concept deployed by most realists depends on the insecurity
produced by an anarchical system, and “it is generally accepted that the great powers
monitor the material power possessed by all the other states in the international system
and endeavor to manipulate the resulting distribution of power in their own favour as a
means of enhancing their own survival” (Little 2007, 11). Scholars differentiate
‘balancing’ as state foreign policy behavior (what a state does to countervail others) and
42
‘balance’ as systemic outcome, though there seems to be no consensus on whether
‘balancing’ is necessary for ‘balances’ to form (Elman 2003, 8-9). Threats play a key
role in balance of power and realist theory in general. For example, in Hans
Morgenthau’s understanding, threats ultimately emanate from human nature: the urge for
dominance, supremacy and the “lust” for power. Other ‘classical’ realist thinkers framed
threat as an unintended consequence of anarchy, primed by uncertainty, not necessarily
aggression. Herz’s (1950) formulation of the ‘security dilemma’ stressed the way that
security-seeking states are driven to acquire ever more power to secure themselves
against others, action which in turn, increases the insecurity of other states and leads to
vicious cycles. In contrast to Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz (1979) holds that threats are
ultimately the result of the anarchical nature of the international system. Power
asymmetries are a natural threat that needed to be met with balancing behavior. Waltz
hypothesized that bipolarity caused peaceful systemic outcomes, in other words that
bipolarity mitigated threat. Waltz pointed to a range of phenomena that he argued
stemmed from bipolar structures: less false optimism by governments over opponents’
relative power, cooperative processes helped by faster learning about the other side,
thicker rules of the game, faster checks and balances due to efficient internal and external
balancing (causing deterrence), fewer inept leaders chosen because the stakes are so high
(Waltz 1979, 161-176).
Other realists subtly question balance of power theory, arguing that great power
revisionist states are no different than other great power states in that they will not be
satisfied with merely maintaining the balance of power. With arguments particularly
salient for China, John Mearsheimer’s offensive realist theory presents a rationale for
43
revisionism that he counterpoises to Waltz’s defensive realism. Like Waltz and other
previous realists, Mearsheimer stresses anarchy, state-centrism, the importance of
survival, and continuity. In the 21
st
century, anarchy holds (361), great powers are still
unable to “divine each other’s intentions” (363) and thus realist assumptions still hold
despite the post-Cold War shift in the distribution of power. According to Mearsheimer,
for defensive realists like Waltz structure “provides states with little incentive to seek
additional increments of power; instead it pushes them to maintain the existing balance of
power” (21). Departing from Waltz (and Jervis, Snyder, and Van Evera) however,
Mearsheimer holds that states are motivated by power hunger and domination, not the
mere preservation of power or maintenance of balance. The structure of the states system
still motivates state power competition, but for Mearsheimer, states pursue as much
power as they can get relative to others, with the ultimate aim of achieving hegemony
(22). As a result of this assumption, offensive realists “believe that status quo powers are
rarely found in world politics, because the international system creates powerful
incentives for states to look for opportunities to gain power at the expense of rivals, and
to take advantage of those situations when the benefits outweigh the costs” (21).
Offensive realism differs from classical ‘human nature realism’ in that it claims states are
motivated not because of an innate drive to dominate, but because “survival mandates
aggressive behavior” (21) and the seeking of power increases the odds of survival.
3

3
Balance of power understandings of threat run into several well-documented theoretical and empirical
difficulties. Perhaps most importantly, critics from across the spectrum in IR have taken issue with
realism’s core assumption of anarchy, the lack of any common central authority in the international realm.
Helen Milner argued that the radical separation of the domestic and international spheres in this conception
of anarchy has deleterious consequences; its overemphasis leads scholars to draw some misleading
conclusions about domestic politics (their degree of centralization for example), and to undervalue other
important conditions of world politics, such as interdependence (1991).
44
China plays a special role in Mearsheimer’s theory, as he believes a “Rising
China is the most dangerous potential threat to the United States in the early twenty-first
century” (362). Following from Mearsheimer’s belief that all states are at least potential
revisionists, China will certainly become a potentially wealthy hegemon that uses its
riches to build up its military and launch its own Monroe Doctrine aimed at the US,
should it continue along the path of economic modernization. Thus, Mearsheimer
harshly criticizes American ‘engagement’ policy towards China. Following offensive
realist prescriptions, the US should be trying to slow Chinese growth with containment
policies, but instead is enabling China’s dangerous rise. This seems to contradict the
realist claim that states continue to follow realist dictates. What explains this?
Interestingly, Mearsheimer falls back on a culturalist argument. For Mearsheimer, US
political culture is deeply liberal and thus its hostility to realist thought, though portrayed
as only rhetorical (23-7), is enough to prompt it to ignore the dictates of anarchy and

Scholars who recognize international relations as social relations have also contested the realist
understanding of the implications of anarchy. Hedley Bull denied that anarchical conditions implied a lack
of order, stressing the persistent element of society inherent in international relations, most notably in his
differentiation of international systems from societies and his recognition of common institutions that
regulate international relations. Bull presents evidence for his claim that, during World War II, the Allied
and Axis powers, despite a lack of cooperation in common society or institutions, largely observed rules of
war regarding enemy combatants while, even at the height of the Cold War, the US and USSR never broke
diplomatic relations, refused to recognize the other’s sovereignty, or denied the legitimacy of a common
international law (Bull 1977, 42-3). Drawing on Bull and others, Hayward Alker (1996) also contested the
presumption of anarchy, noting in it a descriptive inaccuracy that ignores multiple and interpenetrating
world orders in favor of seeing only disorder, an insistence on absolutely separable realms that misses the
overlapping and indistinct borders of the domestic and international, and a general denial of the possibility
of ordering, legal and regulatory processes.
Constructivists in particular, have complicated the picture presented by realists and other ‘anarch-
ists.’ Nicholas Onuf (1989) argues that realists, caught in a liberal operative paradigm, mistakenly presume
anarchy, which is both an institution and a social arrangement, is rule by no one. Thus, for Onuf, anarchy
is not what liberals make of it: “The world of international relations is a world of rules and rule, even if no
one ever claims to rule. No world is ruled by no one: the very idea of anarchy is a contradiction in terms”
(2002, 136). Contesting the realist conception of anarchy in a different way, Alexander Wendt argues that
“anarchy is what states make of it” a system characterized by self-help and insecurity is only one possible
result of anarchical conditions (1992). If anarchy is a problematic construct, and threats are not given by
anarchy in any event, analysts need to go beyond realist configurations of threat politics.

45
balance of power logic in its dealings with China (402). Mearsheimer implies that the
Chinese are under no such constraint, and, equipped with a realist worldview, will pose
problems for the US, engaging in security competition such as its increasing participation
in the ballistic missile arms race already under way in Asia (375-7)
Avery Goldstein’s (2003) assessment of the successes and failures of structural
realism in accounting for Chinese foreign policy is also instructive in this regard.
Goldstein argues that in the post-Cold War period, structural realism can only take us so
far in understanding China’s current emphasis on fostering a positive image and avoiding
great power rivalry (141); China’s “distinctive national attributes” must be accounted for.
These include the PRC’s prioritizing of economic modernization and the historical legacy
concerning Sino-Japanese relations and Taiwan, the persistence of regime insecurity, and
the nuclear guarantee that enables the expansion of multilateral and other tension
reducing diplomatic initiatives (142-4). Further, under unipolarity, China lacks the
suitable alliance partners necessary for ‘external balancing’ against the US while, much
the same as other major powers, it is unable to resist economic partnerships with the US.
At the same time, Goldstein argues, ‘internal balancing’ strategies are for the foreseeable
future unavailable to China since a rapid closing of the economic and military gap is
implausible given China’s domestic developmental challenges and American
preeminence (Goldstein 2003, 144).
4

Balance of threat theory and threat
Intriguingly, realists also point out that balance of power theory, if it is to remain
viable, must develop a concept of threat perception. Susan Martin argues that realists

4
C.f. Johnston 1998.
46
have mostly ignored the “challenge of investigating the factors that lead to threat
perception”(Martin 2003, 81 n.62). Martin proposes a model of balancing behavior that
separates threat perception from threat response, one that builds on Stephen Walt’s
balance of threat theory.
Taking off from Waltz, Walt (1985, 1987, 1988, 1992, 1996) launched the most
influential modification of the core assumptions of balance of power theory. Walt’s
“balance of threat” model represents both an important contribution to neorealist theory
and an overture of sorts to constructivist theorizing of threat politics. Aimed at
explaining alliance politics, Walt’s (1987) study of Middle Eastern alliance building
argued that states balance against particular threats, not power. Walt reviewed the most
prominent (Waltzian) realist explanations (which double as policymaker assumptions) for
alliance formation, balancing (allying with weaker states against the dangerous state) and
bandwagoning (allying with the stronger, dangerous state), to see which best fit the
dominant tendencies of the international system. Kissinger’s rapprochement with China
is given as a prime example of balancing behavior (1985, 6). Walt holds that balancing
and bandwagoning behaviors are best explained as responses to threat, not merely power
(i.e., the choice of the weaker or stronger side) as assumed by other realist scholars. Walt
conceptualizes threat as a function of four elements: aggregate (military) power,
geographic proximity, offensive power/capability, and aggressive intentions (1985, 9;
1987, 22).
Though all four are likely to play a role in the perception of threat, Walt’s key
contribution is his articulation within realist thought of the crucial importance of the
factors he captured with his fourth component, the “appearance of aggressiveness,” or
47
“perceptions of intent,” for gaining a complete picture of the role of various sources of
threat in alliance choices. For Walt, it is necessary to develop an “aggressive intentions”
variable to explain how states differentiated friend from foe in the first place. As Walt
explains, the difference between balance of power and balance of threat theories is that
the former “predicts that states will ally against the strongest state in the system” while
the latter “predicts they will tend to ally against the most threatening” (1997, 933).
Using the example of the United States and Canada, Walt’s balance of threat
theory raises questions for balance of power theory. Despite the United States’ power
offensive capability and proximity, Canada does not interpret the US as a threat because
it does not perceive aggressive intentions. In a later study applying his theory to
revolutions, Walt reformulates “aggressive intentions” as “perceptions of intent” to
explain their impact on threat: “if a state is believed to be unusually aggressive, potential
victims will be more willing to use force to reduce its power, to moderate its aggressive
aims, or to eliminate it entirely” (1996, 19)
Realists and critics of realism alike have applauded Walt’s efforts to rescue the
logic of Waltzian neorealism by moving away from the explanatory impotence of
structuralism, since “[w]ithout knowing who holds particular capabilities and their
intentions—as well as who we are and what we value—we cannot say whether there is a
threat to balance” (Donnelly 2000,120). However, it is difficult to tell from Walt’s
exposition or subsequent development of his work how scholars should approach
operationalizing aggressive intentions in the absence of a theory of threat perception or
construction.
48
Scholars influenced by constructivism have argued that Walt’s theory is open to
constructivist development. For Michael Barnett (2003), Walt’s expansion of the sources
of threat beyond merely material power and anarchy also takes him beyond neorealist
theory to a constructivist alternative. Walt adds “aggressive intentions” as a source of
threat, but fails to specify the concept of intent, or link it to anarchy and the balance of
power, nor does he explain its role in the constitution of a threat. Barnett argues that that
this problem can be fixed if we turn to ideational, not material factors, particularly
through an understanding of the role that inter-Arab rivalry played in threat perception in
the Middle East; it was pan-Arabism, not anarchy that caused perceptions of threat.
Similarly, David Rousseau argues that Walt’s conceptualization of “aggressive
intentions” and his finding that, in the Middle East from 1955 to 1979, these intentions
varied widely despite relatively static material and geographic threat contexts is an
opening for identity arguments (Rousseau 2006, 21). For Rousseau, however, it is
unclear how Walt’s theory suggests we measure the “highly subjective category” of
aggressive intentions. However, if threat and power are not strongly correlated as realists
would assume, Rousseau sees this as an opening for shared identity as a component of
aggressive intentions (21).
Power transition theory and threat
Power transition theory also seeks to modify realist ideas of threat. The basic
hypothesis of power transition theory, that the probability of war increases as the
power/capability gap between an unsatisfied rival and a dominant status quo power
narrows, has been increasingly applied to US-China relations. Power transition theory
upholds several realist tenets—states manage external threats with counteracting
49
behavior—but departs from realism particularly in its focus on hierarchy over anarchy,
and its attention to domestic growth. Organski (1958) developed the theory in response
to realist assumptions that the international system tended naturally towards equilibrium,
and what he saw as the neglect of domestic sources of power. Briefly, power transition
theory argues that differential rates of economic growth spur changes in the international
system, power parity (not predominance) causes war, hegemons are less interested in
balancing than they are in maintaining the status quo international political order, and
states aim mainly not at power maximazation but at retaining their dominance over the
system and control over the rules of international interaction. Using the example of
British acquiescence to American overtaking in the late 18
th
century and leadership in the
early 20
th
century, power transition theory argues that shared institutions, cultures and
visions of political-economic order can mitigate the chances of transitional war (Tammen
et al. 2000; Levy 2008). Thus power transition theory has stressed the importance of
satisfaction with the status quo, in addition to parity and overtaking, as the key to whether
rising states and status quo powers will resort to conflict. Threats are understood as
depending on challenger dissatisfaction with the international system as it currently
exists; under threat are both the dominant state (physically) and the international order it
has promulgated and maintained.
Power transition theory has been subject to thorough criticism. For example, Jack
Levy questions Organski’s argument that a rising challenger will initiate war prior to the
point of the transition; it would be more logical to expect the timing of war to reflect
either the challenger waiting until it achieves a stronger position, or the dominant state
launching preventative war while it retains military superiority (2008, 26). Further, the
50
theory ignores the probable intervention of allies of the dominant state, who stand to
continue to reap benefits from the dominant state-led system, against any attempts to
undermine the system (27). It also downplays preventative war strategies, while
underestimating the nuclear deterrent in the modern age.
Further, scholars have shown that using power transition theory to understand the
US-China relationship is problematic in several senses. Steve Chan’s (2005) inquiry into
the possibility of a power transition between the US and China casts doubt on the
measures of national power utilized in power transition theory. According to Chan,
evaluations of China's relative national power that support a power transition are flawed
if they are based on “obsolescent indicators” such as population size and traditional
measures of industrialization and if they downplay military expenditures and the
necessity of human capital and technological innovation. Such emphasis biases
assessments of national power in China’s favor. Chan’s thought experiment, that “in
order for China to overtake the U.S. in aggregate purchasing power parity, its economy
will have to grow consistently at an annual rate of 7% over an entire decade during which
the U.S. economy will have to remain completely stagnant” throws the possibilities of
overtaking into doubt (2005, 700). Chan concludes that:
Historically, the world's premier powers did not emerge from the ranks of those
strategic states commanding the largest territory, population, or armed forces.
Rather, Spain, France, and, most recently, the Soviet Union lost out to their
respective smaller rivals that were much more adept in the creation and
application of 'soft power' assets (e.g., the Netherlands, the U.K., and most
recently, Japan) in developing economic and commercial competitiveness. (700)

Other critics point to the possibility of a peaceful power transition, arguing that
power parity does not always lead to war, and that the US could be said to be welcoming
51
China in economic terms (Zhu 2006). Levy adds that ‘satisfaction’ is difficult to
measure, and in regards to China, its multidimensionality prevents drawing easy
conclusions: “China is highly dissatisfied with its relationship with Taiwan, moderately
dissatisfied with its relationship with Japan, satisfied with the rest of the Asian regional
order, and somewhat satisfied with the global order” (Levy 2008, 21 n.28). Finally,
China’s status as a regional power undermines the applicability of power transition
theories that stress the “struggle for primacy” at the top of the international hierarchy
(30).
In sum, balance of power, balance of threat, and power transition theorizations of
threat each present rich research programs centering on particular notions of threat, yet
each have important drawbacks. Balance of power theories rely on a concept of structure
that has difficulty accounting for international (and Sino-American) relations under
unipolarity, requires explanatory assistance from non-structural factors, and in addition,
lacks an adequate theorization of threat perception. Power transition theories face logical
inconsistencies, empirical problems, and hinge on the possibility of locating and
measuring a challenging state’s dissatisfaction. Balance of threat theories, perhaps most
amenable to joint rationalist-constructivist development, treat threat processes mainly as
external events and fail to specify adequately the manner in which we should study
aggressive intentions.
Cognitive and psychological theories and threat
Psychological approaches to IR have made valuable contributions to our
understanding of threat perception. Cognitive approaches challenge the assumption,
made by neorealists and others, of individual rationality, by highlighting the way that
52
beliefs and human information processing constrain policy makers in international
relations. They also address the difficulty rationalists have in deriving clear predictions
from purely systemic, structuralist models (Tetlock 1998). Contesting the prominence
given to unitary rational actor assumptions about the state, and positioned as a move
away from the rational actor and the microeconomic theory that informs it, the
psychological approach to IR has stressed misperceptions, the content, structure and
continuity of belief systems (Rosati 1995), the role of cognitive consistency, attribution
errors, heuristics, images, schemas, framing effects, as well as group identity in
international relations (Stein 2002). Psychological theorists argue that cognitive biases
that lead to “errors” of attribution and embedded schemas and enemy images resistant to
change can both fuel mutual perception of threat and hostility. Many of the cognitive
mechanisms seem to play a “threat exacerbating” role (for instance, lowering the
threshold for perceiving the other as possessing hostile intentions), taking threat as
emanating from an external realm to be correctly or incorrectly perceived by a
cognitively simplifying individual, a conceptualization that does not necessarily tell us
much about the cultural origins or historical processes by which threats become possible
in the first place.
In the 1970s, the “perception” of threat began to attract attention from IR
scholars, challenging realist objectivism with its attention to bias and information
processing at the individual policy-making level (Jervis 1976). Though taking a mainly
historical approach to threat perception, Klaus Knorr’s (1976) contribution began to
integrate psychological factors. Knorr limited his discussion of threats to “major values,
such as territorial and political integrity” (78), separating actual and potential threats, and
53
wrote that the “perception” of either “involves the estimate of probabilities about whether
the anticipated harm will materialize” (79). Systemic threats, Knorr further elaborated,
followed from the arrangement of sovereign units in an international system, and the
resulting long-range insecurity was why states, even in times of peace, maintained their
militaries. For Knorr, threat, illustrated by British appeasement, is “usually not
observable”, but is a “cognitive construct” with indicators that could be derived from the
observable behavior of states (84).
Raymond Cohen’s (1978) work on threat perception in international crisis also
moved away from objectivist models towards a stress on perceived meanings. Cohen
first notes that threats are rarely immediate or unambiguous. He distinguishes between
two stages of perception—an initial, observational stage and a subsequent appraisal
stage—each psychological processes by which decision-makers select cues from a
background, and then evaluate or define them as threats. Cohen then identifies the
criteria by which actors observe events and appraise the cues they provide: by
geographical priority or emotional relevance, according to the current level of tension or
mistrust, and in accordance with any particular vulnerability felt in a specific area.
Cohen operationalized his concept of threat by locating his evidence in the reactions,
states of mind, and coping responses of decision-makers and contemporary descriptions
of these indicators. Threat perceptions, Cohen argued, involve anticipations of the future
and states rely on rules of the game to coordinate mutual expectations. Because states
coordinate their behavior using rules as a focal point, opponents are seen as threatening
when they break these rules and thus project unpredictability, the abandonment of
restraint and the adaptation of more aggressive policy. At stake is not only “limited
54
attempts to achieve immediate gain” but “the repudiation of overall systems of
communication and restraint”, that is, the undermining of rules of permissible behavior
and thus a calling into question of the shared relational structure of international relations
(107). As Cohen concluded, “Threat, then, is like a tug on this web of rules, its
perception an anticipation of a descent into disorder and uncertainty” (107). Cohen thus
provides one link between threats, rules and order.
Recently, scholars have noted what they see as complementarities between
psychological and constructivist approaches. For example, Paul Kowert’s (1998) effort
to synchronize psychological and constructivist approaches draws on cognitive
psychology to details several key mechanisms—minimal group paradigm, cognitive
biases such as intergroup differentiation, intragroup homogeneity, and causal attribution
bias—useful for understanding transformations of political identity. Peter Gries (2006)
argues that the social psychology of intergroup relations can aid explanations of Sino-
American conflict by identifying the conditions, utilizing social identity theory (SIT),
under which intergroup identity can lead to conflict.
Despite their contributions, theories of threat that rely upon psychological or
cognitive perceptions, present a set of difficulties for a constitutive theory of threat.
Psychological approaches suffer from lack of attention to the social context of the
subject. This is in part due to a failure to problematize adequately their ‘psychologism,’
the “idea that the meaning constructing processes are located solely within the personal
mental apparatus” (Polklinghorne 1988, 39). Other scholars criticize cognitive theorists’
adherence to methodological individualism, “the doctrine that all social phenomenon
55
(their structure and their change) are in principle explicable only in terms of
individuals—their properties, goals and beliefs” (Elster 1982, 453).
Misperception studies face the challenge of delineating, not assuming, the
‘reality’ that is said to be incorrectly ‘perceived.’ After the third debate, it is no longer
possible to posit innocently a reality outside of all interpretation. As Thomas
Schmalberger argues, a focus on misperceptions makes "the analyst the arbiter for what is
considered to be normal behavior" or "traces the cognitive construction of phenomena
which is disconnected from the interactions participants are engaged in" (1998, Ch.1, 13).
Wang Jianwei’s recent study of the influence of ‘images’ on post-Cold War US-
China relations is a good example of the consequences of an objectivism that takes reality
as given rather than socially constructed. Wang presents a categorization of mutual Sino-
American relations: enemy, limited adversary, neutral, friendly non-ally, limited ally, and
ally (2000, 33), arguing that the relationship today best fits the limited adversary
category. Wang’s conclusions are based in part on a survey of 200 ‘intermediate elites,’
a group he targets for interviews because of their location between inaccessible foreign
policy elites and unreliable general public. Wang draws upon social psychology to argue
that Sino-American misperceptions are examples of the fundamental attribution error, the
tendency to attribute self’s mistakes to benign, situational factors while attributing other’s
to more sinister, dispositional factors. Wang posits that after the Cold War, the less-
structured environment leads actors to depend more on perceptions, which in turn raises
the possibility that “misperceptions, rather than conflicts of real interest” would trigger
conflict (265). Wang admits the dangers of thinking of images and behavior in a direct
casual relationship (2000, 27), yet persists in separating ‘real’ interests from their
56
perception. Reality can be correctly perceived, but Wang gives us no criteria with which
to formulate an ultimate definition of this reality.
Constructivists in particular have criticized cognitive approaches. The perception
literature can be generally categorized as an expression of behavioralism, which, in its IR
form has concerned “itself with how states’ leaders process information, deal with
dissonance, form images and, in general, internalize their situation” (Onuf 1989, 232).
Onuf argues that this represents a “passive” view of behavior that effectively removes
people’s behavior from international relations: “People’s perceptions and states’ doings
are antiseptically connected through ‘decision-making,’ a term conveying the sense that
people do not decide on a course of action so much as have their minds made up for
them” (232).
Wendt argues that the misperceptions literature is prone to the same
methodological individualism as other rational choice theories and ignores the
constitutive power of representations. Wendt’s powerful critique is worth quoting at
length:
implicit in this way of thinking is a tacit assumption that what the object of the
perception is, and this includes the identity of the Self as an object of the Other’s
perception, does not depend on perceptions. Representations are treated as
passive with respect to the constitution of their objects, not active. They are
‘about’ independently existing phenomena, not ‘productive’ of those phenomena.
The problem facing rational actors, therefore, is making sure that they perceive
other actors, and other actors’ perceptions of them, correctly. This is similar to
how beliefs are handled in the literature on misperception in foreign policy, which
is often seen as antithetical to rationalism. Here too the objects of perception are
treated as existing independently of the representations of others, and the problem
is therefore how to explain, and help actors avoid, mistakes in perceiving what
things really are. We might call this a ‘sociology of error’ approach to
representations. (1999, 334-5)

57
Other scholars dismiss the psychological approach to threat (perhaps unfairly and
prematurely) as a “blind alley,” a literature that does not properly situate the self in a
social context, missing the subtly of the self-other relationship and failing to problematize
language. These studies are unpersuasive, according to Iver Neumann, because of their
“treatment of language as an unproblematic vessel for the transformation of meaning
from one bounded individual to another, instead of focusing on transformations inherent
in language itself to understand those social relations that should be the object of study”
(Neumann 1999, 8).
In addition, critics argue that aside from a problematic focus on individual
perception, approaches to cognitive decision-making in IR neglect the construction of the
social order that serves as the precondition for the very processes of perception under
consideration (Doty 1993, 300). Early “cognitive” work was “not concerned in any
clearly stated way with the collective meanings of the culture within which such
individuals operate” (Chilton 1996, 29). Most problematically, the possibility that the
subject is itself a construction is left unexamined by cognitive perception theorists.
Variable-oriented studies of ideas
A second strain of “cognitivist” IR involves a rich literature treating the causal
effects of “ideas” in IR, under rationalist, individualist, and realist assumptions. Is it
possible to approach the study of threat politics through a discussion of the ‘idea’ of
China or the US within such a rationalist framework? Goldstein and Keohane’s (1993)
framework represents the most systematic IR positivist effort to typologize ideational
effects, ostensively improving on earlier belief system accounts to encompass socially
shared ideas. Taking ideas as particular individual beliefs shared by groups, Goldstein
58
and Keohane separate ideas into three types: worldviews (at general level), principled and
normative ideas (at intermediate level), and (elite) casual beliefs. The worldviews or
“conceptions of possibility” type seems at first look to be relevant to a concern with the
meaningful constitution of the reality of Sino-American relations. Yet, Goldstein and
Keohane imagine possibility conceptions in reference to the more general possibilities of
modern secular science, for instance, not the relatively more circumscribed possibilities
found in a state’s construction of a significant other. Ideas are significant, not in any
constitutive sense, but as along a ‘causal pathway.’
Further, the concept of ideas as variables in the causal scheme presented by
Goldstein and Keohane has been subjected to wide criticism. Some authors criticize this
neo-positivist, “cognitive” literature in general for the way its formulation of ‘ideas’ is
beholden to materialism, rationalism, and individualism. First, often voiced is the
reservation that the possibility of distinguishing between material and ideational becomes
problematic upon the realization that this very distinction is an ‘idea’ itself (Behnke
2001,128). Other scholars resist the effects of squeezing ideas into an individualist
framework. In this way meaning is problematically seen as “ultimately reducible to a
property of individuals” rather than as a “social or intersubjective quality, constitutive of
entities and relations” (Laffey and Weldes 1997, 205).
Albert Yee (1996) accepts the assumption that ideas can be treated as variables,
but argues that the structural quality of the intersubjective meanings constructed by ideas
is downplayed by cognitive approaches that focus solely on behavior. Laffey and Weldes
criticize the neo-positivist tendency to separate ideas and interests on the one hand, and
then treat ideas as causes on the other, downplaying the constitutive effects of ideas and
59
holds ideas only as discrete variables, which implies that interests are given whereas
ideas are manipulable to be used as weapons to further interests (1997, 200). With these
criticisms in mind, conceptualizing threat in terms of ideational variables would be less
helpful than in terms of cognitive processes.
Constitutive theory and cognitive approaches would seem to have a lot in
common. Yet rather than investigate the intersection of cognitive and constitutive
approaches, those inspired by social psychology confine themselves to causal approaches
(Tetlock 1998). While cognition undoubtedly plays a role in the constitution of threat, it
is clear from the criticism that depending on idiosyncratic individual cognition is
theoretically problematic. What is needed then, is a theory of cognition that avoids a
methodological individualist orientation, and accounts for the kind of language use by
which international relations are produced.

II. Second generation: constructivist and critical security studies of threat

Rationalist and positivist theories have come under significant challenge on
methodological, ethical and theoretical grounds. Broadly, the critique is that positivism
offers “no systematic way of recognizing and representing subject’s concepts or their
influence on actions” and, moreover, by under-utilizing a rich source of available data,
i.e., “practical political discourse,” positivist and rationalist models are “forced into
conjectures about those understandings that have no basis in their model” (Banerjee
1998, 182). Particularly since the 1980s, IR has witnessed a debate posed in terms of a
clash between dominant positivists, with their emphasis on “positivities,” the measurable
60
properties of things and their relations (Onuf 2002, 125), and challenger post-positivists.
Positivists responded to post-positivist efforts to celebrate a refusal to foreclose or forget
the problematic legacy of modernity with efforts to “domesticate these disturbing
developments” (126).
In the sub-discipline most concerned with threat, security studies, these scholarly
contests were framed by epochal geopolitical change and the agenda setting efforts that
followed. With the end of the Cold War, environmental issues and sub-state ethno-
political violence suddenly became more salient to students of International Relations.
At the end of the Cold War, scholars across the IR discipline focused on change. The
very question of change, wrote Cynthia Weber, had been a “casualty” of the ahistorical
position that grounded the modern state system in sovereignty (Weber 1995, 9-10). In
addition, a growing awareness of the limits of dominant neorealist theories, the
dissolution of the Soviet bloc, the uniting of Europe, and the new relevance of ecological
and economic threats prompted some scholars to reevaluate “what (or who) is to be
secured, from what threats, and by what means” (Krause and Williams 1996, 230; c.f.
Walt 1991). Some scholars offered a broadened vision of security as encompassing
economic, environmental, and social sectors (Buzan 1991), while others promoted an
emancipatory conception of security, linking it with the releasing of individuals from the
constraints not only of war but also poverty, meager education, and political oppression
(Booth 1991). Other scholars defended traditional military and state-centric approaches,
arguing that these broadening moves posed the danger of evacuating ‘security’ of all
meaning (Walt 1991).
61
In the immediate post Cold War IR theoretical climate, the goal of theorizing
change in the face of hegemonic realist theories that were seen to have failed to anticipate
the USSR’s collapse became preeminent. The end of the Cold War was said to be an
embarrassment for IR theorists comparable to that of the sinking of the Titanic for naval
engineers (Katzenstein 1996b, xi). The search was on for an antidote to the static
assumptions of law-based analysis which “can yield a sort of behavioral fatalism that
presumes fixed patterns: political choices as thought to be more or less determined by
certain conditions and configurations of variables; states and other actors reacting
similarly to similar circumstances” (Smith 1999, 187). The result of this theoretical
upheaval was a robust literature that re-evaluated security practices, and seemed to carve
a larger role for European approaches within American IR.
5

The literature’s main thrust is to examine the implications of politicizing an issue
as a security problem. It moves away from both systemic explanations unproblematically
based on anarchy and the identification of “objective” threats to focus on the cultural,
intersubjective and performative aspects of securitizing practices, the relationship
between identity and the danger, and the prospects of articulating ethical ways of living
with the insecurity provided by community formation and inescapable difference. The

5
Waever’s description of the dictates of ‘political relevance’ as felt in American security studies is
interesting: “Security is a goal that society wants. Therefore, this aim should be defined as clearly as
possible, and public debate as well as decision making processes should be as rational as possible, and this
includes being informed by the knowledge generated by security experts. The conceptual analysis part of
research can help to clarify logical and definitional matters, but the main task for security experts is to
supply relevant knowledge of cause-effect relationships that enable efficient and successful policies.”
Waever contrasts this with the European context of his own theory, in which he finds a broader agenda
inclusive of public intellectuals and debates “about ends not only means” (Waever 2003, 25). Huysmans
also implicitly pitches his (European) approach to security against the research agenda dominated by a
“techno-instrumental or managerial orientation” and aimed at helping “the political administration in its job
of identifying and explaining threats in the hope of improving the formulation of effective counter-
measures”; he hopes instead to “lay bare the political work of signifier security, that is, what it does, how it
determines social relations” (1998, 233).
62
label “critical” captures the attitude these diverse approaches share, be it towards realist
structuralism, Waltzian “materialism” or mainstream IR theory in general, but further
discussion is necessary to tease out the wide variety of conceptions of threat.
Causal constructivism, security cultures and threat
How has the IR literature conceptualized threat in cultural terms? The strategic
culture literature is an interesting point of departure for present purposes because it
represents the development of variable-oriented constructivist theorizing about threat, and
offers important insights into the relationship of culture to security. The strategic culture
research program at its most modest, is an attempt to “bring culture back in” to traditional
national security studies (Lantis 2002). The concept of strategic culture was introduced
by Jack Snyder (1977), who argued that predicting Soviet behavior based on an American
rational actor model that ignored the unique perspectives of the Soviet decision makers
was mistaken, and would not help determine whether or not the USSR would embrace a
limited nuclear war doctrine; Soviet planners were socialized into and guided by a
perceptual lens produced by the USSR’s particular historical experience (Macmillan,
Booth and Trood 1999, 4). Throughout the 1980s, various authors deployed the concept
to understand the effects of the American “national style” on nuclear strategy, warfare,
and alliance politics (Gray 1981; Lord 1985; Klein 1988). In their survey of the
literature, Macmillan, Booth and Trood define strategic culture as the “distinctive and
lasting set of beliefs, values and habits regarding the threat and use of force, which have
their roots in such fundamental influences as geopolitical setting, history, and political
culture”(1999, 8).
63
The work of Alastair Iain Johnston (1995a; 1995b; 1996; 1999) represents one of
the most important efforts to develop security culture theory and in addition, apply it to
Chinese international relations. Johnston, following anthropologist Clifford Geertz,
defines strategic culture as a “system of symbols…which acts to establish pervasive and
long-lasting strategic preferences by formulating concepts of the role and efficacy of
military force in interstate political affairs, and by clothing those conceptions with such
an aura of factuality that the strategic preferences seem uniquely realistic and efficacious”
(Johnston 1995b, 46). Johnston’s notion of Chinese strategic culture is comprised of two
parts: a “central paradigm”—basic assumptions about the strategic environment
(including the role of war, nature of the enemy, and the value of using force)—and lower
level, operational assumptions concerning strategic options appropriate to the central
assumptions. By analytically excluding behavior from his definition, and looking for
consistent, ranked strategic preferences as indicative of the existence of strategic culture,
Johnston builds into his theory the elements he finds lacking in previous generations of
strategic culture: falsifiability, the ability to derive testable empirical predictions, clear
empirical referents, observable objects of analysis, and the measurement of the evolution
of strategic culture over time (1995b, 49).
In a complex argument pitched at IR theorists, historians and Sinologists,
Johnston (1995a) claims that a parabellum (“prepare for war”) security policy (which
favors the offensive use of force, views the external environment as dangerous, and
displays an overt sensitivity to shifting relative capabilities) is consistent across historical
periods in China and can be traced, not to the structural determinants favored by
neorealists, but to the transmission of an ideationally rooted strategic culture. For
64
Johnston, the persistence of this socially constructed approach to security affairs across
different Chinese state systems (in different structural conditions) undermines the
arguments of neorealists who would attribute this behavior to the dictates of international
anarchy, external threats, and self-help behavior. Johnston derives his “central paradigm”
from a textual analysis of the Seven Military Classics. He finds two distinct strategic
cultures, a Confucian-Menician culture and the parabellum culture tempered by the
concept of quan bian, or absolute flexibility. The Confucian strategic culture, supported
by much traditional China scholarship, would indicate a central paradigm based on the
ideas that war is to be avoided, the enemy can be dealt with by means short of
extermination, and violence is a last resort (66). However, Johnston’s analysis and
cognitive mapping of the texts “indicate that preparations for war, knowledge of the
‘way’ of warfare, and the resort to war are positively related to the achievement and
preservation of state security” (106). Johnston’s conclusion, that the parabellum model
dominated Chinese strategic culture and that Confucian ideas only played a legitimating
role, contradicts the received wisdom.
Johnston then applies his approach to Ming China (1368-1644). The choice of
this era was driven by expedience and methodological imperatives that prompted
Johnston to seek a historical period where “decision makers are self-conscious heirs of
the philosophical and textual traditions and experiential legacies out of which” a
“Chinese” strategic culture could be expected to come, one where decision makers were
isolated from non-Chinese strategic cultures, and where documentation was
comparatively rich (Johnston 1995a, 29-30). His study shows that, in dealing with the
Mongol threat, Ming strategists “tended to favor more coercive, offensively oriented
65
strategies” than they are given credit for (243) and thus Ming strategic behavior is most
accurately described as realpolitik. Johnston finds no linkage between the Confucian
strategic culture and Ming behavior, although he finds that quan bian flexibility
moderated Ming preferences by “making decision makers sensitive to the relationship
between changes in capability and opportunity on the one hand, and the likely efficacy of
this preferred strategy” (243).
Johnston (1996) extends this analysis to the Mao Zedong era, to see if the
parabellum culture persists across the 1949 cultural divide. Studying a sample of Mao
Zedong’s writings during different strategic contexts, Johnston finds in these “paeans to
the consistency of conflict and struggle in human affairs” (229) a consistent hard
realpolitik/parabellum central paradigm (characterized here by a belief in the transitory
nature of harmony, conflict as the solution to political problems, and a zero-sum
conceptualization of the enemy) which he finds fits post-1949 Chinese conflict behavior.
Johnston’s general theoretical conclusions are punctuated by what he sees as the
continued Chinese reliance on realpolitik decision rules in the reform and opening period,
“even as China's economy has become increasingly integrated into the global economy,
even as international economic institutions play an increasing role in directing China's
development strategies, and even as China faces the most benign threat environment
since 1949” (1996, 257). However, Johnston does not conduct the same “object” analysis
of relevant texts or even identify significant Chinese actors of the 1980s and 1990s, so it
is difficult to assess how speculative Johnston’s insistence on continuity is meant to be.
6

6
Johnston’s contribution has prompted many reactions in the IR and China literature. For general
critiques, see Esherick 1997, Waldron 1996, and Yahuda 1997. For critiques concerning culture and
strategic culture, see Michael Desch 1998, and the exchange between Colin Gray 1999 and Johnson 1999.
66
In Johnston’s strategic culture approach, “threat” develops as a result of the
options presented to strategic decision makers by the strategic culture in which they are
enmeshed. But Johnston’s studies are not dyadic, thus do not capture the important
interactive element of constitutive approaches geared to the analysis of meaningful
encounters. It often seems like Johnston excludes threat and threat structure from the
realm of the ideational (1996, 223). Thus, Johnston’s study brackets interactional and
social components of international relations, in favor of focusing only on the prism
through which China views the world. In later work on socialization, Johnston (2008)
treats China’s interaction with global institutions, presenting a more constitutive view of
China in its international context.
7

Alexander Wendt’s constructivist theory of threat
Like Johnston, Alexander Wendt also utilizes culture to account for the process of
threat construction. Wendt proposes that by applying a constructivist ontology we can
see that culture is the condition of possibility for power and interest accounts of
international politics. Thus we should start from culture and only then study power and
interest (Wendt 1999, 193). Unlike Johnston, whose focus is mainly on the domestic
realm, Wendt develops a self-consciously systemic approach to constructivism.

For developments and critiques from a Chinese perspective, see Shuguang Zhang 1999, Tiejun Zhang
2002, and Wang 2000.
7
Johnston’s work is vulnerable to claims such as Lisa Weeden’s (2002) argument that scholars must be
wary of static models of culture. As Weeden notes, treatments of culture in political science have thus far
suffered from an understanding that takes culture as “fixed group traits.” For Weeden, these mis-
formulations can be traced back to Clifford Geertz, who maintained that cultures were a “reified, frozen
system of meaning” and symbols (716). According to Weeden, Geertz left a legacy for political science
that discounted the work that symbols do, disregarded individuals’ divergent interpretations of what their
practices meant to them, and provided no theory of agency. Although Johnston relies in part on textual
analysis, his theory of language is underdeveloped. The focus here is distinguished by an understanding of
culture that integrates constitutive effects in a way that Johnston’ variable-oriented approach cannot.
Instead of artificially separating behavior from culture, I instead embrace a theory of culture that sees
linguistic action as behavior.
67
Wendt argues that from a constructivist point of view, some of the phenomenon
identified by realists must be viewed as social structures; security dilemmas and security
communities are both structures composed of intersubjective understandings of trust
(Wendt 1995, 73). For Wendt, threat is a function of the degree to which a given “culture
of anarchy” and its attendant shared identities and intersubjective understandings
dominate a given international system, and the degree to which this culture is
internalized. Against neorealist assumptions, Wendt argues that linking anarchy
necessarily to the security dilemma and a war of all against all is a materialist mistake.
Wendt argues that anarchy can take at least three distinct shared social structures, or
“cultures”: Hobbesian, Lockean, or Kantian based on the role relationships of enemy,
rival and friend. These depend in turn on the degree to which states have internalized the
culture and how they have done so, i.e., through coercion, self-interest or legitimacy.
Knowing which of these cultures is dominant is the key to understanding any given
anarchic system (1999, 310).
Under the logic of enmity, for example the reality of the existential threat posed
by the other is less important than its representation as an actor who denies both the right
of the Self to exist and any restraints on violence towards that Self, and the resulting self-
fulfilling cycle of beliefs and behavior. If an Other is represented as an enemy, Wendt
argues that their interactions (and the use of violence) will be characterized by “no-holds-
barred power politics” and guided by several logics of this role structure: the response
will be destruction or conquering of the enemy, decision makers will be prone to discount
the future and fixate on worst case scenarios (which seems not to be true in US-China
case) and emphasize relative military capabilities.
68
Wendt’s main argument relevant to our purposes, that “social threats are
constructed, not natural” (1992, 405), seems correct. Yet Wendt raises some puzzling
issues. In what Wendt calls a “first encounter,” it is possible that actors interact solely on
the basis of private beliefs about the other without shared understandings (1992, 405;
1999, 189). Wendt presents a thought experiment in which he argues that ‘we’ would not
assume the worst (attack) about a visiting alien civilization. Even taking the provocative
example of “first contact” with aliens into account, it is possible “earthlings’” reactions
would be shaped in important ways by their drawing on large stocks of knowledge about
aliens and cultural understandings therein, just as initial encounters between the US and
China were laden with historical antecedents that structured the exchanges between the
two political communities. What counts as “alien” is itself a discursive construction that
would seem best to leave to empirical investigation in each case.
Also, Wendt’s systemic focus seems less useful for honing in on the properties of
threat construction within dyadic relations. Threat relations are said to change at a
systemic level as the result of a number of state conversions from one logic to another.
For Wendt, the logic of any given system can be changed when it reaches a “tipping
point” whereby some unspecified number of actors adapt enemy representations of their
Others and come to take enmity as a property of their system rather than of individual
actors (1999, 264). The particular other becomes generalized, and thus produces a robust
set of assumptions and expectations about other actors that is historically persistent and
even socializes new members. Thus states are seen by Wendt to be reacting to roles
rather than the “actual qualities” of the Other. The vague understanding offered by
Wendt seems to be tied to the Cold War—perhaps beholden to Wendt’s theoretical goal
69
of offering a response to neorealism—in that it does not seem to be accurate in the post-
Cold War era. It also seems to be the result of the desire on Wendt’s part to present a
micro-level foundation for a Hobbesian anarchy emergent on a macro-level.
If Wendt’s argument that somehow state dispositions accumulate until they are
tipped one way or another toward system domination seems incomplete, then his
associated conclusion is that the international social system is moving through phases
towards a Kantian system needs further examination, if only to clarify the status of mixed
systems that contain states such as the US and China, which seem to modulate through
different positions in the Wendtian scheme.
Securitization theory and threat
Barry Buzan, Ole Waever and the members of the ‘Copenhagen School’ offer yet
another constructivist approach to the study of threat, one that’s focus on language
remedies some of the drawbacks of positivist, variable-oriented constructivism. The
study of ‘securitization,’ a hybrid approach to critical security conceives of security as a
speech act (or sometimes as the invocation or utterance of a label with specific
consequences) which presents or otherwise recognizes a particular object as being under
threat, prioritizing it and moving it outside established frameworks of normalized
politics, thus legitimating forceful, sometimes militarized responses. Analysis in this
tradition proceeds with the goal of countering the legitimization of forceful responses to
certain issues: “security should be seen as a negative, as a failure to deal with issues as
normal politics” (Buzan et al. 1998, 29). The goal for securitization scholars then, is to
effect the channeling of threats into the implicitly cooperative realm of normal politics, in
70
other words, to “desecuritize” them. Threats are speech acts in the sense that they are
moves by actors to securitize particular issues in the name of particular referent objects.
The Copenhagen School rejects the idea that the provision of security is an
appropriate goal, rejecting the assumption that “security is a good to be spread to ever
more sectors” (Buzan, et al. 1998, 35). The School also distinguishes their efforts from
other, Critical and post-structural inspired approaches to security, arguing that these
approaches are intent on “showing that change is possible because things are socially
constituted” while the Copenhagen School stress the relative stability of “sedimented”
social constructions (Buzan et al. 1998, 34-35).
Despite its important contributions, including bringing language into security
studies, allowing for the concrete evaluation of securitizing “moves,” and taking into
account the role of the audience of threats, the Copenhagen School of security is open to
several criticisms that raise questions about its adequacy for present purposes. Some of
these critiques have been raised from within, by its own ‘members.’ As Lene Hansen
(2000) and others have argued, it is worthwhile to ask after the security of women and
other individuals, the threat to whom is not articulated (or articulate-able) in the political
sphere and thus evades ‘securitization.’ Further, as Waever allows (2003), the definition
of “normal politics” is somewhat problematic, and the articulation of extra-ordinary times
difficult. It is these “normal” times—in democratic and non-democratic social
contexts—that are precisely what needs to be explained in terms of the politics of threat
construction, for it is discursive possibilities that allow securitizing actors the leeway to
act discursively.
71
As Waever admits in his discussion of the Copenhagen School’s neglect of the
question of performativity, securitization theory is weak on the constitution of subjects
and the “constitution of agents in the act” (2003, 32-33). Yet the focus on isolated
‘security moves’ underrates the importance of the securitizing process by underplaying
the constitution of the “securitizing agent” in the very field of discourse, or background
understandings that enable and constrain the actor from making claims to security. In the
threat politics common to IR, the securitizing of the other actors (as opposed to issues),
stories and narratives may play a larger role than a focus on speech acts allows. Seeing
security as a “speech act” has the merits of highlighting languages’ function as action, but
does not adequately attend to its representational power.
8

Post-structural theories of threat
A critical shared critical posture towards threat can be strengthened by resisting
the allergy some scholars have towards the radicalism of post-structural theories. For
example, Walt (1991) dismisses (and misconstrues) post-structural contributions to
security: “issues of war and peace are too important for the field to be diverted into a
prolix and self-indulgent discourse that is divorced from the real world” (223). Other
treatments of threat in the IR literature (Rousseau 2006) fail to give consideration to post-
structuralist and other radical critiques of security. Yet these dismissals and oversights
are unfortunate, since a review of this literature shows several important theoretical

8
For an approach critical of the Copenhagen School, see Ken Booth’s (1991, 2007) Critical Security
Studies (CSS) approach, which argues that threat should be reconceptualized in terms of the emancipation
of individuals, rather than in terms of power or order. Booth criticizes the Copenhagen School for
conflating security with survival (Booth 2007, 106). For Booth, survival is the necessary but not sufficient
condition for security, an argument he sums up in the phrase: “Survival is being alive; security is living”
(107). However, Booth distances his approach from language-centered approaches arguing that “meaning
is not everything” (1991, 316), a move which significantly weakens the ability of CSS to engage with other
critical constructivist and post-structuralist theories.
72
initiatives relevant to the study of threat, and perhaps surprisingly, significant overlaps
and complementarities between these radicals and the different strands of critical
constructivist security theorists.
Post-structuralism differs from other approaches detailed above by its
philosophical (as opposed to social scientific) approach, its resistance to modernity and
statism, and the ethical imperative it places at its core. Lene Hansen describes one of
post-structuralism’s most jarring departures from mainstream objectivism aptly:
Conventional discussions of security presuppose a standard given outside of the
security discourse against which threats can be measured, a standard which has
never been, and which will never be, discovered…Poststructuralism
acknowledges that not everybody gets to define what constitutes threats, and that
security still remains for the most part a prerogative of the state. Whether
something is characterized as a “real threat” should therefore be seen as part of a
political and material struggle, rather than as corresponding to an immanent
quality of the situation. (1997, 383)

Any account of post-structuralist security theory must start with ontology. As
John Shotter argues, in reflecting about the nature of the world scholars have the choice
“either to think of it as based in invariances (fixed things) and to treat change as
problematic, or, to think of it as in flux (as consisting in activities) and to treat the
attainment of stability as a problem” (1994, 74 cited in Lapid, 1996, 6). Post-
structuralists follow Nietzsche in taking the second option, assuming what could be
called “flux ontology.” This leads to a focus on “becoming” at odds with so-called
positivist approaches to IR, as well as with “moderate” variable-oriented constructivists.
This understanding, as applied to the state, is given dramatic reading by David Campbell.
Building off of Benedict Anderson’s insights about the imagined nature of political
community, Campbell argues that:
73
This paradox inherent to their being renders states in permanent need of
reproduction: with no ontological status apart from the many and varied practices
that constitute their reality, states are (and have to be) always in the process of
becoming. For a state to end its practices of representation would be to expose its
lack of prediscursive foundations; stasis would be death. (1992, 11)

In this vein, post-structuralist threat theory has three pertinent themes. The first focuses
on the role of security practices in the constitution and reproduction of the self, and on
the way that identity is dependent on threat. This is sometimes (rather clumsily) referred
to as post-structuralism’s “damaged identity theme,” an understanding of the scope of
political activity (‘the political’) such that “a loss of threat damages political identity”
(Huysmans 1998, 239). As Jef Huysmans elaborates, “If one loses the other in the name
of which the community is defined, one risks losing the name of the community” (ibid.).
In other words, self-knowledge is achieved as a consequence of threat. Thus, a political
community doesn’t just face danger, it is indebted to it (238), a condition which results in
something of a paradox of security policy: the statist security project, if successful in its
own terms, would be self-defeating for state identity.
A second theme has to do with the post-structuralist critique of modernity as the
rejection of any statist foreclosure on the meaning of the ‘political.’ As R.B.J. Walker
explains, “the crucial understanding of the subject of security focuses precisely on the
claims of the modern sovereign state to be able to define what and where the political
must be” (Walker 1997, 68). This notion of the political both underlines post-
structuralism’s theoretical concerns and a particular approach to methodology. David
Campbell writes that rather than conforming to the tenets of social science as mainstream
constructivists do, analysis should aim instead at “a politicized account of important
practices” (1998, 225).
74
The third exemplary theme of post-structuralist security theory is the
problematization of security as a value. James Der Derian writes that the ethical goal of
living with difference—the negotiation of an ethical relation with the other—should
replace the security imperative which, underwritten by western metaphysics, dominates
the modern imaginary and produces a recurrent fear of the external other. Seeking to
problematize “identities created out of fear” post-structuralists draw on Nietzsche to read
the history of security as “one of individuals seeking an impossible security from the
most radical ‘other’ of life, the terror of death, which once generalized and nationalized,
triggers a futile cycle of collective identities seeking security from alien others—who are
seeking similarly impossible guarantees” (Der Derian 1993).
Perhaps the most influential of the post-structuralist reformulations of security
relevant to our concern with threat politics is David Campbell’s approach. In Writing
Security (1992) Campbell proposed that the articulation of danger in foreign policy
discourse be understood, not as a threat to the United States’ identity as a state or
existence as a polity, but as a necessary condition that enables the practice of American
‘Foreign Policy’ and makes the reality of the state possible. Campbell contrasts his
notion of ‘Foreign Policy’ to foreign policy, traditionally understood as involving the
“external deployment of instrumental reason on behalf of an unproblematic internal
identity situated in an archaic realm of necessity” (Campbell 1992, 43). For Campbell,
‘Foreign Policy’ is rightly viewed as a boundary-producing political performance, a
political practice that produces certain events and actors as foreign and in the process
constructs the domestic realm. As Campbell explains, “the construction of the ‘foreign’
is made possible by practices that also constitute the ‘domestic’” (1992, 69). In this way,
75
threats are viewed as the articulation of danger and are wrapped up in boundary-
producing politics.
In the post-structural view, the articulation of danger is an important function of
any states’ security apparatus, and the locating of this danger outside of the state acts to
reproduce social order. Far from being an academic exercise, the identification of
boundary producing processes is integral to understanding threat, as such processes have
serious consequences. When an issue is constituted as a security problem, it “implicitly
constructs the political identity that is being rendered secure as unproblematic and as the
desired political order” (Dalby 1997, 15). Practically speaking, societal and political
problems, such as drug use and environmental degradation, are ascribed to “foreign”
actors. As Simon Dalby notes, the political strategy of relegating danger to foreign
causes and thus buttressing the dominant social and political order, “usually works
against social reform and defines as beyond consideration policies designed to deal with
social problems through strategies that accept the need for domestic political reform”
(1997, 15).
In a concern common to some constructivist and other critical approaches,
poststructuralists have contested core realist notions of security in their shared focus, in
different ways, on internal security. As Peter Katzenstein has argued, “internal security
often illustrates fundamental clashes between state and individual security: many political
actions designed to enhance state security put citizens at risk” throwing into doubt
“realism’s core assumption that state security is a collective good uncontested in
domestic politics” (Katzenstein 1996a, 25). Post-structuralists have arguably contributed
most to the development of this common theme of critical security studies. Campbell
76
calls these ‘liminal groups’ and he links them to his understanding of state identity “As
the outcome of exclusionary practices in which resistant elements to a secure identity on
the ‘inside’ are linked through a discourse of danger…with threats identified and located
on the outside” (1992, 237). Shapiro (1997) and Doty (1996a) demonstrate a concern
with something like internal security through their studies of the way the “immigrant”
lays bare the paradox of modern nation-states. Campbell understandably limits his
analysis of liminal groups to those relevant to American security discourse, but in a
constitutive process study, internal security takes on a more central role, depending on
context. In this study, the securitization of liminal groups, such as Asian Americans, is
integral to constitutive processes of Sino-American identity formation; how they come to
be a site of security, representing external, enemy others is of key interest.
Following Campbell, when I look at China as viewed from the US, “rather than
assuming a pregiven, externally existing entity” called “China,” I am concerned with
what could be called “metaChina” or “the array of practices” through which China and
the US come to be understood (1998, ix-x). However, this study parts ways with post-
structural analysis in several ways. I do not share the position of certain post-
structuralists who are “not especially interested in the meticulous examination of
particular cases or sites for purposes of understanding them in their own terms” (Ashley
1989, 278 cited in Fierke 2001,120). While post-structuralists argue that “nothing is
fundamental” they also take identity (as “an inescapable dimension of being”) and
difference as fundamentals (Campbell 1992, 8; Connolly 1995, 104). However, while
identity and difference are part of the picture, scholars need to remain open to other
factors for a fuller conceptualization of threat.
77
Too often post-structural writers on security present an overly monolithic and
unidirectional view of “threat.” As Milliken argues, in its focus on a particular self and
its others, Campbell leaves aside collective state identity and distinctions within
collectivities (1999, 93-95). Thomas Smith raises questions as to whether identity
construction is as top-down or as invulnerable to counter discourses, such as those
dissenting from or contesting the elite scripts of McCarthyism and the Drug War, as
Campbell seems to maintain (1999, 171).
In addition, most of the research in this vein has been unidirectional, focusing on
American constructions of “others” without considering the effects of “interaction” or if
these insights hold when applied to states, or “selves” other than the US. Campbell too,
needlessly injects a sort of American exceptionalism in his claims that the US is the
imagined community par excellence and the idea that “America is peculiarly dependent
upon representational practices for its being. Arguably more than any other state, the
imprecise process of imagination is what constitutes American identity” (1992, 105).
This is, of course, a debatable assertion though the multicultural character of American
political life is a factor worthy of consideration. The failure to do so does not invalidate
the findings, but should spur attempts to find out whether these processes are peculiarly
American or not. What is important to recognize is that post-structuralists make serious
claims about threat constituting processes that, taken seriously, add much to our
understanding of threat politics.

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III. Towards a third generation of the study of threat politics

IR theories have given us a rich legacy of factors that affect ‘threat perception’ or
alternatively the ‘production of danger’ from which to build a ‘third generation’
framework for the understanding of threat politics. Threats can be influenced by the level
of tension and mistrust characteristic of the relations between states. The presence or
absence of other threats plays a role in whether leaders focus on or overlook a threat in a
given realm. Rationalist IR scholars investigate threat relying upon a rational actor and
causal theorizing. Classical and neorealists maintain that threats are ultimately a result of
systemic anarchy and the security dilemma, while some modify this understanding by
adding variables such as the perception of aggressive intentions or level of challenger
satisfaction. For those influenced by psychology and the cognitive revolution, the
characteristics of threatened states leaders and their decision-making processes take
center-stage. Cognitivists direct our attention to the individual level, crises, and the
departures from rational action decision-makers must make as a result of their need for
cognitive consistency, or as a consequence of the cognitive shortcomings of human
beings as information processers.
Reflectivists, constructivists and critical theorists, despite wide differences, move
away from causal approaches to constitutive ones, challenging (to varying degrees) the
legacy of state-centrism in IR, while recognizing hitherto disregarded referents to security
and introducing normative and ethical concerns. For systemic constructivists, the extent
and depth of shared identity among states involved in security institutions matter most in
threat construction. Post-structuralists hang their accounts of threat on the constitution of
79
state identity or a critique of doomed attempts to escape contingency, and deploy mainly
discursive approaches in their efforts to politicize taken-for-grantedness of security
practices. Copenhagen school scholars borrow heavily from post-structuralism, seeing
threats as speech acts and security as divisible into sectors. While post-structuralists
politicize the given, securitization theorists aim at politicizing security acts, removing
these acts from the security realm to the sphere of ‘normal’ politics. The competing
notions of threat offered by this wide range of IR traditions are schematized in table one.
Building from extant understandings of threat in IR theory, the rest of this
dissertation aims at contributing to building a third generation theory—whether viewed
as ‘science’ or ‘philosophy’—of the construction of threat, and a better understanding of
how states come to view Others as threats, or as some less dangerous entity. A first step
is to recognize the inadequacies of existing rationalist approaches to threat in IR. Clearly,
structural approaches, while often a useful first cut, cannot offer a satisfying account of
threat politics. Instead of building structuralist blind spots into theory, utilizing a
constitutive approach focused on a particular dyadic relationship in historical perspective
may yield more insight into the processes of threat construction. In addition, although the
cognitive dimension of threat construction demands attention, it may be that ‘perception’
as a guide to threat is also an unreliable concept; if it is possible to identify
‘misperception’ of reality then it must be assumed that it is possible to describe
objectively what a correctly perceived reality looks like. This kind of objectivism is
difficult to sustain after the post-positivist revolution.
Second, it no longer seems possible to take language as a transparent reflection of
the real world or to ignore language as action or language in its constitutive power. Nor
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Table One: Summarizing Theories of Threat
Body of
scholarship
Main threat
source
Analytic keys Analytic
objectives
Main idea,
briefly
Balance of power Anarchy,
external
material
factors

Survival
strategies,
internal and
external
balancing
Explain
balancing in
bipolar orders
“Threat is
power.”
Balance of threat Anarchy,
state
perceptions
of external
threats
Aggressive
intentions
Rescue realism
from untenable
premises
“Threat is
power plus
intention.”
Power Transition Hierarchy,
differential
rates of
economic
growth,
power parity
between
status quo
and rival
powers
Challenger
(dis)satisfaction
(in combination
with parity and
overtaking)
Explain initiation
and timing of
war between
rising
challengers and
status quo
powers.
“Threat is parity
plus
dissatisfaction.”
Cognitive-
Psychological
Threats are
perceptions
(internal to
minds of
policy-
makers) of
reality
Perception,
various biases of
elites in decision
making
positions
Show how
threats influence
decision making
process of
individuals
“World politics
are complex and
ambiguous and
individuals
matter in threat
processes”
Constructivist Threats are
not natural
or given,
they are
social
constructed
Extent and
depth
(internalization)
of shared
identity
Show how threat
is cultural, at
systemic level, or
result of strategic
culture at
domestic level
“Anarchy is
what states
make of it”
Post-structuralist Identity
construction
(through
foreign
policy)
Show how
identity is
dependent on
threat, show
how
contingency is
taken as threat
Politicization,
problematization
of given order,
metatheoretical
reflection
“Foreign policy
is policy of
making foreign”
Securitization Securitizing
actors’
speech acts
Referents,
securitizing
moves in
different sectors
(De)politization
of threat
“Security is
failure”
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does it seem wise to insist on methodological individualism to the neglect of the social
and discursive dimensions of threat. I shall say more about this in the next chapter.
Third, while it does not exhaust the terrain of threat construction, identity is a key
to understanding the construction of boundaries and the production of meaning. If, as
posited in the introduction, identity, as shared knowledge that allows states to imagine
and design relations among themselves, is a source of international order, then the
connections between identity, threat, and order raised in this chapter must be a core part
of any theory of threat. Placed in identity terms, a third generation threat politics would
also attend to ‘internal security’ or ‘liminal’ groups to accentuate not only the domestic
processes of threat construction and identity constitution emphasized by post-
structuralists. Constructivists have established that threat is not given materially, but
intersubjectively established through interaction in a cultural plane. Going beyond
intersubjectivity, the concept of ‘intrasubjectivity,’ a phrase introduced by Janice Bially
Mattern that captures an important part of the threat phenomenon, threat produced from
intrasubjective sources within a given political community (Bially Mattern 2005, 98).
The recognition of intrasubjectivity, and the components of self versus self seem
particularly important for understanding threat construction that involves a multicultural,
multinational state such as the US.
Fourth, positivist constructivism presents puzzles that bear on threat theory
development. For instance, Wendt gestures at an undefined process by which a kind of
representation comes to dominate and the members of a given system reach a “tipping
point” where the representation becomes the logic of the system, yet the dynamics of this
process, if it exists, are still poorly understood. It is unclear how bilateral relations, even
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between two key states such as the US and China, fit into a systemic scheme, but it seems
likely that Sino-American relations would play an important role in the achievement of
any tipping points in the near future.
Finally, threat is often studied only in reference to its crisis dimensions. Yet this
focus on international crisis behavior, shared by realists, psychological, constructivists
and some post-constructivists, does not tell the whole story. Crises offer a convenient
boundary around which to build a case, and are often easier to research because they are
viewed as discrete events and draw significant attention at the time of occurrence, leading
to a healthy paper trail of primary sources and public commentary. Yet such a focus
should be accompanied by the recognition that, especially in cultural terms, encounters
between political communities occur outside the purview of the state-to-state or
diplomatic crises sanctioned by traditional IR research programs. Crisis behavior is
worthy of study, but we should neglect neither the more mundane, every-day
formulations of other political communities that provide the background to threat events,
nor the more long-term development of threat relationships. Threat relationships must be
studied in historical perspective.
What does threat do? As this chapter demonstrates, in their efforts to answer this
question, IR scholars have recently added cultural, identity, and discursive factors to
existing themes in threat scholarship that emphasized behavioral, material, unintentional,
structural, domestic, international, objective, subjective, and cognitive sources of threat in
international politics. In addition to telling us much about the objective and subjective
assessments of state vulnerability, threat processes are constitutive of identity, and
integral to community boundary production; threat processes can reinforce particular
83
notions of political community taken as security referents. They play a role in the
articulation of what is to be secured by security policies and ultimately lie at the core of
the maintenance of political order. The next chapter offers a methodology by which to
study the politics of threat construction as it relates to the constitution of Sino-American
relations.
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Chapter 3: Discourse Analysis as Interpretive Method

The study of threat politics in terms of meaning can be situated firmly in the
tradition of interpretive social science, as can the constructivist study of constitutive
relations. It is difficult if not impossible to understand meaning making practices without
recourse to language. I argue that the most appropriate set of tools with which to study
language and meaning can be assembled from the materials provided by discourse
analysis. This chapter, then, introduces the tools necessary to conduct constructivist
inquiry into the process and politics of threat construction, identifying the rich literature
this type of analysis relies upon, and articulating the limits and challenges faced by this
type of analysis. It does so in three sections.
The first section situates discourse analysis within interpretive social science. In
it, I outline the traditions and assumptions of this approach. Two traditions in particular
are presented, one drawing on analytic and natural language philosophy, the other
drawing on the post-Nietzschean criticism of structuralism. I then make the case for
discourse analysis, noting its strengths and limitations as a practical approach to the study
of politics. Noting the broad array of available tools, a tendency for theoretical cross-
pollination, and differences with standard models of political science, I turn to a
discussion of the assumptions of discourse analysis including the positions it takes on
materiality, context, practice, and standards of evidence.
The second section presents the tools of discourse analysis as I use them in the
thesis. I arrange the tools into two categories: mechanisms and modes. Mechanisms
include both prevalent features of discourse and related analytic tools, and include
intertextuality, juxtapositioning, and the analysis of representations. Discursive modes
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are widespread, cross-cultural, linguistic practices that give coherence and meaning to
social life. Since the bulk of the subsequent study is dedicated to exploring two particular
modes of discourse, narrative and metaphor, I devote some effort to explaining and
describing these in particular, leaving the explication of metaphor for chapter four.
The third section addresses the difficulties presented by a study of US-China
relations, the necessity of relying in part on Chinese sources characterized by inordinate
formalization, censorship and shrill rhetoric, seemingly throwing the study of meaning
into doubt. The fourth and final section reviews the methodological strategies previous
authors have used to apply discourse analysis to IR, and sets out a concrete research
strategy based on the lessons drawn from them.

I. Qualitative methodology, interpretivism, and discourse

Although the increasing interest in the development of “diverse tools and shared
standards” (Brady and Collier 2004; c.f. King, Keohane, and Verba 1994) in qualitative
methods has opened up an important conversational space for social inquiry in political
science and IR, there have been few attempts to explore the overlapping of qualitative,
“interpretivist,” and discourse analytic approaches to international relations and political
science. Ranging beyond its home in anthropological interpretivism, the challenge to the
social sciences posed by Clifford Geertz is a worthy of attention as a general inspiration
and provocation. This challenge is put succinctly by Paul Shankman: “Geertz has
proposed that social scientists study meaning rather than behavior, seek understanding
rather than causal laws, and reject mechanistic explanations of the natural-science variety
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in favor of interpretive explanations. He has invited his colleagues to take seriously the
possibilities of analogy and metaphor, to consider human activity as text and symbolic
action as drama” (1984, 261). For Geertz, interpretive explanation is neither predictive,
nor verifiable in the positivist sense, nor is it necessarily comparative (263). By boldly
stating his case, Geertz opened up important space for debate between those who practice
social inquiry inspired by the model of natural science and those inspired by the example
of the humanities.
However, it is often the case that even the most sympathetic and sensitive
explorations of the scope of interpretivism (Gerring, 2003) evaluate interpretivist
contributions using standards drawn from standard causal analysis (e.g., generate
falsifiable propositions, identify rival hypotheses, stress replicability), the very standards
that many interpretivists claim to be problematizing. At the same time, what Michel
Foucault (1984, 43) might have called the “blackmail” of positivism (i.e., are you “for” or
“against” positivism?) seems to have taken up entirely too much scholarly attention. That
is to say, interpretivists who close themselves off from discourses of the natural sciences
and positivist social sciences risk loosing the ability to critique and add to the
conversation, but also may squander the opportunity to add richness to their own theories.
In terms of this thesis, for instance, there is no reason I can see why potential
contributions of cognitive science to the debates over the interpretivism or the “problem
of meaning” should not be explored (Turner 2001). Harboring doubts over the nature of
regularities in the social world is not necessarily tantamount to rejecting the achievements
(along with the tragedies) of the discourse of the natural sciences. Thus, the qualitative
87
methodological subdiscipline’s engagement of interpretivism is to be welcomed as an
opportunity, if guardedly.
The meaning of interpretivism,
1
like positivism, is by no means settled, but it has
three qualities I will take up in the course of this section: 1) the foregrounding of
meaning, and particularly the tendency to focus on shared or so-called ‘intersubjective’
meanings, 2) a move, though by no means complete, away from both a narrow focus on
causal analysis and an unquestioning attitude towards scientism 3) its tendency to draw
inspiration from a different set of philosophers, especially Continental philosophy, than
research in the positivist vein, allowing the engagement and sometimes incorporation of
the insights of post-structuralism, gender studies and other critical theories.
What Geertz calls the “besetting sin” of interpretive approaches, that they resist
systematic assessment, is indeed a challenge to theory development within interpretivism
(1973, 24). One way to address this issue is to develop methods appropriate to
interpretive inquiry in a given subfield, in this case IR, and share them in order to get an
assessment of their potential for wider adaptation as interpretive methods. This does not
have to result in the proselytizing of rigid standards, but the act of sharing does provide
focal points of debate. So practically speaking, methodological systemization benefits
our research, beyond and sometimes above what the benefits of “shared standards,” if
they are understood as imposed research criteria, can bring (c.f. Milliken 1999a; Hansen
2007).

1
Geertz (1973), Taylor (1979), and the readings in Rabinow and Sullivan (1979) are often taken as the
seminal articulations of interpretive theory. See Neufeld (1993) for a treatment of interpretivism in IR.

88
Language as starting point: the linguistic turn
Since at least Hobbes, theorists of the international have expressed
skepticismabout words and their capacity to order political life: “Covenants without the
Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all” (1996, 117). The “force
of Words being” according to Hobbes, “too weak to hold men to the performance of their
Covenants”, there existed only two “imaginable helps to strengthen it” namely, fear and
glory (1996, 99). In this spirit, rationalists have characterized communication as
“inherently non-credible as a reliable signal of actor intentions” and argued that states
discount such unreliable information as to true intentions as “cheap talk”, moves which
thus reduce “an astonishing array of state practices and actions to the status of a null
category of inconsequential action” (Lynch 2002,195). Writ large across social scientific
practices, the idea of language as a transparent medium has become a comfortable
assumption, well described by Andrew Sayer:
Paradoxically, while it has been common to ignore knowledge which is not
expressed in language, until recently social scientists and methodologists have
taken the linguistic character of their own knowledge for granted, as if language
were nothing more than a transparent and unproblematic medium (1984, 19).

In contrast, this inquiry starts from a set of theories that take language seriously.
While the vast body of this scholarship is difficult to survey in limited space, a brief
introduction to two general developments or traditions that inform discourse theory is
important to contextualize the ensuing discussion. The first tradition, rather than view
language and behavior as separate, argues that language is behavior. The second
tradition argues that language is creative of social reality, not merely transparently
descriptive or referential. Rather than giving names to meanings that things already have,
89
language is more properly understood as productive of meaning. Discourse theory, then,
does not uphold vulgar correspondence theories of truth, but holds that language is bound
up with the world in important ways.
The first body of scholarship pays attention to the ways language is inseparable
from social practice, and the ways in which communication is a collaborative and
cooperative achievement. A group of important analytic philosophers of the 20
th
century
took language as a rule-governed form of behavior. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1958, section
23) noted that speaking was an activity, as revealed by a multiplicity of what he called
“language games.” J.L. Austin (1962) observed a division between constatives, or the
descriptions that logical positivists assumed language provides, and performatives, which
amounted to the performance of an action (6), such as the uttering of the words “I do” at
a wedding. Performatives depend on circumstance for their force. Thus the “speech act”
theory Austin developed is not concerned with whether a statement is true or false, but
rather concerns itself with whether an utterance is successful (felicitous in Austin’s
terms), whether it does something in accordance with conventional procedure (Petrey
1990, 12). Utterances, according to Austin, had locutionary (the standard referential
function of language), illocutionary (the speaker’s intended impact on the audience), and
perlocutionary (the effect on the audience) force. Austin took particular interest in
illocutionary acts, taking them as the basis for his theorization of “speech acts.” Austin’s
student Searle later broke with Wittgenstein’s interpretation that there existed an infinite
number of uses of language or language games (Loxley 2007, 49). Searle offered a
taxonomy of possible illocutionary speech acts, which he took as the fundamental unit of
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meaning and communication, and which included assertives, directives, commissives,
expressives, and declaratives.
2

Scholars who stress that communication is a collaborative achievement draw upon
the ethnomethodological conversation analytic concept of “turn taking.” Conversation
analysis aims at describing the competences that support ordinary social exchanges,
focusing on the recurrent structural features and context shaping and renewing processes
of conversational interaction (Heritage 1984, 242-3). Conversation analysis attempts to
“explain the remarkable fluency of ordinary conversation, the fact that people generally
manage to speak without extensive overlapping and without major gaps in the flow of
talk” (Fairclough 1992, 153). Accounts of turn taking demonstrate the importance of
simple rules of conversation, for instance, the current speaker’s selection or addressing of
the next speaker, giving us a powerful model of discursive interaction.
Another line of thought stresses the cooperative nature of communication. For
instance, scholars of conversation analysis argue that “conversation is a cooperative
medium—not in the sense that people are always supportive or compliant but in that they
jointly collaborate in the production of meaning and inferences” (Jaworski and Coupland
1999, 49). From the view of pragmatics, linguists have posited that “human rationality
incorporates an a priori commitment to be co-operative in communicating” (Chilton and
Schaffner 2002b, 12). The most famous statement of this insight is Paul Grice’s (1975)

2
Following this conception, the words and letters of IR are action. For IR scholars, one sense of the
significance of this recognition is brought out by Thomas Schmalberger’s characterization of the Cuban
Missile Crisis and the nature of state-to-state interactions in general: “what we tend to forget is that for the
main protagonists, the policy makers of the American and Soviet governments, the crisis unfolded in the
letters they wrote to each other, the reports they received and the actions they ordered. They did not watch
missiles being prepared or vessels approaching the interception area. They rather discussed, read and wrote
about it” (Schmalberger 1998, Intro, 8).

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“co-operative principle,” which demands that communicators “make your conversational
contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose
or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.” Grice also postulates that
when they communicate, people follow several maxims, maxims of quality, quantity,
relation and manner. These four maxims dictate that contributors speak what they know
to be true or have evidence for, be only as informative as is necessary for purposes of the
continuing discourse, only make relevant contributions, and strive towards clarity and
intelligibility respectively. While people do not always abide by the maxims, “if norms
weren’t norms, there would be no concept of lying, telling half-truths, evading the issue,
being deliberately obscure” and even in political discourse where such maxims may be
routinely flouted, Grice argued that the co-operative principle is still functioning in that
“hearers infer (and speakers expect hearers to infer) some implied meaning –these
pragmatically implied meanings are known as implicatures” (Chilton and Schaffner
2002b, 12). Politicians and other actors can of course use inferred implications to evade
the consequences of more explicitly expressed meanings (ibid.). The work of Jurgen
Habermas can be viewed as continuing both the speech act and Gricean traditions and has
had great influence on IR theory. Mark Lynch (2002) subjects the American engagement
policy towards China to a theoretical analysis based on the Habermasian distinction
between communicative and strategic action. Lynch argues that American engagement
policy meets with more success when it pursues communicative orientation geared
towards deliberative understanding (205), instead of a rationalist engagement logic,
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which “suffers from almost unsurpassable incentives to misrepresent preferences,
suspicion about motives and considerations of relative power” (206).
3

The second family of theories can be identified with the work of post-structuralist
philosophers and social theorists, such as Jacques Derrida, who have criticized the
detached conversational space posited in the Habermasian tradition and the logocentric
assumption that speakers are able to exercise intentionality and control over the meanings
of their utterances (Shapiro 1992, 9). They argue, among other things, that Habermas’
view of communication “deprives discourse of the deep rhetorical force” it derives from
both its “connection with the historical traditions that have given rise to the meanings of
its utterances” and the “force it acquires from the spatial and temporal moments from
which it issues” (9). Post-structuralism is a broad church that originally developed as a
reaction to structuralist linguistics.
4
The theorist with perhaps the biggest impact on

3
While space precludes a full analysis, IR scholars have demonstrated the wide influence of Habermas’
work on ideal speech communities and argument, communicative and strategic action, argumentation, and
legitimation to name a few. For example, Risse’s (2000) analysis shows the role that argumentative, not
instrumental, rationality played in negotiations over German reunification during the end of the Cold War.
According to Risse, Gorbachev was persuaded to agree to reunification under NATO auspices in the course
of a “practical discourse on the ‘right thing to do’ in this peculiar situation” (24) because he ultimately
accepted Western liberal norms of self-determination. Harold Muller (2001) demonstrates the superiority
of Habermas-inspired approaches to communication, with its fuller notion of communicative competence,
to utilitarian theories. Muller describes Habermas’s idea of communicative action, where partners
exchange and evaluate several types of validity claims: the truth of factual claims, the validity of normative
claims, and the sincerity of the claims in general. Under (ideal) conditions–mutual recognition, equal
access to discourse, and empathetic capability—partners can through rationally argument reach agreement
(162). Jens Steffek (2003) employs concepts derived from Habermas to addresses the question of how
international organizations justify their activities in the absence of democratic participation or control.
4
For Nicholas Onuf, “structuralism” is “the insistence that cognition has its own logical structure,
independent of societies and their conventions, and exemplified by language, once the later is stripped of
its social content” (1989, 45). The positing of innate universals, such as found in the ideas of Piaget, Levi-
Strauss, or Chomsky, is controversial but not taken up by most constructivists. Though he is agnostic
concerning the ultimate existence of “some innate property of mind which orients cognition and relates to
culture through language competence and use” (46), Onuf sees structuralism in this sense to be inconsistent
with constructivist principles and points as well to the constructivist tone of the “poststructuralist
repudiation of structuralism’s absorption with what may be innate in the human mind” (1989, 45). Deftly
sidestepping the issue of innate human nature, Onuf instead “bounds” his constructivism, arguing whatever
is natural in humans does not ultimately seriously impede the study of the mutual constitution of people and
society (1989, 46).
93
discourse analysis is Michel Foucault (see especially Foucault 1972). The outburst of
terms he introduced as well as the ambiguities of his thought on discourse make
Foucault’s views on discourse difficult to summarize as they are complicated by the
stages his ideas went through; his early “archeological” view of discourse as autonomous
and constitutive was later replaced by a “genealogical” view that took discourse as a
strategic means for the advancement of the interests and projects of particular forces
(Howarth 2000, 49). The early view held discourses to be “autonomous systems of rules
that constitute objects, concepts, subjects and strategies, thereby governing the
production of scientific statements” (48-9). Genealogy, by contrast, “examines the
historical emergence of discursive formations with a view to exploring possibilities that
are excluded by the exercise of power and systems of domination” (49). It is best to pick
and chose useful conceptual apparatus from his theory. More generally, discourse in
Foucaultian terms is concerned with knowledge and power. In each society, “the
production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and distributed
according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and its
dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality” (1976,
216 cited by Hodge and Louie). “Discursive practices” for Foucault, “delimit the range of
objects that can be identified, define the perspectives that one can legitimately regard as
knowledge, and constitute certain kinds of persons as agents of knowledge” (Shapiro
1989, 130).
Foucault had an immense influence on the post-structural point of view in IR.
From this perspective, George and Campbell explain that language is important, “not as

94
an asset employed by a preexisting subject or as a constraint imposed on the subject, but
as a medium through which the social identity of the subject is made possible” (1990,
285). A Foucaultian understanding of discourse as applied to IR then, goes beyond
merely a group of signs/symbols to refer to “social practices that systematically form
social subjects and the objects of which they speak” (ibid.). In this way, discursive
practices can shed light on the knowledgable practices by which states construct threats.
The question becomes how to study them systematically.
Making the Case for Discourse Analysis
The promise of discourse analysis (DA) is signaled by the growing interest it has
attracted from multiple theoretical, disciplinary, and epistemological perspectives. In
political science and IR, use of the concept of discourse is no longer the monopoly of
dissident critical theorists but is slowly gaining acceptance in qualitative methods circles
and others (Milliken 1999a; Gerring 2004). Perhaps signaling the acceptability of DA as
method across diverse practices of academic political science, calls for its incorporation
have now come from those committed to variable-oriented analysis (Abdelal et. al. 2006,
702) as they have from those taking a broadly constructivist view (Klotz and Lynch,
2007, 19). A rich array of tools for the analysis of language, text, context, and practice
have already been developed—in IR and associated fields alone—to conduct metaphor
analysis (Chilton and Ilyin 1993; Chilton 1996), narrative analysis (Suganami 1997;
1999), predicate analysis (Milliken 1999a, 2001), plot structure analysis (Alker 1996),
discourse analysis of foreign policy (Waever 2002; Hansen 2006), Wittgenstein-inspired
language game analysis (Fierke 1998), and argument analysis (Risse 2002; Crawford
2002). As a field of study outside of IR, scholars working under the banner of critical
95
linguistics or Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) have made important progress in their
investigations of politics (Chilton and Schaffner 2002), national identity (Wodak, de
Cilla, Reisigl, and Liebhart 1999), and racism (Reisigl and Wodak 2001).
5

Discourse analysis has been used to answer a broad number of questions in
academic International Relations. Scholars working in a general constructivist and post-
positivist veins have drawn from various traditions to inquire into the discursive
formation of threats to collective identity (Milliken 1999b), how foreign policy choices
are constructed (Majeski and Sylvan 1999), and how some discursive constructions of
policy options come to dominate others (Shapiro, Bonham and Heradstveit 1988; Hall
2003). Work inspired by post-structuralism has asked how discursive representational
practices produce hierarchies (Doty 1996b), and has inquired into the linkages between
identity and foreign policy (Campbell 1992, 1998; Hansen 2006). Work in the
Wittgensteinian tradition investigates how policies previously thought to be unrealistic
can become possible through changing language games (Fierke 1998). In the process of
addressing such questions, the discourse analytic literature has provided researchers with
a variety of analytic tools, a representative of which are summarized in Table Two. The
table, a partial representation of a field, the scope of which defies easy categorization,
leaves out important traditions of discourse analysis, such as argument analysis,
Habermasian discourse ethics, and narrative analysis, that have had an important impact
on IR theory.

5
For expositional convenience, I lump these contributions all under the category of DA as they are all
concerned with text analysis, though it should be noted, these diverse research practices do not always
share assumptions, ontological or otherwise. In my view, however, this is a strength of this area of
research. For further stocktaking on the promise of discourse analysis for IR and political science, its
appropriateness to IR, its relationship to leading approaches within IR, and the factions within IR DA, see
the essays in Debrix (2003) and Gerring (2004).

96
Table Two: Some Tools Used for Discourse Analysis in IR
6

Approach:
Canonical
influences
(IR
applications)
What is
“discourse”?
Questions:
emphasized/
Concerns (other
associated methods,
analytic techniques)
Discursive mechanisms:
Post-
structuralism
Nietzsche,
Derrida,
Foucault,
Butler,
Laclau
***
(Shapiro,
Doty,
Campbell,
Hansen)
Language plus
practice; a system
of representation
through which
knowledge is
produced
How are subjects
created and
positioned by and
through discourse?
Who can speak?
Power/knowledge
Performative
constitution of
subjectivity,
possibilities for
resignification
(Deconstruction of
binary oppositions,
Juxtapositioning,
genealogy)

intertextuality
Referential, mosaic, interpenetrating
quality of textual materials and the
meaning they produce
Predication
Attributes linked to subjects/objects by
verbs, adjectives, adverbs
Subject positioning
Identifies relations: opposition, identity,
similarity, complementarity
Post-Marxist
Althusser,
Lacan,
Laclau, Hall
***
(Weldes,
CDA)
Structure in which
meaning is
(re)produced
How is meaning
partially fixed?
Power?/
Meaning is not totally
contingent nor totally
fixed, Ideology,
hegemony
articulation
Construct objects, relations out of extant
resources
Interpellation
“hail” individuals into subject positions
Nodal points
Privileged signifiers which fix meaning of
signifier chain
Post-
Analytic
Wittgenstein,
Austin,
Searle, Grice
***
(Onuf,
Duffy,
Fierke,
Frederking,
Sylvan,
Waever)
Language as
action, as moves
in a game
How does language
(as action) create
social facts, relations,
and commitments?
Meaning-in-use
(Multiple games
systematized speech
acts
rule-based
constructivism)
Speech acts
Communicative cooperation Constantives,
performatives, Felicity conditions
Conversational implicatures
Implicit contents of speech acts inferred
by actors
Language games
Language is vehicle of thought also,
grammars, forms of life
Cognitive
Linguistics
Language is only
surface reflection
of innate
conceptualizations
How do idealized
cognitive models aid
reasoning and
constitute reality?
Conceptual metaphor
Cross-domain mapping, image schemas,
entailments

6
Table Sources include Doty 1993; Frederking 2000; Milliken 1999a; Fierke 1998; 2002, Weldes, 1999,
and Lakoff and Johnson 1999.

97
However, the table highlights the variety of social mechanisms—what I call “discursive
mechanisms”—shared among scholars, showing the difficulty of disentangling
approaches to discourse on the basis of the philosophical traditions or the purity of the
ontological-epistemological positions to which they subscribe.
7
Thus, while consensus
does not exist on many issues, such as the scope of the constitutive effects of discourse or
whether the subject pre-exists discourse, scholars have engaged in heavy borrowing
across epistemological and ontological lines. The Foucauldian conception of discourse,
speech acts, narratives, interpellation, and even metaphor, all continue to be deployed
from multiple perspectives.
In IR theory, constructivists are the only branch among the three dominant
schools of thought to, if at times cautiously, approach language as problematic, not as
merely correspondence. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Wendt, though he has
been criticized for inattention to language, can be read as putting forth a notion of “social
structure” which is analogous to “discourse.” Wendt writes that “the components of
social structure—shared knowledge, material resources, and practices—could serve as a
rough definition of discourse” (Wendt 1995, 73).
8
Yet Wendt’s omission of linguistic
component raises the question of just how should discourse be conceptualized?

7
Another regrettable omission is the work of scholars who draw upon the study of rhetoric to focus on
techniques of persuasion found in international relations discourse (Beer and Hariman 1996). These
scholars see rhetoric as useful for exploring “the capacity of speech to affect judgment and action,
particularly in respect to political decision making” (Beer and Hariman 1996a, 11). Scholars drawing
upon the Aristotelian tradition have also shown how metaphors are used to make persuasive appeals to
audiences using logos, ethos and pathos or reason, authority and emotion (Beer and De Landtsheer 2004).
Recently, discourse scholars have tried to move rhetoric away from persuasion, which they argue relies too
much on a problematic account of individual’s subjective motivations, and towards a model of rhetorical
coercion that stresses the ways actors use rhetoric to maneuver their opponents into unfavorable positions
(Krebs and Jackson 2007).

8
For works of IR, seminal and otherwise that take language seriously from a rule-based constructivist
perspective, see Onuf (1989), Fierke (1998) and Frederking (2000); from a post-structural stance Der
Derian and Shapiro (1989); On IR constructivism and language, see Zehfuss (2001).
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“Discourse” as Hodge and Louie remind us, comes from the Latin dis-currere, literally
“to run backwards or forwards”, a meaning which emphasizes “process and interaction,
either a text or set of texts produced by interaction or the rules while allow that to
happen” (1998, 11).
9
Scholars whose focus is discourse have offered an array of
definitions
10
and understandings.
Moving away from a focus only on referential functions of language favored by
linguists and towards their constitutive role, some scholars define discourse as a
“linguistic practice that puts into play sets of rules and procedures for the formation of
objects, speakers and thematics” (Shapiro 1992, 108). Adapting Foucault’s view of
discourse as a politicized strategic asset for particular types of speakers, Michael Shapiro
promotes a “view that places discourse within an economy of power relations rather than
within a simplistic epistemological frame that emphasizes fidelity of representation or
expressions of deeper reality” (109). Others, such as Richard Price, stress the
legitimating power of discourse, and define discourse as “theoretical statements
connected to social practices” which “produce and legitimize certain behaviors and
conditions of life as ‘normal’ and serve to politicize some phenomena over others” (1997,
9). Still other scholars take discourse as “an ordering of terms, meanings, and practices
that forms the background presuppositions and taken-for-granted understandings that
enable people’s actions and interpretations” (Milliken 1999b, 92). Weldes and Saco

9
Hodge and Louie distinguish this conception from “language” which they write relates to lingua, “a
tongue, human speech with its grammar, vocabulary and sound systems” (1998, 11).
10
Definitional practices are, of course, not innocent. Many critical and post-positivist theorists might resist
both in their adherence to the ontology of becoming as presented by Nietzsche, who wrote that only dead
things were susceptible to definition, and their rejection of the fetishized positivist habits of
operationalization. Throughout this chapter, I brave these waters facing the problem raised by Lapid, of a
bounty of “potentially rewarding definitions.” As Lapid puts it, “The challenge…is not to push
energetically to some consensual but arbitrary reduction, but to reflectively match suitable definitional
assets to declared theoretical missions” (Lapid 1996, 7).

99
define discourse as “a social practice through which thoughts and beliefs are themselves
constituted” (Weldes and Saco 1996, 371). Meaning, ordering, politicized strategies,
practice, background presuppositions, and the linguistic and extra-linguistic realms all
seem to be key components of any consensus definition we could formulate. Thus,
defining discourse as a constitutive, social, meaning-making practice consisting of
linguistic and non-linguistic components, governing rules and background assumptions
serves a working understanding to take us forward from this point.
Discourse analysis as a pragmatic approach to politics
What are the strengths of a discourse approach to an investigation of international
relations? First, there is a case to be made in terms of practicality: a large proportion of
the empirical material of IR is textual. Discourse theory assumes that political practices
are eminently discursive. It is important to note that it is not necessary to practice the
“dogmatically ascribing [of] autonomy to language” (Xenos 2004, 128) in order to see
the methodological utility of discourse analysis. On the other hand, discounting the role
of political language and discourse more broadly leaves scholars unable to exploit fully
the most available evidence of political processes. Discourse analysis is broadly
informed by the recognition that “political activity does not exist without the use of
language” (Chilton and Schaffner 2002b, 3). As argued by Chilton and Schaffner,
“[w]hat is strikingly absent from conventional studies of politics is attention to the fact
that the micro-level behaviors [of politics, such as conflicts of interest, threats and
power/dominance struggles]…are kinds of linguistic action—that is, discourse”, while at
the macro level of political institutions such as the state, parliamentary debates, broadcast
interviews, constitutions, and laws are all forms of discourse (Chilton and Schaffner
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2002b, 5; Chilton 2004, 4). Alker and Sylvan (1994) note that political life itself is
generally organized around discourse:
Most political actions, including acts of public violence, are explicitly or
implicitly verbal: orders, questions, speeches, characterizations. Very few are
what Searle calls ‘brute facts’, i.e., physical behaviors pure and simple. For that
matter, most physical behaviors of interest to political scientists are given
meaning by their conspicuous emplacement in a discursive space. (7)

Discourse analysts agree that it seems reasonable, then, to “go where the action
is.” Harold Muller states that “it is an undeniable fact that international politics consists
predominantly of actions that take the form of language” (2001, 161). Other scholars
hold that there are good arguments for a focus on discourse when asking the particular
questions posed by IR, such as questions of identity. For instance, Bially Mattern argues
that “language-centrism” gives us “greater clarity about the centrality and ubiquitousness
of power in the production and re-production of international identity” (2007, 92).
Secondly, and most importantly for this thesis, discourse analysis is suitable for
tracing processes of meaning construction against backgrounds of possibility, and
situating these processes in the knowledge creation practices we use to understand them.
Discourse analysis in this understanding raises how-possible questions instead of
traditional why-questions (as discussed in the introduction), examining the production of
meaning and its attachment and the possibilities it enables and disables. As noted by
Roxanne Doty, how-possible questions “examine how meanings are produced and
attached to various social subjects/objects, thus constituting particular interpretive
dispositions which create certain possibilities and preclude others” (Doty 1993, 298).
11

11
Laffey and Weldes question the stark contrast Doty draws here, as they see how-possible and meaning
production questions as “integral to causal analysis rather than in competition with it” (1997, 205).
101
While recognizing that policy makers are political, bureaucratic actors, discourse analysis
often focuses on how certain policy prescriptions win out over other possibilities
(Majeski and Sylvan, 1999). For example, Alker and Sylvan (1994) show how the dove-
like arguments of Undersecretary of State George Ball failed to carry the day in debates
over US escalation of the Vietnam War. Alker and Sylvan note that Ball’s discourse
constructed the US involvement as tragic, and the Vietnamese enemy as autonomous,
interpretations that did not jell with the prevailing worldview that took the Vietnamese as
inferior objects without full power (16-17). Conceptualizing representations in terms of
“knowledge” not merely “perceptions,” discourse analysis has a built-in “reflexivity,” in
the sense that analysis of actors’ discursive strategies can prompt reflection on analysts’
discursive strategies. Further, if John R. Hall (1999) is correct that both social scientific
and humanistic inquiry share and draw upon many of the same discourses (of values,
narratives, social theory, narrative and explanation) across both methodological and
disciplinary lines, then conceptualizing inquiry in discursive terms offers us grounds for
comparison and hybridity between approaches too often seen as mutually exclusive.
A third strength of discourse analysis is the attention it pays to the shared, or
intersubjective, meanings available in public sources, and the role these meanings play in
constituting subjects. Post-structural perspectives, for example, assume the relative
autonomy of language practices, and thus resist taking “individual or collective subjects
as the loci of meaning” thus raising the issue of “a kind of power that constitutes subjects,
modes of subjectivity, and ‘reality’” (Doty 1993, 302). Emphasizing the linguistic
construction of reality, many analysts posit a ‘productive’ conception of language where

102
language is “a set of signs which are part of a system for generating subjects, objects, and
worlds” thus dampening the “need for recourse to the interiority of a conscious, meaning-
giving subject, either in terms of psychological and cognitive characteristics of
individuals or shared mental templates of social collectivities” (Doty 1993, 302). Such
strategies of interiority are controversial within discourse theory. Of course, “private”
discursive material or data (such as can be obtained through memoirs or interviews, for
example) can be immensely valuable to triangulate publicly made claims. However, the
objection from a discourse analytic view (shared by scholars with broadly different
concerns) is that true “motives” are difficult to discern in politics, or as Krebs and
Jackson (2007) argue, a focus on actors’ true motives is methodologically untenable.
Fierke (2001) criticizes mainstream constructivists such as Emmanuel Adler who
emphasize “instrumental agency,” and rely on a kind of verstehen approach, which,
though it starts with importance of cultural norms, aims mostly to “get inside heads” and
“understand the intentions or motives of individual actors.” According to Fierke, taking
this type of verstehen approach
may make sense in a murder investigation, but how often are we really looking
for ‘individual’ motives at the international level that do not have some kind of
intersubjective expression? The rationale for deploying missiles or an
interventionary force is necessarily argued and justified in an intersubjective
space, whether that be a bureaucratic forum, an alliance, or to public opinion.
Possibilities and power are intersubjectively constituted and made meaningful
through language. (Fierke 2001,117)

A position that takes language and intersubjectivity seriously can be taken as a
corrective to the work of mainstream constructivists whose analysis, according to Fierke,
is overly agentic “so far as ideas are understood to be instrumentally employed by
individual actors, with insufficient attention to how these actors are constrained by a
103
social and historical context of interaction” and has little to say about the “role of
language in constituting practices” (Fierke 2001, 121). Attention to language and
intersubjectivity does not preclude discourse analysis from complementarity with
cognitive approaches or having a cognitive component, but any such approach must
account for socially-shared meanings. The main point is that discourse analysis gives us
tools with which to analyze publically available statements—constitutive, justificatory,
strategic, etc.—irrespective of the availability or relevance of “private” data for particular
subjects of interest. I shall discuss strategies of exteriority and interiority and their
possible complementarities in a later section.
Finally, through its emphasis on practice and recognition of intertextuality,
discourse analysis applied to IR broadens the concept of “foreign policy” in the ways
suggested by David Campbell as discussed in the previous chapter. By nesting the actions
of official decision makers in interconnected discourses—of policy bureaucracies, of
think-tanks, media, and even the general public—we can recognize that foreign policy
can be found in official and unofficial sources and sites in society. That is, “what foreign
policy is need not be limited to the actual making of specific decisions nor the analysis of
temporally and spatially bounded ‘events’” (Doty 1993, 303). Further, to be received as
meaningful when it is presented to the public, foreign policy discourses—statements,
declarations, speeches—have to “make sense.” They must “fit into the general system of
representation in a society”, and jibe with what reality is popularly understood to entail
(Doty 1993, 303). This recognition offers a start for theories that want to go beyond elite
discourses to encompass societal factors at play in security practices, yet does not restrict
analysis to one “level” or another. Without entirely ruling out causal approaches to
104
political analysis, we can still note that constitutive discourse analysis is not dependent on
the analytic apparatus discussed in debates about the “levels of analysis problem” in IR.
Since there is no need to place causal variables in an organizing scheme, the practice of
positing ‘levels,’ as well as the recourse to the artificial separation of domestic from
international is unnecessary; assumptions like these make it more difficult to trace the
circulation of meanings within and outside political community.
Assumptions of discourse analysis
As noted by the contributors to Brady and Collier (2004), social inquiry is about
tradeoffs—no one method or methodology can exhaust the realm of interpretive or social
scientific accounts. Discourse analysis, like any methodology, theory, technique or
method, cuts up the empirical material of international politics according to certain
assumptions. Discourse analysis as an approach to IR has tended to cluster around a set of
theoretical commitments. Jennifer Milliken (1999a) identifies three of these
commitments: a belief in the socially constructed nature of meaning, the idea that
discourse is (re)productive of the things defined in that discourse, and a belief in the
instability and historical contingency of discourse and thus, the need for constant work to
produce and reproduce the reality discourses describe (229-230). Thus, discourse
analysis is generally a critical activity that problematizes the shared political order: “at a
minimum, it implies that the order is historical and recreated, rather than natural; at a
maximum, it implies that order may come to be seen as an apology for narrowing or
105
inverting the imaginary community which as a social/cultural background constitutes the
order” (Alker and Sylvan 1994,15).
12

Situating the work of DA in the cannon of current social scientific practice, Ted
Hopf argues that the response of DA to “insuperable” problems of research design, such
as omitted variable bias and unit homogeneity, should simply be the making of more
modest knowledge claims, claims strong in terms of particular historical and temporal
domains, but weaker in terms of generalizability (2004, 31). For Hopf, the assumption of
intertextuality, and the fact that discourse is part of an “open social system” limits
scholars’ ability to control for “omitted variable bias.” As Hopf notes, meanings and
categories are not necessarily constant across historical time periods; they are “social
kinds” and not “natural kinds.” Because of the historical contingency of the “variables”
in question and the impossibility of fixing meaning with any certainty, the “unit
homogeneity” assumption will remain a problem from the perspective of mainstream
social science (Hopf 2004, 31; King et al.1994; for extended discussion of “social kinds”
see Wendt 1999, ch.2.).
13

12
David Howarth (2000) offers a useful comparison of the assumptions behind discourse analysis and other
social scientific approaches.

13
On the seeking of homogenous units (making observations identical in respects pertinent to research for
analytic purposes) across time and space in causal analysis, King, Keohane, and Verba write: “Since a
causal effect can only be estimated instead of known, we should not be surprised that the unit homogeneity
assumption is generally untestable. But it is important that the nature of the assumption is made explicit…
[in the case of measuring the impact of incumbency,] Across what range of units do we expect our
assumption of a uniform incumbency effect to hold?” (1994, 93). While much clarification of the
relationship between DA and more accepted approaches is needed, the modesty of Hopf’s approach seems
reasonable. For a tentative exploration of selection bias and reliability issues in discourse analysis, see
Milliken (1999a). There may be more room for generalizibility in the discourse analysis approach than
Hopf allows, however. Work on the structure of war-origins narratives suggests that we may yet be able to
identify regularities in conventionalized accounts of international relations and open up for discussion the
integration of interpretive and causal analysis (Suganami 1997; c.f. Alker 1996, esp. chapters 8, on
falsifiablilty and Propp’s work on fairy tales, and 9).

106
The notion of discourse as an “open social system” presents a theoretical
challenge for discourse theory. Some discourse theorists argue that the issue of
distinguishing one discourse from another, delimiting discursive systems in the course of
analysis, is not an intractable problem, but instead points to fundamental strengths of
discourse analysis. That a discourse, though offering a relatively coherent constitution of
meaning, can never entirely achieve closure is indicative of a space for agents to choose
among political possibilities. For discourse analysts, the contestation we see in the ‘gaps’
between discourses and the conflict over the fixing of meanings, is the realm of politics,
and thus discourse analysis comes to be about the boundary (and threat) producing
practices of political communities (Sayyid and Zac 1998, 259-261). As Sayyid and Zac
put it, the “limits of discourse must be found within the discourse itself; that is, by
uncovering how, in a particular discourse, the boundaries are drawn” (Sayyid and Zac,
1998: 259). An account of boundary-drawing practices and the delineation of self and
other is key to a constitutive approach to the institution of Sino-American relations.
Materiality, Context, Practice
Discourse analysis is often accused of “textualism,” the reduction of politics to
written or spoken texts, or denigrated as a form of unreflective “idealism.” It is
understandable that this area attracts controversy, since claims about “material reality”
are a powerful political resource in every day life and in the contest to secure scholarly
resources and status. What is the relation of the “textual” to the “extra-textual,” the
“linguistic” and the “extra-linguistic” and how do discourse analysts treat both realms?
As noted, there are strong grounds for an approach that analytically privileges the
linguistic component of international political life. Linguists Scollon and Scollon (2001),
107
while they do not urge neglecting extra-linguistic aspects of communication, defend a
focus on language to the detriment of “non-verbal” communication. Claims of the
dominance role of non-verbal communication in the conveyance of meaning, they argue,
are drastically overstated if not entirely without supporting evidence. When people
engage in regular communication within their discourse communities, i.e., with other
familiar people like themselves, this results in much being “taken for granted” by both
sides. However, Scollon and Scollon argue that in the realm of intercultural
communication, a premium is placed on verbal forms and “we become hyper-conscious
of communication itself” (14-5).
Many reject discourse analysis because they view its scope as being confined to
the analysis of texts. Critics of Paul Ricouer or Derrida, who suggest viewing the “world
as a text” or hyperbolically assert “there is nothing outside the text”, mistrust the
“linguistic fundamentalism” that they see underlying these theories and resent what they
view as an attack on “external reality.” Some discourse analysts rebut these criticisms
by clarifying that it is the “external” not the “reality” part of the equation they seek to
problematize. Laclau and Mouffe offer one of the best-known defenses against
accusations of textualism when they argue that “what is denied is not that such objects
exist externally to thought, but the rather different assertion that they could constitute
themselves as objects outside any discursive condition of emergence” (1985, 107-8).
Indeed, the problem of material “reality” has long been a concern of discourse
analysis across widely disparate perspectives. While obscure on this point and tending
towards favoring the autonomy of discourse, Michel Foucault was concerned to show
how practice helped constitute discourse and recognized the importance of “non-
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discursive” factors (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983, 77). In the theory of speech acts, while
truth and falsity are besides the point when considering performatives, “a successful
performative is necessarily in harmony with a non-verbal condition”(Petrey 1990, 11).
System Functional Linguistics, led by the work of M.A.K. Halliday, aimed at “building
grammars of meaning which can then be used to track the materialization of social
activity in discourse” (Martin and Wodak 2003, 3). Norman Fairclough’s theory of
discourse held that discussions of texts must always refer to text production and
interpretation; a “discursive practice” was made up of the production, distribution, and
consumption of a text (Fairclough 1992, 73-79).
In IR, post-structuralism is thought to be the vanguard of the anti-materialist
discourse movement. Yet, Michael Shapiro argues that attention to language “does not
imply that an approach emphasizing textuality reduces social phenomena to specific
instances of linguistic representation” (1989, 13). “Materialist” arguments against
discourse analysis, in their efforts to find a realm “immune to discursive articulation”
misunderstand the more moderate claims of discourse analysis regarding language.
Discourse theorists do not hold that “things are created simply by uttering words” nor do
they deny the existence of reality, but instead claim that language constructs what reality
means; it mediates our access to reality and plays an important role in the definitions and
redefinitions of that social reality (Sayyid and Zac 1998, 254-5). The relation between
linguistic and non-linguistic elements of discursive practice is thus a key thematic in the
study of discourse.
Following debates in political theory, discourse scholars offer a far more subtle
view than the mere “rejection of reality,” one that opens up important debates about
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agency and the status of the subject. Among the arguments that should be taken
seriously, Judith Butler has offered a compelling critique of the criticism that focus on
discourse does not give us the ability to understand the effects of material reality, such as
material violence. She argues that “the options for theory are not exhausted by
presuming materiality, on the one hand, and negating materiality, on the other” (Butler
1992, 17). For Butler, the “loss of epistemological uncertainty” suffered in a politically-
minded problematization of foundational assumptions “does not entail political nihilism”
(17). Following Nietzsche, Butler attacks the assumption that agency requires a subject
existing prior to discourse, because “this kind of reasoning falsely presumes (a) agency
can only be established through recourse to a prediscursive ‘I,’ even if that ‘I’ is found in
the midst of a discursive convergence, and (b) that to be constituted by discourse is to be
determined by discourse, where determination forecloses the possibility of agency”
(Butler 1999, 182).
In lieu of reducing all linguistic acts to material bases, discourse theory
foregrounds the role of context and practice. Context minimally includes the discourse
participants’ identities, roles and locations, the participants’ taken-for- granted
knowledge and background information, and the place of a discursive exchange in a
sequence of turns (Levinson 1983, x). Discourse is always ‘contextualized,’ where the
talk and text are in a complex reflexive and circular relationship with historical and
political context (Chilton and Schaffner 2002b, 16). An emphasis on practice, in this
case the practice of foreign policy, highlights the production of discourse in such
contexts, and represents one way discourse theory theorizes the relationship between
discourse and social action. Doty puts it this way:
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What foreign policy makers are doing in any particular situation goes beyond
merely making choices among various policy options. They are also performing
according to a social script which is itself part of a larger social order. By virtue
of this performance they are involved in a ritual reproduction (or repudiation) of
that social order. Foreign Policy thus becomes a practice that produces a social
order as well as one through which individual and collective subjects themselves
are produced and reproduced. (Doty 1993, 301)

What kind of evidence does discourse analysis utilize?
Discourse analysis works across multiple sites or “levels” of analysis, but it also
brings new forms of evidence of security practices to bear on security theory. It is
common to recognize that security is a multi-sited phenomenon. For example,
securitization scholars, though they analytically segment their analysis of security into
discrete spheres, argue that any analysis of securitizing speech acts must extend beyond
the traditional military-political spheres into societal ones. As Paul Chilton writes, when
considering cognitive structures and their linguistic evidence, it is important to consider
their polysemic qualities, for instance in the systematic interrelation of the word security
across contexts (Chilton 1996, 58).
What is assumed is some form of continuity between specialized security
discourses, other discourses of the culture, and the language of the culture itself.
The justification for this lies in the fact that specialized discourses have to be
constructed over time, and that the process of construction in all probability
involves some metaphorical transfers from one realm of understanding to another.
If this were not the case, then specialized discourses would be divorced from their
surrounding culture. Moreover, in the case of security discourses, communicative
continuity with other policy milieux and with the public is essential” (Chilton
1996, 58-9).

For Lene Hansen, the methodological demands of post-structuralist discourse
analysis spur an interest in non-traditional sources of evidence. Foreign policy texts are
socially situated; they appropriate and revise history to become authoritative (Hansen
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2006, 55). The key concept in this regard is intertextuality, the referential, mosaic,
interpenetrating quality of textual materials and the meaning they produce, which is taken
up in more detail in the next section. The implications of intertextuality for Hansen
suggest a methodological approach that situates the statements and speeches that make up
official foreign policy within a textual network that extends over multiple media and
genres.
Thus, to achieve a move from the reliance on “perceptions” to the study of
knowledge, it is important to attend to genres of policy-making, journalism and
academia, and literary non-fiction and attend to the importance of different modes of
authority as they are connected to knowledge. The authority of journalists and academics
is based on the production of knowledge where politicians are authorized on the basis of
their knowledge claims, responsibility and exercise of power. As Hansen and others have
argued, it is reasonable, then, to extend one’s analysis of foreign policy and identity
discourse beyond official foreign policy (that of states, policy elites, military, and
international institutions) to wider foreign policy debates (including parliamentary
debates, speeches, statements and reporting of political opposition discourses, the media,
corporate institutions) and even to popular culture (film, fiction, travel writing, art, other
media) and marginal political discourses (social movements and academic discourses).
14

14
Noting also that new events will undoubtedly be shaped by the internet and other advanced technology
communications, Hansen urges the future development of discourse analysis along a path that would
investigate travel writing and foreign policy, the integration of visual forms of representation, and a deeper
consideration of popular culture.
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II. Tools of discourse analysis: mechanisms and modes

Conceived variously as properties of communication, meta-codes, and ontological
conditions of social life, the tools presented below have been subject to broad use and
multiple interpretations. Both are mechanisms in the sense of “habitual manner of acting
to achieve an end” but modes are distinguished somewhat by the fact that they have more
distinct linguistic instantiations. Narratives and metaphors are discursive modes or
processes seemingly found in most cultures and in many different historical situations. It
is possible that they are universal features of human discourse, and I treat them as akin to
“data.” This is something of a departure from more critical approaches to discourse, that
argue against valorizing a ‘will to universality’ or a quest for theories and concepts that
are durable across historical and cultural and linguistic circumstances. These tools have
been used across disciplines, methodologies and fields, and interestingly, the tools have
been embraced to varying degrees by scholars from both realist and anti-realist camps.
Intertextuality
Intertextuality, which foregrounds the allusive relationships between texts in
general, and the manner in which one discourse refers to and builds upon another
discourse in particular, is one of the key assumptions of discourse analysis. All discourse
“draws upon familiar formats and texts, previously-used styles and ways of acting, and
familiar plots” (Johnstone 2002, 165). Building on Bakhtin’s “dialogism” (which paid
attention to the multi-voiced nature of texts), Julia Kristeva (1986) introduced the term
intertextuality as it is now used now by linguists, political theorists and some IR theorists.
The concept of intertextuality provides a way to trace the impact of one historical
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discourse on another. In Norman Fairclough’s reading, Kristeva argued that to use the
concept of intertextuality was to imply “the insertion of history (society) into a text and
of this text into history” (Kristeva 1986, 39, cited by Fairclough 1992,102). Fairclough
unpacks this statement, stressing the historicity of texts. For Fairclough, Kristeva is
explaining both the way in which “text absorbs and is built out of” the textual artifacts of
history, and the ways that “text responds to, reaccentuates, and reworks past texts, and in
doing so helps to make history” (102). A form of intertextuality, recontextualization,
“the process by which a dominant text assimilates for some strategic purpose, elements of
another genre” speaks to the nature of the relationship between two texts; this
assimilation could be the appropriation of a politician’s phrase into casual conversation or
the use of “the epic genre in a party political broadcast” (Chilton and Schaffner 2002b,
17). Some post-structuralists take intertextuality as a larger, orienting theme. Following
Barthes, Der Derian for example, defines an ‘intertext’ as “a multidimensional space in
which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (1992, 27). This
understanding enables analysis that connects high politics of diplomacy to the low
politics of popular culture. As noted above by Lene Hansen and others, intertextuality is
the key to understanding the approach discourse theory takes to evidence.
Juxtapositioning
Following Foucaultian discourse analysis, particularly his discussion of the
separation of ‘true’ discourse from ‘false’ discourse (Foucault 1972), discourse analysts
deploy juxtapositional method in order to throw the political contestation into relief. As
Samuel Delany has noted, in order to see clearly the structures of a given discourse, it is
useful to “suffuse one discourse with a systematically different discourse and watch the
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places where strains and tensions result” (Delany 1994, 268). The point of a
juxtapositional method then, is not to establish the true or right story but to “render
ambiguous predominant interpretations of state practices and to demonstrate the
inherently political nature of political discourses” (Milliken 1999a, 243).
Juxtapositioning is a good first step in discourse analysis, as it throws competing
discourses into relief, providing a view of the terrain under study.
Representations and partial fixity
Most discourse analysts focus in one way or another on representations and other
attempts to fix meaning through discourse. “Representations” refer to the production of
knowledge and “truth” about a given discursive object. A particularly lucid example of a
post-structuralist approach to “representations” is Roxanne Doty (1996b). In her study of
North-South relations, especially Northern constructions of the meaning of the South,
Doty is particularly interested in the circumstances under which Western qualities are
called into question, becoming floating signifiers “signifiers whose meanings have not
been fixed by virtue of being articulated into a particular dominant discursive formation”
(8). Assuming the “inherently open-ended and incomplete” (6) character of discourse
and the impossibility of ultimately fixing meaning, Doty argues that representational
practices that can establish textual nodes or nodal points, dominant signifiers or
“privileged discursive points that fix meaning and establish positions that make
predication possible” (10). Doty conceptualizes this paradox by discussing the “dual
nature” of discourse (45): what we get is a kind of temporary stabilized meaning, partial
fixity or temporary closure that allows us to make sense (of an object, situation, agent,
etc.) in an overlapping, discontinuous and unstable system of multiple discourses. Doty
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cites Derrida’s concept of difference, which is meant to get at this duality; there can be no
“ultimate closure” (because meaning is constantly deferred) but at the same time, there is
a process of differentiation that is provisionally fixed by nodal points. To be clear,
representations in this sense are not understood in terms of political representation (for
instance a domestic community authorizing a government to act on its behalf), but instead
in terms of symbolic representation (Weber 1995, 6-7). According Doty and other
discourse analysts, the “partial fixity within a discourse enables one to make sense of
things, enables one to ‘know’ and to act upon what one ‘knows’” (1996, 6).
Discursive modes
Discursive modes are social practices that help give political life coherence and
meaning and are thus key to understanding boundary production processes involved in
threat politics. Narratives assemble events into meaningful sequences, providing social
life with a temporal dimension, and aiding processes of identity (self-continuity) and
historical memory. Narratives are also one way meanings emergent at one historical
juncture can survive into later periods. Metaphors, as meaningful practices of inter-
domain experience transfer, help us manage reality by suppressing and highlighting
certain of its features. Narratives and metaphors are pervasive features of discursive
knowledge production, and as such constitute scholarly discourse and its objects.
Whether or not they are universal meta-codes or not, each plays a vital role in the
interdisciplinary study of discourse. Here I treat narratives, leaving metaphors for the
next chapter.

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Narrative
Narratives, according to John Hall, can be defined broadly as “meaningful
stories” that make sense of otherwise disparate events” (Hall 1999, 81). A form of
discourse, narrative allows us to make particular stories meaningful and relevant in our
everyday lives (94). To be “narrated” means to present events “revealed as possessing a
structure, an order of meaning, that they do not possess as mere sequence” (White 1987,
5). Narrative articulates relationships between characters or agents and their
environments or structures, and imputes sets of cause and effect relations, goals, and
morals on social life (on mythical narratives, see Dorsey and Harlow, 2003). The human
ability to share a narrative plays a large role in identity formation on the individual, social
and political levels. Hayden White argues that the “value attached to narrativity in the
representation of real events arises out of a desire to have real events display the
coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be
imaginary” and thus “the notion that sequences of real events possess the formal
attributes of the stories we tell about imaginary events could only have its origin in
wishes, daydreams, reveries” (White 1987, 24).
However, despite narrative’s apparently vital role in the social world, modern
science has been marked by the “progressive demotion of the narrative mode of
representation” which came to be seen as “an index of a failure at once methodological
and theoretical” (White 1987, 26).
15
Similarly, Margaret Somers has shown how narrative
has traditionally served as the “epistemological other” of social science: “Variously
formulated in binary terms as idiographic versus nomothetic, particularistic versus

15
But see two recent attempts to incorporate narrative into political science, Patterson and Monroe (1998)
and Buthe (2002).
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generalizable, or description versus theory, the contrast between the ‘mere narrative’
approach of historians and the more rigorous methodologies of the social sciences has
effectively cordoned off narrative from legitimate social-science epistemology” (Somers
1994, 613).
But we can immediately recognize that knowledge production is seemingly
impossible without narrative, or as Hall puts it, “criticizing narrative is easier than
purging it from inquiry” (Hall 1999, 73-4). Because we make use of narrative both in the
“lifeworld” and in the practices of sociohistorical inquiry (Hall 1999), narrative analysis
holds the promise of a more reflexive scholarship.
16
As Somers notes, there has been a
shift in the understanding of narrative. It is no longer solely seen as representational, as a
form “imposed by historians on the chaos of lived experience”, but recognized for its
ontological properties in arguments that hold that “social life is itself storied and that
narrative is an ontological condition of social life” (Somers 1994, 613-14; c.f. Tilly,
2002).
17
The new approach holds that narratives
guide action; that people construct identities (however multiple and changing) by
locating themselves or being located within a repertoire of emplotted stories; that
“experience” is constituted through narratives; that people make sense of what has
happened and is happening to them by attempting to assemble or in some way to
integrate these happenings within one or more narratives; and that people are

16
Even “quantitative” methodology is not easily transmitted without narrative; otherwise, how to rationally
explain the appendage of the story of the “prisoner’s dilemma” (PD) to so many “games” and two-by-two
matrices? But if we recognize the PD is part of a “political writing tradition of comparing rulers to
criminals” (Hurwitz 1989, 114) we can also recognize a perhaps surprising metaphorical construction,
“state decision-maker as criminal,” lurking underneath this scholarly apparatus.
17
Work in Artificial Intelligence contributes along similar lines. Shank and Abelson (1977) argue that
language and memory are closely related and that memory is organized in episodic fashion. They support
an “episodic” view of the process of memory, memory organized by personal experiences, episodes or
events that a person associates with the object, as opposed to “semantic” memory organized by abstract
categories which hierarchically link words like “canary” to “bird,” “bird” to “animal” and so on (17-18). In
order to economically process episodes such as routine situations (visits to restaurants), we categorize them
as standard episodes or “scripts” which are “predetermined, stereotyped sequence[s] of actions that defines
a well-known situation” (41). Narratives or stories then make use of these scripts to fill in missing, implicit
but necessary details and information (41).
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guided to act in certain ways, and not others, on the basis of the projections,
expectations, and memories derived from a multiplicity but ultimately limited
repertoire of available social, public, and cultural narratives. (Somers 1994, 614)

Under this understanding, a revived study of narrative has much to contribute to
discourse analysis. Hayden White’s important critique of modern historiography is one
of the best- known articulations of narrative theory. By way of summary, at the core of
White’s insights into narrative processes are provocative questions worth quoting at
length:
Does the world really present itself to perception in the form of well-made stories,
with central subjects, proper beginnings, middles, and ends, and a coherence that
permits us to see “the end” in the every beginning? Or does it present itself more
in the forms that the annals and chronicle suggest, either as mere sequence
without beginning or end or as sequences of beginnings that only terminate and
never conclude? And does the world, even the social world, ever really come to
use as already narrativized, already “speaking itself” from beyond the horizon of
our capacity to make scientific sense of it? Or is the fiction of such a world,
capable of speaking itself and of displaying itself as a form of a story, necessary
for the establishment of that moral authority without which the notion of
specifically social reality would be unthinkable? If it were only a matter of
realism in representation, one could make a pretty good case for both the annals
and chronicle forms as paradigms of ways that reality offers itself to perception.
(White 1987, 24-25)

David Carr (2006) points out that Hayden White’s view of the artificiality of narrative is
contested by theories that view narrative as an intrinsic quality of human experience. Carr
instead argues for a “continuity theory” which maintains that “Far from being merely the
literary form of either fictional or historical writing, narrative is found at the level of
human events themselves”; in other words, “narrative structures are found at the root of
our temporal and practical experience” (124). Even taking into account the differences
between the “artificial” position and the “continuity theory” of narrative, we are left with
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both a vision of the ubiquity of narrative, and a need for a way to distinguish between
narrative types.
As Margaret Somers (1994) has recognized, it is important to distinguish between
narratives constructed in the “real world” (“lifeworld”) that gird actors’ understandings,
and those constituted to understand, explain, or otherwise give an account of events in the
discipline of academic IR (“conceptual”), though they may well be intertwined. The
ultimate goal served by this recognition is a more reflexive social science. As Alker puts
it, the “stories social scientists tell about their ‘subjects,’ and the arguments they are
intermingled with, should be critically compared by the scientist with the discoverable
accounts of the ‘subjects’ themselves” (1996, 305).
18

The understanding I use here emphasizes the way that narrative transforms natural
time into human time (Carr 2006, 124). That is, following Paul Ricouer’s insight that
“time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode” (cited
in Carr 2006, 124), we can begin to better specify the roles narrative plays in threat
politics: making time meaningful, transmitting historical roles, narrating identity,
supplying self-continuity and in the process ordering international reality. As
Polkinghorne (1988) argues, it is through narrative that agents give meaning to the
experience of temporality (11). Narrative organizes and places events in meaningful
wholes: “thereby attributing significance to individual actions and events according to
their effect on the whole” (18).

18
Of course, the acceptance of narrativity and recognition of competing discourses does not necessarily
entail that any representation is as good as another. As Suganami writes, “While there is nothing in the
objective world that tells us to represent it in any particular way, there is still room for intersubjective
agreement as to the relative merits of one type of (normatively embedded) depiction compared to another”
(1999, 380).
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Narrative in political science and IR
Cecilia Lynch’s historical, agentic approach to narrative “draws attention to the
ways in which scholars privilege certain actors and contextualize them to make sense of
their stories” (Klotz and Lynch 2007,45). Taking an explicitly interpretivist approach,
Lynch (1999) builds an alternative to the dominant “mythological” narratives provided
by structural realist inter-war accounts that explain the start of World War II by blaming
appeasement and isolationist policies on peace movements, despite excluding these
movements from having an explanatory role by fiat. Instead, Lynch’s narrative recovers
the constitutive contributions of the social movements whose norm entrepreneurship
contributed to the construction of the United Nations. With approaches like this, the aim
is to “highlight the agency of particular individuals or groups by telling a story with a plot
and main characters” (Klotz and Lynch 2007, 45). Reflecting their particular concerns,
Klotz and Lynch recommend a strategy whereby the analyst establishes a particular
narrative problematic, then figures out whether and how to tell a better story using
societal voices as a check on elite voices (48-49). Further, they foreground the
contestable nature of narrative analysis, since “narratives are interpretations, rather than
‘correct’ stories based on objective facts, their coherence and completeness are often
challenged” (50). Narrative analysis, from this perspective, is directed at the critique of
established or dominant narratives and the (analytical) restoration of agency to
subjugated narratives and their agents.
19

19
In addition to Lynch (1999), narratives are featured prominently in several recent contributions to IR
scholarship; see Shapiro (1997), Hall (2003, and Bially Mattern (2005) for various approaches to using
narrative as an analytic concept.

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For example, the “rise of China” has a prominent place in Chinese academic
discourse about IR and has particular narrative characteristics. Prominent Chinese
scholar Yan Xuetong's (2001) article is exemplary of articles claiming to present the
Chinese perspective on China’s rise. Yan narrativizes the rise in the following manner:
Not long after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of China attracted
international attention. After the Cold War, it was the foreign media, which first
labeled China as 'a potential superpower'. Chinese leaders and citizens gradually
developed the belief that China would indeed become a superpower in the visible
future…The rise of China is granted by nature. (2001,33)

While it stresses external recognition, this narrative has no place for American influence
on China’s path, for instance FDR's installation of (Nationalist) China on the UN
Security Council and its bestowal of the trappings of great power incommensurate with
China’s status at the time (as I detail in chapter five). It focuses instead on an
international consensus that China will successfully reclaim its status, completing its
transition to an important international role. Next, Yan itemizes the events that are taken
to demonstrate American containment or “constrainment” of China's rise:
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States became the only
superpower in the world. Meanwhile, the United States dramatically changed its
China policy from one of cooperation to one of prevention, under the name of
'engagement'. After the Cold War, the United States undermined China's effort to
host the Olympic Games, blocked the Chinese ship Yinhehao in international
waters, condemned China's human rights record at the UN Human Rights
Conference in consecutive years, increased arms sales to Taiwan, sent aircraft
carriers to the Taiwan Strait in order to confront maneuvers of the People's
Liberation Army, disagreed on China's entry into the World Trade Organization,
and bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. (Yan 2001, 36)

The merits of China's benevolent, non-interventionist, Confucian discourse for
international relations are also a familiar component of Chinese writings on IR. The rise
of China is said to have philosophic roots in Chinese culture, while its economic rise will
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prompt a corresponding rise in the popularity of Chinese culture, an idea also found in
discussions of Chinese “soft power.” Again, Yan offers a typical account:
The rise of China will make the world more civilized. Chinese written civilization
is more than 4,000 years old, and its culture is so rich that it is admired by people
all over the world. The core of Confucianism is 'benevolence' [ren]. This concept
encourages Chinese rulers to adopt benevolent governance [wangdao] rather than
hegemonic governance [badao]. In terms of foreign relations, Chinese strategists
aspire to 'associate with benevolent gentlemen and befriend good neighbors'
[qinren shanlin]. In the last two centuries, Western countries took the leading role
in world affairs. The strength and advance of Western countries created a political
culture that emphasized power rather than morality, which has had a worldwide
impact. As China rises, its economic achievement will make its political culture
popular throughout the world. The Chinese concept of 'benevolence' will
influence international norms and make international society more civilized…
Chinese philosophy stresses 'don't do onto others what you don't want others to do
onto you' [jisuo buyu, wushi yuren]. (37-8)

Placing great significance on the power of cultural influence for ordering the
international system, Yan’s narrative allows for Western leadership, but contrasts the
benevolent Chinese approach to Western “hegemonism,” predicting Chinese ascension
will lead to greater international balance. In time, Chinese influence will counteract the
norms of power politics established by Western leadership.

III. Chinese sources and discourse analysis

Yan Xuetong's narrative of the rise of China raises important issues. At first
glance, the discourse of the Chinese state (particularly in the Communist era), and by
extension US-China relations is a hard case for any discourse analysis that foregrounds
meaningful practices and their intercultural exchange. From a perspective that takes
language as transparent representation of reality, we would not expect heavily state
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controlled discourses of international relations to yield satisfactory insights into meaning
making processes. Indeed, state control over media and public discourse opens questions
about the value of an analysis of discourse filled with stock phrases found in formalized
official policy products as well as academic texts, and shrill propagandistic tracts for the
analysis of meaning. Chinese sources, like all discourses, are in some sense
compromised by their context. As Sayer writes, “individuals cannot develop knowledge
independently of a society in which they can learn to think and act” (Sayer 1984, 14).
Critical discourse analysts emphasize the context within which discourse is
produced. The politicized meanings given even familiar terms can be baffling to Western
interpreters. For example, in earlier eras of Chinese policy discourse, to speak of the
criteria of being “scientific” is not to evaluate a statement on its truthfulness or
verifiability, but to use the criteria of political utility, if it evokes the proper thought-
processes, emotions, and behavior in its target audience (Schoenhals 1992, 9-10). More
recently, Lee Chin-Chuan, Professor at City University of Hong Kong (2007) articulates
the characteristic style of Chinese media and state experts, whose “essay style tends to be
declarative rather than expository or argumentative. Speaking as ‘authoritative narrators,’
they do not listen to various voices, much less to refute counter-arguments. Assertions are
often unsupported by evidence or logic. (24)
Scholars have also noted the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP)
ambivalence about open debates, strict observance of taboos, and adherence to the
practice of repeating formalized phrases. One result is that some Chinese political
analysts rarely “refer to, let alone criticize, other authors’ views in their writings”
(Pillsbury 2005, xix). Lucian Pye (1981) found the Chinese political rhetoric of the past,
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which he characterized as “Aesopian language,” overly symbolic, cryptically coded and
exaggerated, to be partially driven by factional politics. In one memorable passage, Pye
explained that, in Mao era discourse, “the need for exaggeration stems in part from the
troublesome fact that realistic statements would fail to provide a satisfactory test of
political loyalties, since people might agree with such statements merely out of common
sense” (10).
Exaggerated, repetitive styles of expression do not mean that Chinese discourse is
bereft of power implications or is not susceptible to the systematic analysis of meaning.
It also does not imply that the crafting of political language within China is not a primary
concern of the CCP. Along these lines, Schoenhals (1992) demonstrates that the
accuracy of propaganda was of paramount concern for a party that took propagating truth
to the masses very seriously. Schoenhals argues that the formalized language seen in
Chinese political discourse is best seen as a form of power. Schoenhals traces the
importance of formalization in Chinese political discourse from the premodern Confucian
concern with rectification of names (“the Prince is never casual in his choice of words”)
to one of the basic building blocks of Mao Zedong thought and leadership, a concern with
“minute details of semantics” as he expressed in 1963: “one single [correct] formulation,
and the whole nation will flourish; one single [incorrect] formulation, and the whole
nation will decline” (Schoenhals 1992, 3). Any tampering with approved formulations
(tifa) was taken as revisionist action against socialism, and speakers needed to pay
constant attention to which tifa were ascendant to guard against risking “accusations of
heterodoxy” (14).
125
Historically, control over formulations tends to centralize power at the top of the
CCP hierarchy, where a few leaders “are able to manipulate rather than be manipulated
by formulations” having their favored formulations be designated as “appropriate” (22),
their political privileges and fortunes tied to the fate of formulations. As Schoenhals
notes, leaders such as Lin Biao and Hu Yaobang (“Practice is the sole criterion of truth”)
achieved the powerful position of having their formulations inducted into the official
language of the CCP. This position is always tenuous, as in the case of Hua Guofeng,
for a time Mao’s chosen successor, who was forced to admit that his “two whatevers”
formulation, intended to blunt criticism of his benefactor had not been “very well thought
out” and that “it seems as if it would have been better not to mention the ‘two
whatevers’” (23).
Schoenhals argues that, while with respect to content, taking into account all
forums, Chinese discourse may be no more restricted than in the US or former USSR.
However, with respect to form, it is much more restrictive. Thus, the CCP is able to
achieve “far more with far less by manipulating the form rather than the content of the
discourse” with the result that “only by replicating or mimicking the formal qualities of
the discourse of the state can critics of the state make their voices heard” (20-21). The
explosion of global communications exemplified by the internet, since the time of
Schoenhals’ writing, has garnered both much attention from Chinese state censors and
much optimism from Western China-watchers, providing new opportunities for outside
and new forms of resistance to state control. The point remains that even ritualized,
symbolic communication is still worth analyzing because of what it tells us about
particular regimes of truth and the symbolic capital actors have available.
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Several studies of the Chinese political discourse of different periods have shown
the benefits of such analysis, highlighting the importance of narrative and metaphor for
understanding China security practices as they relate to US-China relations. Against
standard objectivist models of history, Prasenjit Duara (1996) turns our attention to the
way narrative forms of history are appropriated by the nation as a subject in history;
under modernity those peoples without history can make no claims nor claim any rights.
The “Century of Humiliation” narrative is one key to understanding how Chinese
thinkers and policy-makers have narrated China as an historical actor. Wu Xinbo argues
that, while the CCP’s preeminent goal since founding has been the recovery of great
power status for China, Chinese security thinking was characterized in the CCP’s first
decades by a sense of vulnerability emanating from the “century of humiliation,” relative
material (economic and technological) weakness and adverse balance of power
positioning, and external military threats from the US and USSR (Wu 1998, 115). The
century of national humiliation (bai nian guo chi) narrative is integral to the Chinese
identity; it is a major means by which the Chinese state has narrated the national self, and
navigated the national story through modernity. Humiliation—told through the story of
China’s fall from its previous central position in the world after suffering European
incursions in the mid-19
th
century until its rise under the revolutionary guidance of the
CCP –has played a key role in the development of Chinese nationalism as it has in
Chinese foreign policy discourse (Callahan 2004). For Beijing, foreign policy events are
coded as foreign aggression and fit into the humiliation narrative and given emotional
and moral resonance. For instance, the 2001 EP-3 incident, for China, counted for “much
more than simple violation of Chinese sovereignty: It was seen as a moral problem,
127
another in a long line of humiliations that China has suffered since the Opium War”
(Callahan 2004, 202).
Anne-Marie Brady’s (2003) study of the waishi system, though not presented as
discourse analysis, shows how texts, institutions and practices dedicated to CCP foreigner
management orchestrated a portion of many Chinese interactions with outsiders, from the
hospitality shown to foreign visitors to the cultivation of diplomatic “friends.” Brady
identifies several discursive strategies, operating both in the domestic and international
realms, which aim at the regulation and management of foreigners. For example, Mao
articulated the new regimes’ security strategy and placed it within the existing
international social arrangements through his use of metaphor. The PRC would “Lean to
One Side” (yibian dao), toward the Soviet side of the international structure. As Brady
describes, Mao also used several metaphors of domestication to establish the CCP’s
waishi system of diplomacy. The Maoist slogan of “cleaning the house before inviting
the guests” (ba fangwu dasao ganjing zai qing ke) during the period where the CCP
resolved the problem of foreigners’ presence in China 1949-1952, was followed in the
early years of CCP rule by “setting up a new kitchen” (ling qi luzao) which referred to
the establishment of a CCP foreign affairs apparatus distinct from Nationalist China’s
(2003, 88). The waishi construction of the foreigner was based on the fear of internal
enemies and the perceived need to control foreign influence. In 1971, the slogan “make
the foreign serve China” (yang wei Zhong yong) served to signal the coming diplomatic
shift and justify rapprochement (180), but also map the limits of the role foreigners are
legitimately allowed to play in CCP discourse.
128
“Friendship” as seen in Mao’s key expression of CCP ideology, “Who are our
enemies? Who are our friends?” seems fairly straightforward and non-metaphorical. Yet
placing state-to-state relations in the framework of “friendship” (youyi) is indeed a
metaphorical move that highlights some aspects of social relations and not others. While,
according to Brady, the significance of “friendship” within Chinese political circles was
political, strategic and instrumental, not referring to “food or intimate personal relations”
and “reflects a deep mistrust of, and discomfort with, the outside world” (2003, 7), the
use of this term has particular effect on the foreign audiences it is aimed at.
As seen in these examples, even highly formalized language seeped in policy
propaganda has discursive effects. Even when they reflect rapidly changing policies or
serve as political code, official statements have to “make sense” to their audiences, and
thus tell us important things about the boundaries of a particular discursive economy or
the “terrain of competition among kinds of statements, in which the major discursive
actor, the official strategic discourse, struggles not only to vindicate [state]…policy but
also to contain representations of that policy” (Shapiro 1992, 107). Using the metaphor
of economy can not only foreground the competitive quality of discourse, but more
generally, helps us understand certain features of discourse that can highlight the process
of exchange among a set of symbolic culturally produced resources
So while Chinese discourse must be treated with these limitations in mind, for
discourse analysis the divining of what actors “really think” matters less than does the
identification of the discursive economies they draw upon, contribute to, and draw power
from. Further, a constitutive analysis emphasizes that meaning is an achievement.
Applied to encounters between actors in international relations, this means that meaning
129
is achieved cross-culturally. A focus on discourse goes beyond any given text to show
how language and practice combine to make meanings that have real consequences.

IV. Designing concrete discourse analytic research

This section reviews guidelines that have been proposed for the study of discourse
in IR. Discourse analysis presents particular set of methodological challenges for applied
research, and are still in the process of being developed; in contrast to neo-positivism, no
consensus “cookbook” of recipes exists for the successful execution of a discourse
perspective within IR or political science. Here I consider how to apply the methodology
of discourse analysis through a discussion of several recent contributions.
Post-structural writers, following Derrida’s belief that methodological reflection
is compromised by positivist associations, have tended to mistrust methodological
imperatives and systematizing moves as unwarranted attempts at disciplining scholarship
in ways that promote the negative consequences of the discourse of modernity. They
have rightly noted that attention to methodological issues risks devolving into what James
Der Derian has termed “methodologism” (1989: 7).
20
Jennifer Milliken has responded
that method can make the task of discourse research easier to carry out, show the order of
discourse, and demonstrate the different ways discourses construct social reality, while
facilitating scholarly exchanges (1999a, 235). Milliken also defends the value of more

20
Der Derian has argued that, though critical IR theorizing is not “a process of scientific verification”, it
should not be seen as “intrinsically antiscientific” but should be thought of as avoiding the
“methodologism” pervasive in contemporary IR because it “takes a self-conscious step away from the
dominant formalistic and ahistorical trends in international theory that ‘naturally select’ hermetic, rational
models over hermeneutic, philosophical investigations” (1989, 7).
130
formal models of discourse analysis (Milliken 1999a; see also Duffy, Frederking, and
Tucker 1998; Shapiro, Bonham, and Heradstveit, 1988).
Discourse scholarship in IR has moved towards systematization and increased
methodological awareness as scholars start to reflect upon lessons from their research.
For example, Lene Hansen, interpreting methodology as “a way of communicating
choices and strategies that all writing…must make” takes on the assumption that post-
structuralist discourse analysis is not amenable to systematization with a call to arms:
“it’s time for poststructuralism to take methodology back” (2006, xix). In Hansen’s
view, post-structural work faces the same questions, of analytic focus, research design,
and reliable data selection as any academic project (2), but its analytic goals of linking
identity and foreign policy demand particular methodological strategies. A
“methodology of reading” addressing the identification of identities and an articulation of
the relationships among them must be combined with a “methodology of textual
selection,” criteria for choosing which texts and how many should be analyzed. Because
foreign policy and identity are linked performatively, and thus co-constitutive of one
another, Hansen argues that causal research designs that take ideas as variables are
inappropriate. If Hansen sets herself apart from main currents of post-structuralism in
championing a self-consciously systematic and structured approach, she sets herself apart
from positivists and positivist-leaning constructivists with her denial of causality. Like
other discourse analysts, Hansen argues that positivist traditions, due to the absence of
extra-discursive reality and the impossibility of finding discrete variables, are not useful
for discourse analysis. For Hansen, arguments that take material baselines as the proper
criteria to evaluate discourse analysis are similarly mistaken; material factors and socially
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constituted facts do not produce foreign policy by themselves, but are part of a process
whereby what is objectively at stake and what counts as feasible policy options are
determined (Hansen 2006, 214-5).
In terms of the concrete organization of the research process, there are few
methodological primers directed specifically at IR questions about representations and
identity. Iver Neumann (2008) presents a representation-focused guide to research that
resonates with the current project. Neumann’s discourse analysis focuses on mapping
continuities and discontinuities among socially produced, mediated representations,
which “are put forward time and time again [to] become a set of statements and practices
through which certain language becomes institutionalized and ‘normalized’ over time”
(61). Representations comprise the discourse and Neumann offers three broad steps for
analysis: the delimitation of the range and time frame of sources, the identification of
representations under study with reference to “censorship and other practices that shape
the availability of text”, and finally, the assessment of the fluidity, stability and historical
depth of a discourse, as well as the robustness of its representations as a way to explore
change (63-75). In the delimitation phase, the analyst can orient herself through use of
“anchor points” or “monuments,” including widely cited or recognized, canonical texts
possibly found in secondary sources (67). As for the scope of materials, Neumann notes
that “because it conveys meaning in a particular context” any sign may be construed as a
‘text’ for purposes of discourse analysis (63).
Hansen (2006) offers a more developed fine-grained set of guidelines for research
that overlap with Neumann’s. The first step for Hansen’s identity-centered discourse
analysis is to identify, through close reading, a small number of structuring basic
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discourses of identity. Hansen eschews analysis organized by genres (i.e. political,
media, cinematic) in favor of a concept of discourse organized around the substantive
identity and policy articulations she believes are best equipped for the analysis of
political discourse (65). Basic discourses add structure to the policy space but cannot be
confused with policies themselves; they are meant to be seen as ideal-typical articulations
of contrasting identities and policies available in a given political discursive landscape
and may not be the most commonly argued or be identical with government claims (52).
They are formed by culling from a corpus of texts a set of key representations—partisan
identities, historical analogies, metaphors—which are then augmented with a conceptual
history, preferably in a genealogical mode, of the present conceptualization in relation to
competing representations.
Foreign policy texts are socially situated; they appropriate and revise history to
achieve authority and they do so through intertextuality. The implications of
intertextuality for Hansen suggest an approach which situates the statements and
speeches that make up official foreign policy within a textual network that extends over
multiple media and genres. Hansen sums up this methodological two-step thusly:
“Analytically, the basic discourses of a debate structure the political and substantial
positions and divisions, whereas intertextual models identify the locations of different
discourses in relations to official discourse and the other sites of opinion and debate”
(65).
Hansen argues that, faced with an inexhaustible “reality,” and thus an analysis
that is always partial, discourse analytic research design consists of several choices
among four dimensions. These are choices of intertextual model (how far outside the
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official discourse one should range), of the number of “selves” (single or multiple states,
nations, or foreign policy subjects, for example), of the temporal perspective (particular
moment or the historical development of a case), and of number and kinds of events (one
event or many) (13, 73). Addressing the first dimension, Hansen offers several
“intertextual models” each broadening the scope of analysis. These range from official
foreign policy (states, policy elites, military, international institutions), to the wider
foreign policy debate, defined as oppositional (in which Hansen includes the
parliamentary debates, speeches, statements and reporting of political opposition
discourses, the media, corporate institutions), to popular culture (film, fiction, travel
writing, art, other media) and marginal political discourses (social movements and
academics). The second dimension is the identification of selves to be studied, be it a
single self, the responses of different selves to the same event, or the co-construction of a
“discursive encounter” between designated Self and Other (76). Third, Hansen weighs
the advantages of various temporal perspectives: a single moment, multiple comparative
moments, or historical development of identities across longer periods. Fourth, the
number and kinds of events must be selected: multiple events can be related by issue but
take place at different times to highlight reproductive transformations of identity, or the
construction of multiple issues within one period can be studied to build understanding of
Selves across issue areas (80).
Next, Hansen’s discussion of the selection of historical and contemporary texts
arguing that primary texts such as governmental statements and speeches should be
augmented by conceptual histories and genealogies. Contemporary material should
present clear articulations of policy and identity, be widely circulated, read and paid
134
attention to (to ensure their central role in dominant discourses), as well as being invested
with formal political authority. Ole Waever (2002) offers additional, pragmatic insight
into the problem of gathering evidence. For Waever, a bias towards the texts produced
by high-profile political figures is forgivable when the analyst is trying to reconstruct the
pertinent debates and must place a premium on clear representations of the debate’s key
positions. Waever argues that (in the case of studying European integration discourse) it
would be “very unlikely that we would miss a dominant position if we examine the
parliamentary debates, discussion programmes on TV, the programmes distributed by
parties and social movements, the debate in leading newspapers and books on European
integration” that are relevant to the debate (2002, 42).
Concerning the difficult decision as to when to stop collecting discursive
evidence, Waever urges discourse analysts to adopt what he calls the “opposite burden of
evidence” position, the claim that “on the basis of my reading of the debate in country X,
the discursive structure looks like this…If you show me a text I have not included, it
should be possible for me to read this text through the structure I have constructed. If
not, my reading of the debate needs to be revised” (42). Iver Neumann agrees, arguing
that, “regardless of the extent of the discourse, relatively few texts will constitute the
main points of reference” (2008, 70). Cecilia Lynch offers similar methodological
criteria to Waever from an interpretivist perspective, arguing that better accounts must be
thought of as revisable in the face of particular empirical material (1999, 10). The rule of
thumb is thus that discourse analysis collects and processes evidence until the “structure”
of discourse becomes clear, for instance the boundaries of self and other in a particular
135
situation, with the understanding that the revisable accounts produced can always be
challenged.
In brief, taking its cue from these scholars, my analysis proceeds as follows. The
time frame of analysis is to some extent “naturally” delimited in that I proceed from an
era I judge, based on secondary sources, to be formative for the Sino-American
relationship, the late 19
th
century “Open Door” era, and take as the focus of in-depth case
studies the post Cold War period. Other periodizations are possible, but this one makes
the most sense in terms of my analytic focus on times of unsettled identity and the
feasibility of doing the research. In Hansen’s terms, the intertextual model I employ
ranges outside of official discourses as appropriate. The number of “selves” is delimited
to the US and China, although I recognize the impact of other significant others (such as
the USSR and Japan) when relevant. The temporal perspective I adopt is correspondingly
broad in relation to the historical development of Sino-American relations. Finally, the
case studies treat more than one number or one kind of events both because I am
interested in how enmity and amity are produced across differently placed Sino American
encounters, how these productions are informed by historical legacies (narratives) and
because the thesis is a plausibility probe and as such, the method benefits from exposure
to a wider range of applications.
The first step in each case is the identification of the dominant discourses and the
representations that make them up. In order to account for the historical context, I also
generally first identify “antecedent” discourses when relevant to the particular
constitution of self-Other boundary I am interested in exploring. Antecedent discourses
may be proximate in that they construct events within recent memory in particular ways,
136
or they may be representations in the historical narrative mode by which selves attempt to
maintain consistency. The next task is to articulate, as accurately as possible the range of
possibilities faced by agents in this discourse. This may involve a focus on the political
work it takes to maintain even dominant widely held representations, and almost always
results in the recognition of “competing discourses” whether they are sublimated or
backed by other powerful discourses. Competing discourses construct reality with
differing emphasis, or they could be identified with other significant players, but they
always represent alternatives through which agents could exercise agency. Finally a
reflexive effort to situate or place the knowledgable practices under study is integral to
discourse analysis, and this can draw upon intertextual understandings as well (Neumann
2008, 73).
Generally, the recognition of intertextuality leads me to a broad conception of
discursive evidence fundamental to the foreign policy representations I am interested in.
Thus the selection of material utilized here mixes the “primary texts” of foreign policy—
official statements, treaties, speeches etc.— as well as academic constructions of
reality—journal articles and expert opinions—and less traditional sources such as media
accounts, representations in popular culture, and opinions. Discourses of threat and
foreign policy do not obey tidy genre distinctions, and neither can our analysis. How-
possible questions guide case analysis. In some cases, I reached the conclusion that
narrative or metaphor modes dominated the discursive practices I study, in others they
combined to produce meaningful events.

137
Conclusion

The approach taken here builds upon the lessons of earlier research, but offers an
analytic scaffolding which clearly presents a set of tools drawn from multiple discourse
traditions. It also maintains that discourse analysis can serve as a site of interdisciplinary
interest and cooperation. Discourse analysis brings together insights from literary theory,
history, linguistics, cognitive science, and area-studies to form a powerful package for
understanding international politics. Scholars influenced by the natural sciences and
humanities recognize the importance of many of the tools presented in this chapter.
Discourse theory is practical in that it allows us the ability to exploit abundant textual and
discursive materials with tools specially designed for their understanding. It is well-suited
for investigations of the connections between threat, culture, language and order, and
helps us understand the relationship of history to these phenomena. It gives us traction
on the question of threat from an integrated cultural-cognitive perspective that does not
confine itself to methodological individualism, does not restrict its focus to individual
decision makers, yet attends to the materiality of discourse.
The tools employed in this thesis, such as narrative and metaphor theory, work for
intensive (micro-level, linguistically based approaches such as pragmatics or conversation
analysis) and extensive (more macro-level, historical, or Foucaultian) styles of discourse
analysis. Empirically, the objects of analysis are wide-spread if not universal, across
cultural and temporal divides and are thus well-suited for research in international
relations. Methodologically, there is significant agreement across epistemological and
ontological divides on the existence of the modes of discourse I have identified in this
138
chapter, if not their specifications. This allows discourse analysis to function, in my
view, like an “intertext,” or a multi-voiced site of contestation, not among adherents to
one or another worldview or vision of science, or within hermetically sealed research
communities, but among a diversity of the widest possible range of scholars and research
interests. Metaphors and narratives have the advantage of treating important interpretive
questions of interest to those in critical, post-positivist traditions, but also having an
intuitive appeal across academic boundaries, potentially making results easier to
communicate to lay-audiences and more mainstream scholars alike.
139
Chapter 4: Opening the Door: The Role of Metaphor in the Discourses
of Early Sino-American Relations

Introduction

This chapter is concerned with the role metaphors play in the discursive
construction of the Sino-American relationship, and the role metaphors play in Othering
processes in international relations more generally. It speaks to the core concern of the
thesis, how international collective subjects, such as states, are constituted by encounters
with other subjects, both by the representations they “bring to the table” and by the
processes through which they interact. A good place to begin articulating an account of
US-China relations that takes this under consideration is the intersection of the United
States’ quasi-imperialist trade diplomacy and immigration policy in the late 19
th
and early
20
th
centuries.
The substantive focus of this chapter is two interactions that I argue share the
same conceptual basis. The first is the US Exclusion Act of 1882 (subsequently renewed
and reformulated), the culmination of political efforts at legislating the Chinese
population in the US out of existence, despite treaty agreements with China to the
contrary. Second, and the chapter’s main focus, is John Hay’s Open Door diplomatic
notes of 1899 and 1900, the result of a 100 year effort at securing US free trade rights,
and later preserving China’s territorial and administrative integrity, that came to guide
US foreign policy towards China. The Open Door functioned as an “interpretive
straightjacket,” giving US policy makers what would prove to be a durable basis upon
140
which to conceptualize China and geopolitical space more broadly.
1
At a very general
level, the Open Door provided Americans with a way to reason about China. Much in the
way “slippery slope” metaphors affect our reasoning about politics, the Open Door
metaphor “constitutes politics as a world of physical objects, where predictable laws of
physics rule instead of complex and unpredictable social factors, human inconsistencies
and political contingencies” (Stenvoll 2008, 28). My argument is that once ensconced in
America’s nascent foreign policy discourse, the “Open Door” and the metaphor system
behind it guided US China policy well into the mid-20
th
century, while also playing a
pivotal role in the constitution of the Chinese state as a member of the international
community.
Even a casual look at the Open Door policy and its impact reveals several big
themes in US China relations and in each state’s domestic political discourses: Unfair and
unequal treaties are at the core of the Chinese “Century of Humiliation” narrative, while
the construction of the US as “imperialist” has pride of place in Mao Zedong’s early
foreign policy discourse and the imagined stakes of the Korean War. This period also saw
the issue of overseas Chinese gradually become significant for the Chinese state. In the
first section of this chapter I offer a brief account of a constitutive, discursive,
metaphorical perspective. In the second part, I argue that a provisionally dialectical
approach that takes both social constructivist and cognitive perspectives into account
would be beneficial for the continuing development of metaphor theory. Third, I
illustrate these benefits with a case from the early history of the international relations of

1
Here, I follow Nathanson’s (1988) seminal analysis of the Soviet threat in American politics, which
identified George Kennan’s 1946 “Long Telegram” cable from Moscow as an “interpretive straightjacket”
(455) that disciplined Soviet behavioral ambiguity, thus defining the Russians by shifting the framing of the
problem of Russia from a negotiation to a threat-based script.
141
US-China. Finally, in the concluding section I address some further implications of such
an approach.

I. A Constitutive, Discursive, Metaphorical Approach

In international relations, policy-makers rely on language both to formulate
decisions and legitimate these to publics. A discourse perspective means taking language
seriously as a medium that actively constructs the reality it describes.
2
Discourse recruits
linguistic and material resources and gives them meaning. Following this, a metaphorical
view rejects the idea that metaphors are mere rhetorical ornaments, but instead recognizes
their pervasive role in discourse and the discursive construction of reality. In Dvora
Yanow’s poetic phrase, metaphors are understood not merely as figures of speech, but as
“figures of knowing” (2008, 235). Interdisciplinary metaphor theory argues that humans
use metaphors to understand one abstract or new experience in terms of another. In other
words, we understand and reason by mapping (finding systematic correspondences)
between two conceptual domains (any coherent organization of experience, such as
knowledge about journeys), one a source domain and the other a target domain
(Kovecses 2002). The study of discourse then, focuses on the discursive and linguistic
mediation of the real world. The study of political metaphor allows us to say more about
those mediating processes.

2
Recall from the last chapter that, as a knowledge constituting, meaning-making practice consisting of
linguistic and non-linguistic components, discourse is both “an ordering of terms, meanings, and practices
that forms the background presuppositions and taken-for-granted understandings that enable people’s
actions and interpretations” (Milliken 1999, 92) and “a social practice through which thoughts and beliefs
are themselves constituted” (Weldes and Saco 1996, 371).
142
Thus, the discourse analysis presented here focuses on the metaphorical
constitution of China in American political discourse. Unlike traditional analysis of
Sino-American relations, rather than taking China and the United States relations as the
interactions of pre-given entities whose identities are unaffected by their interactions, I
perform a constitutive analysis. This approach allows us to foreground the extent to
which state identities are bound up in the manner they represent each other, but also
directs us towards careful analysis of domestic and international contexts of metaphorical
discourse, if we assume that, to be received as meaningful when they are presented to the
public, foreign policy discourses—statements, declarations, speeches—have to “make
sense.” They must “fit into the general system of representation in a society”, and jibe
with what reality is popularly understood to entail (Doty 1993, 303).
I argue that Sino-American interactions are metaphorical in important ways
because metaphor constitutes reality by allowing us to see things in terms of other things.
Because it takes language seriously, and international reality as dependent to a great
extent on processes of linguistic construction, metaphor analysis is a way to understand
key constitutive moments in Sino-American relations, and provides insights into how US
policy-makers defined China and the Chinese, in the process defining itself in the age of
imperialism.

II. Metaphors as discourse analysis: two approaches?

Though the subfield of metaphor analysis has yet to be explicitly structured
around any “great debates,” it could be viewed profitably as largely structured around a
143
debate between two analytical perspectives: metaphorical social constructivism that
makes critical “social constructivist” and cultural arguments, and the arguments of
evolutionary, micro-materialist “cognitivists.” To simplify somewhat, the former focus
on developing the insight that “by seeing something as a certain kind of thing, some
arguments and actions become available to us whereas other arguments and actions
become unavailable” (Ringmar 2008, 58). In other words, metaphors matter because they
hide some features of reality and foreground others. The latter explore the consequences
of “embodied realism” for the analysis of political discourse, the idea that our adopted
brains/bodies let us accommodate to and survive our surroundings (Lakoff and Johnson
1999). They have an experientialist epistemology, which holds that the meanings
encoded in language are a result of the human conceptual system, and thus human reason
and knowledge processes are anchored in physical interaction with the environment.
Both approaches offer advantages over psychological approaches to IR; instead of
aggregating individually held beliefs, metaphor theory explains common knowledge or
intersubjective understandings by addressing how beliefs got into the heads of actors and
how they might come to be shared.
3

Social constructivist approaches to metaphor
A large portion of metaphor research in IR adopts positions that draw upon some
of the insights of Lakoff, Johnson and other cognitivists, but does not follow cognitive
linguistics through its development of “embodied realism” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999),

3
As Paul Chilton writes, “Examining metaphor used in contemporary discourse gives an indication of the
positive cognitive content of the categories and beliefs a group or individual may construct in response to
ambiguous evidence…examining metaphor…makes it possible to go beyond concentrating on individual
psychology. Because language and communication are intrinsic to foreign policy formation, examining the
recurrence of metaphor can indicate how conceptual systems crystallize and spread among individuals and
groups” (Chilton 1996, 124).
144
instead focusing on interpretively-oriented inquiries into meaning making, implicitly and
sometimes explicitly adopting social constructivist positions.
4
These theorists share with
Lakoff’s earlier (and later “public intellectual”) work a dedication to the interpretive
practice of social criticism and a particular interest in the manner in which metaphors
systematically highlight and hide certain characteristics (Lakoff and Johnson 1980;
Lakoff 1991). Metaphor theory allows the critic to identify the metaphors present in
public discourse, including both those taken for granted and instrumentally used by elites
to politically justify certain policies. Moreover, metaphors, imbuing as much the process
of knowledge creation as they do the objects of analysis in the “real world,” have also
been put in the service of a reflexive project that questions the assumptions of political
discourse and academic political science discourse, specifically IR theory, filled as it is
with billiard balls, balancing, bandwagoning and buck-passing, etc. (see Chilton 1996 for
the seminal metaphorical critique of realist IR theory).
In terms of policy discourse, for example, David Mutimer (1997) argues that in
the immediate post-Cold War era, security was reformulated in terms of the metaphor of
proliferation, extending the concept from nuclear weapons to other weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) of chemical, biological, or conventional nature. The result of this
metaphorical understanding was policies that prioritized technology denial, enforced
disarmament, and alliance building as a defense against WMD proliferation (189). But,
far from being an autonomous outward distribution process as this metaphor (adopted
from the biological sciences) suggests, the spread of nuclear and other WMDs was

4
Cienke (2008) addresses and attempts to remedy the more general split between political scientists and
cognitive metaphor theorists through the provision of a methodological apparatus that aids in the
identification and analysis of conceptual metaphors.
145
dependent on the actions of political actors in the West, the historical politics of the Cold
War, and the political interests behind the demand and supply of these weapons. In this
way, the proliferation metaphor obscures the extent to which arms diffusion inherent in
the superpower competition by proxy “created” the proliferation problem in the Middle
East, an area of much current concern for the West (199). Thus, Mutimer argues that by
“highlighting the technological and autonomous aspects of a process of spread” the
proliferation metaphor hides Western agency and responsibility for the “spread” of
nuclear weapons (203).
Applying metaphor analysis to the conceptual apparatus we use to make sense of
world politics, Michael Marks (2001) interrogates the metaphorical underpinnings of the
“prisoner’s dilemma” (PD) a model foundational to game theoretic approaches to IR in
which mistrust among prisoners is taken as analogous to the interactions of states (c.f.
Chilton and Lakoff 1995, 45-48; Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 513-538). An examination
of the purported experiential basis of the PD, according to Marks, shows that a model
based on the lives of prison inmates—an alternative prisoner metaphor—provides a
model superior to the PD game “because it more accurately reflects the lived experiences
of individuals under circumstances of confinement” (Marks 2001, 354). Marks’
investigation of the codes, values, and socially constructed roles of actual inmates
problematizes the PD assumption that prisoners are mechanically, inherently opposed to
cooperation. For Marks, this “reconstructed” metaphor of the prison demonstrates that
“societies are constructed at all levels of politics”, a recognition that makes us view
international relations differently, taking seriously the domestic norms that comprise
international society (367).
146
Scholars from outside IR (without drawing upon cognitive linguistics) have also
shown how metaphors are integral not just to “ideational” phenomena in world politics,
but also to the representation of “material forces,” such as geography. For example,
according to Lucy Jarosz, the metaphorical representation of the continent of Africa as
the “dark continent” in Euroamerican discourse legitimates the status quo and perpetuates
unequal power relations; it “homogenizes and flattens places and people, denies the
actualities and specificities of social and economic processes which transform the
continent, and obscures a nuanced examination of the forces of cultural and economic
imperialism unfolding within Africa in their relation to Europe and America” (Jarosz,
1992,105). In relation to Africa, the metaphor of “darkness” underscored a comparison
to Europe (and challenge to European authority), drew a conceptualization of missionary
activities (dispelling the darkness of non-Christian beliefs), and described Africa’s
opening to the colonizing power of capitalism and scientific assessment (106-107). Jarosz
attributes the persistence of this metaphorical understanding to its “emotional and
dramatic power, its aesthetic appeal for Western audiences,” and “its crystallization of
Africa as Other” (113).
The focus of social constructivist metaphor work has been “critical,” offering the
analytical payoff of a demonstration of how metaphors, made analytically explicit, help
constitute international reality by systematically highlighting some aspects of
international relations while “hiding” others. The scholar-critic can then articulate the
boundaries of the reality these metaphors help to constitute, and potentially propose
different metaphors to organize social and political life in more advantageous ways.
Though the early metaphor work relies on invented, de-contextualized linguistic
147
examples, metaphor analysis has tried to move beyond this stage, towards the tentative
application of the theory to empirical cases. The goal of such research is no less than to
buttress the critical project in IR and political science. It is an “urgent political task to
investigate” the limits of metaphors; we “need to know where the metaphor is ‘stretched’
and where it eventually ‘breaks down’ and ‘dies’” (Ringmar 2008, 67). In this mode,
investigating metaphors is a “precondition for political criticism and for transformative
social change” (67).
Recently, IR theorists assuming constructivist ontologies have attempted to apply
metaphor theory to issues surrounding European Union (EU) enlargement. Taking
metaphor theory as a type of constructivism, Peter Drulák (2006) seeks to understand
international structure in metaphorical terms, stressing the role that MOTION,
CONTAINER and EQUILIBRIUM metaphors play in the discourse of EU integration.
Hülsse (2006) directs attention to the way in which the metaphorical representations of
the EU—as family, organism, home, path’s end point, and house—contribute to
constructions of European identity, an unfamiliar domain. Adopting a “constructivist”
position seems to have hardened the general resistance to cognitive linguistics, and, at
times, IR theorists have studiously avoided engaging the consequences of embodied
realism (explicitly in Hülsse 2006, 404). Human physical interaction with environments
too, constructivists argue, is socially constructed (Stenvoll 2008, 38).
Among IR metaphor theorists, reception of the post-Lakoff and Johnson (1999)
cognitive linguistic, embodied realist project has not been welcoming. Yet opposing
arguments have not been strongly formulated. For instance, while the processes posited
by Lakoff and Johnson may be unconscious, they can hardly be exhaustively described as
148
actors’ “motives” or their “hidden intentions or secret plans” (Hülsse 2006, 404). Mottier
(2008) is an exception to the extent that it engages with the cognitive argument in the
context of social and political analysis, making important points about cultural
situatedness of embodied experience, context, and the need to analyze wider discourses
over just utterances.
5
While recent metaphor work in IR has made valuable contributions
to the extent that it builds the stock of empirical cases and develop lists of metaphors
(Beer and DeLandtsheer 2004), by ignoring or eschewing the role of embodied realism in
metaphor theory, these contributions neither confront the difficulties presented by the
integration of the embodied realist or Darwinian strands of cognitive metaphor theory
into IR, nor are they well-positioned to reap the benefits of such integration.
Cognitive evolutionary approaches to metaphor
In Philosophy in the Flesh, their wide-ranging critique of the legacy of Western
philosophy, Lakoff and Johnson (1999) present the cognitive linguistic (CL) theory of
metaphor, cognitive or conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), as based on three key
findings of second generation cognitive science: the mind is inherently embodied,
thought is mostly unconscious, and abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. From this
follows the claims: that reason is not independent of perception; reason is an
evolutionary, not transcendent feature of the universe; reason is shaped by human bodies,
the neural structures of the brain, and the specifics of everyday functioning in the world.
Key to understanding cognitive metaphor theory is the “entailment,” the
potentially applicable source knowledge latent in any particular metaphorical

5
However, Mottier’s argument is not entirely persuasive; assertions that embodied experience is
“ultimately a product of culture” need to be supported by more than citations to authorities such as Foucault
and Butler (186). In addition, she overestimates the degree to which cognitive approaches, Lakoff and
Johnson particularly, take the world as “given” only to be “cognitively grasped”(189).

149
understanding. For Mark Johnson, entailments “include the perceptions, discriminations,
interests, values, beliefs, practices, and commitments tied up with the metaphorical
understanding” (Johnson 1987, 132). Metaphorical entailments “generate definite
patterns of inference, perception, and action” (136) yet, in any given projection, the full
complement of entailments is not exploited. Metaphorical entailments are thus
underspecified (in the sense that all possible elements of the source conceptual schema
are not developed in the target domain) and thus only contextually realized (Chilton and
Ilyin 1993, 11).
While metaphors enable human reasoning capabilities, they also serve several
other cognitive functions, including structural, ontological, and orientational functions.
They provide structure, for instance, transferring the structure of one source onto
understandings of a target, for instance in TIME IS MOTION (Kovecses 2002, 30). The
ontological function of metaphor allows us to understand abstractions, such as events,
ideas or emotions, as bounded and discrete “entities and substances” (Lakoff and Johnson
1980, 25). For instance, in international relations the abstraction of the nation-state is
often assigned the ontological status of a physical human being in the STATE as
PERSON metaphor. Metaphors also orient our thought and provide coherence, for
example aligning notions of verticality (upward-downward) with positive and negative
values (Kovecses 2002, 30).
Conceptual blending theory (BT), as presented in Gilles Fauconnier and Mark
Turner’s (2002) The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden
Complexities, builds on conceptual metaphor theory, similarly treating metaphor as a
conceptual, not purely linguistic phenomenon, while emphasizing the systematic
150
projection of language, imagery and inferential structure between conceptual domains,
and proposing constraints on these projections. Departing from CMT, blending theory
allows for relationships between more than two pairs of mental representations, does not
define metaphor as strictly directional phenomenon. While CMT stresses entrenched
conceptual relationships, BT focuses on novel, often short-lived conceptualizations.
Scholars see blending theory as remedying some of the limitations of conceptual
metaphor theory, particularly in regards to human creativity (Slingerland 2008, 175).
Blending theory supplements or subsumes metaphor theory by showing “that many
expressions that, at first glance, seem to involve simple source to target domain mappings
in fact involve the blending of two or more spaces into a novel conceptual structure”
(Slingerland 2008, 177) thus accounting for creative, short-term mental constructs where
structure comes from multiple inputs. Fauconnier and Turner’s argument that the
purpose of “blends” is to convert complex, diffuse events to a cognitively manageable
human scale (2002, 322) can be augmented with insights from neuroscience (Damasio
1994) to explain how metaphorical blends recruit emotions (Slingerland et al 2007).
Blending theory has yet to enjoy widespread interdisciplinary adaptation, while as one
particularly researchable type of idealized cognitive model (ICM),
6
metaphor has been
the focus of a growing number of empirical studies of political discourse. With clear
linguistic instantiations, conceptual metaphor is amenable to concrete, discourse analytic
research practices. For this reason, and space limitations, I will focus the discussion on
cognitive metaphor.

6
Lakoff (1987, 68) puts metaphor among three other ICMs (structures by which human knowledge is
organized) he identifies: frame semantics, cognitive grammar, and mental spaces.
151
Lakoff and Johnson (1999) present CMT as a self-conscious rejection of modern
objectivism, Cartesian dualism, and the correspondence theory of truth. Lakoff and
Johnson pitch their argument against the “objectivist” beliefs that there is a world
consisting of objects independent of human understanding, and a god’s eye view of this
world is possible (Johnson 1987). According to Johnson, the objectivist tradition ignores
the body, taking reason as abstract and transcendent and untied to the bodily aspects of
human understanding because the body is understood as introducing extraneous
subjective elements (Johnson 1987, xiv). Cognitive linguists trace this problem back to
Descartes. After Descartes, philosophy took the mind to be disembodied, positing a mind
that was separate from the body and thus the world. In contrast, Lakoff and Johnson’s
theory looks back to the Greek tradition of “direct realism”: Aristotle’s answer to the
question of knowledge (how we can know) was an “ultimate” metaphysical realism
where no divide between epistemology and ontology existed; identity between ideas and
essences of worldly things meant the world could be directly grasped (1999, 94-5).
For Lakoff and Johnson, “embodied” understanding is intersubjectively shared,
across human cultures and languages, due to the relatively standardized manner in which
human organisms operate in a physical and cultural environment. In the light of the
positivist- post-positivist divide in IR theory, embodied realism can be understood as
plotting a course between pure objectivity and pure intersubjectivity; Lakoff and Johnson
argue that “there are no objects-with-descriptions-and categorizations existing in
themselves” but that intersubjectivity, “if it is nothing more than social or communal
agreement, on the other hand, leaves out our contact with the world” (Lakoff and Johnson
1999, 93).
152
Lakoff and Johnson’s embodied realism rejects Cartesian dualism in favor of an
epistemology that is experiential and evolutionary (our adopted brains/bodies let us
accommodate to and survive our surroundings). Like many social constructivists, they
criticize the “correspondence theory of truth” seen in analytic philosophy as introducing a
“chasm” between the world and the symbols used to represent it (98); truth is
understanding dependent. While they are “physicalists,” believing in an ultimate material
basis for (scientific) reality, Lakoff and Johnson take reality to extend beyond physically
existing entities (110). For them, the “real” is “what we need to posit conceptually in
order to be realistic, that is, in order to function successfully to survive, to achieve ends,
and to arrive at workable understandings of the situations we are in” (109).
7
One of the
major disagreements with cultural and social constructivist metaphor theorists is that
evolutionary, cognitive metaphor analysis stresses the limited range of cultural options:
“Time may run horizontally or vertically, but human beings perceive TIME AS SPACE,
not TIME AS TAPIOCA PUDDING.” As Slingerland argues, “The culturally specific
component of a given individual’s worldview would thus seem to be a rather thin and
malleable wafer riding on a deep, massive, and mostly invariant set of cognitive
universals” (Slingerland 2008, 212).

7
Lakoff and Johnson’s confidence is anchored in second generation cognitive science and the support of
what they call “broadly convergent evidence.” They find a consensus for the existence of conceptual
metaphor in several subfields and associated fields of linguistics, including historical linguistics, cognitive
psychology, developmental psychology, gesture analysis, and discourse analysis (Lakoff and Johnson 1999,
81-93). The evidence discussed includes psychological “priming” experiments to test the LOVE IS A
PHYSICAL FORCE metaphor as to whether it was actively being cognitively used, not “dead” or only
taken literally (84). Linguistic research on historical semantic change also found evidence for the presence
of the KNOWING IS SEEING metaphor across a wide historical range of independently developed
occurrences within the Indo-European language group. Though the fact that they ground this consensus
mainly in the results of cognitive science, rather than philosophy, political science, or anthropology is taken
as unproblematic, they maintain that it is “the use of convergent evidence achieved via different methods
that keeps science from being merely an arbitrary narrative” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 467).
153
Within the CL tradition, CMT stresses the process by which embodied minds
must adapt to the physical and cultural environments that humans encounter. Johnson
(1987) introduces two types of imaginative structure at the core of cognitive linguistic
theory: image schemata and metaphorical projections. Image schemata are abstract
structures of experiences such as VERTICALITY (as compared with the metaphorical
projection MORE IS UP). Image-schemata are a “recurring dynamic pattern of our
perceptual interactions and motor programs that gives coherence and structure to our
experience” (1987, xiv-xv). These image-schema metaphors are “skeletal” in that their
“source domains do not map rich knowledge onto the target” (Kovecses 2002, 250).
According to CL theory, these primary schemata become associated with abstract target
domains through experiential correlation resulting in a set of “primary” metaphors, such
as AFFECTION IS WARMTH, CAUSES ARE FORCES, PROGRESS IS FORWARD
MOTION, PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS, and DIFFICULTIES ARE
IMPEDIMENTS. Though the influence of culture on the production of complex
metaphors from these primary metaphors is underspecified, these “primary” metaphors
take cues from “folk beliefs” or shared cultural assumptions to combine into “complex
metaphors” (1999, 352). These complex metaphors are then used to structure reasoning
about an abstract concept, such as in the A PURPOSEFUL LIFE IS A JOURNEY draws
upon primary metaphors PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS and ACTIONS ARE
MOTIONS and commonplace knowledge (cultural models, folk theories, widely
accepted knowledge/beliefs) about the appropriateness of having purposes in life and
acting towards the achievement of those purposes (1999, 52-63).

154
A dialectical approach?
One way to understand the current state of the development of the subfield of IR
metaphor studies might be to characterize it as a dialectical enterprise, an argumentative
structuring of knowledge production that recognizes the validity of competing
approaches’ contributions and the imperfections of any single approach. There are
several ways to imagine such a dialectic.
8
Marks (2003, 17) description of Lakoff’s
approach as a sort of neo-Nietzscheanism is useful in imagining a more productive
relationship between the two sides. Another way to categorize the approaches is raised
by Wendt, who distinguishes between Darwinians and Lamarckians. For Wendt,
Darwinians “are materialists who minimize the role of ideas by arguing that cultural
forms must be adaptive in a genetic sense” while Lamarckians “are idealists who
highlight the importance of ideas by pointing to the variability of cultural forms under
similar material conditions” (1999, 320). Wendt identifies himself as an “ideas almost all
the way down” Lamarckian, and suggests that Lamarckians allow a role for natural

8
My notion of dialectical theorizing builds upon that of Hayward Alker, who was “happy to identify this
[his] position as a “dialectical” or “dialogue-based” approach to knowledge cumulation, as long as
significant degrees of autonomy and respect can be maintained both for those representing different
political/ideological orientations and those emphasizing different knowledge interests. I favor ‘cumulative
controversies,’ not status quo-reproducing pluralism” (Alker 1979, 3). In his discussions of the Frankfurt
School, David Held stresses the dialectical emphasis on the incompleteness of any one approach: “What
distinguishes the dialectical method is its recognition of the insufficiencies and imperfections of ‘finished’
systems of thought. The dialectical method is a critical method for it reveals incompleteness where
completeness is claimed. It embraces that which is in terms of that which is not, and that which is real in
terms of potentialities not yet realized. Through continuous criticism and reconstruction, however, the
partiality of perspectives can be progressively overcome. For Hegel, every ‘point of view’ has a place in
the unfolding of the universal, absolute Idea—the final transcendence of all subject-object differentiation.
The closer our knowledge comes to this limit, the closer it is to truth” (Held 1980, 177-8). This is not to
dismiss the importance of recognizing difference between essentialist readings of metaphor and the anti-
essentialist ontology and antifoundationalist epistemology of post-structuralist styles of discourse analysis.
Nor is it to exclude possible other approaches, for instance, any organization of the subfield should not
exclude rhetorical approaches to metaphor (Beer and De Landtsheer 2004; Howarth and Griggs 2008).
155
selection, favoring a “dual inheritance”
9
model that argues for genetic and cultural co-
evolution, not total cultural reductionism. The recognition of this dialectic seems a good
position to start from, at least provisionally, one from which to take onboard various
theories of metaphor being applied to IR today.
In other words, perhaps the most salient and interesting way to configure the
particularly interdisciplinary subfield of discourse analysis in IR will be a social
constructivist and evolutionary-embodied realist dialectic, with my use of the term
dialectic not intended to mask some ontological privilege or a totalizing belief in progress
aimed at some exclusionary resolution to problems of knowledge, but instead meant to
signal a belief that controversy-oriented approaches to knowledge, as synthetic as they
are logical and empathetic, could usefully structure the subfield. Seen another way,
evolutionary, embodied realist theories of metaphor act as a useful check on the social
constructivism of metaphor theory. Perhaps Paul Chilton has already provided the
guiding statement of a hybrid approach: “Though discourses are historically contingent,
their conceptual base is not entirely arbitrary” (1996, 424).

III. Metaphors and the American constitution of China

In the period leading up to the articulation of the Open Door policy, late Qing-era
China and Post-Civil War America underwent volatile times tinged with reformist
movements, oddly both with roots in Protestantism: the US was struck by three major

9
Perhaps we can provisionally accept the “dual inheritance” model, as promoted by Boyd and Richerson’s
(1985, 2005) adaptationalist account of human behavior as an alternative conceptual meeting place for
culturalist and materialist metaphor theory. See also Ellen Spolsky’s (2002) brilliant reconciliation of
Darwin and Derrida.
156
depressions 1873-1878, 1882-1885, and 1893-1897, while discontent with the Qing
Dynasty Manchu rulers of China was expressed in violent incidents like the Taping
Rebellion (1845-1864) (Riccards 2000, 32). Though the US was sporadically active in
the China trade from the 1780s in pursuit of silks, cotton, porcelain, tea, the European
wars of 1793-1815 afforded the US a neutral position with which to consolidate regular
trade with China (Hunt 1983). The US generally piggybacked on the efforts of the
European powers in the Chinese realm, demanding and receiving the concessions from
China that Britain had gained through warfare before them, as seen in the 1839-1842
Opium Wars and the resulting 1842 Treaty of Nanking. In 1844, the first formal
American mission to China, headed by Caleb Cushing, resulted in the eventual signing of
the Treaty of Wangxia, which inaugurated official Sino-American relations providing the
US with most favored nation status and the same privileges previously won by the British
(19). The US abstained from further French and British efforts in 1857-1858 to open
trade, only in 1858 to agree with China to the Treaty of Tianjin which afforded them the
same trade rights as the Europeans obtained when they forced open ten Chinese treaty
ports by capturing Canton and Tianjin (LaFaber 1989, 100).
American emissaries in China in the mid-19
th
century were from the beginning
tempted to use force in achieving American commercial goals (Hunt 1983). The tenor of
the times was symbolized by American missionary Peter Parker, serving variously as
chargé and minister in 1855 and 1856-7, who urged the seizure of Taiwan in order to
offset potential similar British strategic island grabs, pressure the Chinese, and more
generally demonstrate American power and influence in Asia (21). Significantly, the first
Chinese settled in California in 1848 and, in 1868, the Burlingame treaty negotiated
157
reciprocal privileges for Chinese and American citizens traveling or residing in the other
country.
Paul Chilton (1996) suggests that the role of metaphor and metaphorical
argumentation becomes particularly salient at moments of conceptual crisis, at times
when there exists a demand for a reconceptualization of international relations. By the
time John Hay was sworn in as Secretary of State in 1898 under President McKinley,
China policy needed such guidance. China’s humiliation at the hands of Japan in 1894-5
set off a round of increased interest in China’s territorial dismemberment on the part of
the Great Powers. Then in 1900, the Boxer Rebellion Movement and resulting Western
intervention complicated matters further. At home, at the completion of the
transcontinental railroad in 1869, an anti-Chinese movement had resulted by 1882 in the
first Chinese Exclusion act, signed into law by President Chester Arthur.
McKinley was, according to LaFeber (1989), the first modern American chief
executive; a Civil War veteran who, facing newly mass-distributed, often sensationalized
media, still used new technologies (phone and typewriter) to retain personal control over
foreign policy deployed US troops to China without Congressional approval (183-4).
Under McKinley, “an industrialized America moved to Americanize new parts of the
world” (184). In China as well, the late 19
th
century advent of modern communication
technologies, including the growth of press, telegraph, and readership of novels would
play a role in spreading understandings of the US exclusion acts among the Chinese
population thus playing a role in Chinese reactions (Wang 2001, 39).

158
A social constructivist metaphor approach
Placed in proper context, Hay’s effort to make sense of China through the
articulation of the “Open Door” constructed China against previous metaphor systems,
both inherited from European culture and American self-understandings. One such
system was the idea of “China as Sleeping Giant,” as Napoleon famously referred to it,
which entailed somnolence and stagnation but also latent, if dangerous, promise. This
STATE AS PERSON construction, guided by prejudice and Euro-centrism, was
prevalent among European intellectuals and particularly philosophers of history such as
Hegel and Ranke who used China as “a construct against which to measure and revel in
their own marvelous European progress” (Mackerras 1989, 111). Marx’s development of
‘oriental despotism’ constructed at the same time a Chinese society as victim of
immutable constraints of its physical environment and possessing a market that could
function to bring about European revolution (111). The metaphorical understandings of
China that the West took into the 20
th
century thus supported the idea that, “Western
intervention in China was historically necessary and progressive” (Mackerras 1989, 125).
American’s put their own spin on this: one historian argues that the image of sleeping
China reinforced the Progressive-era view that if awakened, China could quickly become
a progressive success story modeled on the US (Israel 1971, 15).
10

American progressive-era internationalists were up until the Hay notes likely to
see China in terms of a “frontier,” a PATH metaphor that structured American notions of
individualism, destiny and national purpose. As Manifest Destiny exhausted the North

10
Wittfogel’s “hydraulic society” could also be considered a possible competing metaphor system, see
Mackerras (1989, 116-125) and Spence 1998.

159
American continent, Americans turned their eyes towards the new Pacific frontier.
American Protestant missionaries, who between 1870 and 1900 were busy increasing
their missions in China by 500 percent (LaFeber 1989, 205), shared with American
business, political and diplomatic communities a familiar narrative of China’s
romanticized potential. For example, Hay in 1900 understood China as the “key to world
politics for the next five centuries” (LaFeber 1989, 206). Admiral Mahan, though better
known for his strategic theories of sea power, was also convinced that the future hinged
on the development of civilization in China (Israel 1971,7). China, and its government’s
lack of sovereignty, was seen as an opportunity, expressed by Indiana Senator Albert
Beverage in a January 1900 speech to the Senate: “The most populous portion of the
surface of the earth does not control its own markets. This portion of the earth’s surface is
Asia, and especially the Empire of China with its 400,000,000 customers” (12). The
understanding of China as a frontier was certainly linked to “bonanza psychology” that
dominated the American dream regarding China. As Robert Wiebe notes, “Since China
never absorbed as much as 2 percent of the nation’s foreign trade, that enduring dream
testified to the remarkable strength of a bonanza psychology among otherwise shrewd
Americans” (1967, 249).
The Open Door reconfigured previous metaphorical understandings of China in
line with prevailing cultural expectations, the need for markets to deal with economic
surplus, and the management of its sudden status as an Asian power after war with Spain
in 1898 led to an American foothold in the Philippines. As the US developed a foreign
policy for the Asian theater, the Open Door addressed the American demand for
markets—commercial and missionary—while contributing to the construction of a
160
unique American identity. Despite the Open Door policy’s British origins, Hay plainly
saw the original Open Door note of September 6, 1899 as an alternative to the “so-called”
European “Spheres of Influence” model, a metaphor that constructed and spatially
organized China along more explicit imperialist lines. This first note unilaterally called
upon the European powers to “insure to the commerce of the world in China equality of
treatment within said ‘spheres’ for commerce and navigation” (reprinted in US Dept. of
State 1967: 414). Along these lines, the Open Door also reflected the political savvy of
Hays; in its simplicity, it made an emotional appeal to audiences, reassuring them that the
complex political issue of American trade and China policy was a simple matter (Beer
and De Landtsheer 2004, 29).
11
Despite the manner in which the Open Door was
contrasted with more exploitative European approaches to China, the extent to which it
legitimated the status quo and perpetuated unequal power relations should not be ignored.
In response to the anti-foreign violence of the Boxer Rebellion (and using the
5000 US troops McKinley moved into China from Manila as leverage), Hay on July 3,
1900 issued a second Open Door circular, again unilaterally, this time placing more
emphasis on Chinese territorial integrity. Stating that it was US policy to “preserve
Chinese territorial and administrative entity” (US Dept. of State 1967: 417), Hay took
China as an equal sovereign unit, not to be carved up into spheres of interest. That
British and German acquiescence was probably secured by an interest in checking
Russian expansion need not diminish the diplomatic—and discursive—accomplishment
of asserting American rights in the absence of any relatively comparable power base. As

11
Historians seem to disagree whether this was a “remarkable” diplomatic victory (LaFeber 1989, 209) or
merely the result of a temporary willingness on the part of the other powers to put their imperial ambitions
on hold until a more stable situation presented itself (Cohen 2000, 47).
161
articulated in the second note, Hay’s policy recognized China as a domestic “anarchy”
and set the US as the Chinese state’s guarantor.
In a social constructivist view, the metaphor of the Open Door has several
significant features. Metaphors place objects into contexts, often using spatial reasoning
to describe certain relationships constituting them according to relations of power. The
tendency of US policymakers to imagine international order in terms of the American
“backyard” or “neighborhood,” for instance Ronald Reagan’s placing Central America at
(or on) the United States’ “doorstep,” is indicative of a power relationship, one that
implies ownership or in this case, the infantalization of Latin America (Shimko 2004,
212). The Open Door constructed the Chinese state as a domicile or building, and
implicitly appointed the United States as its doorkeeper.
Thus the “Open Door” notes, ostensibly a protection of free trade, hid the
assumption “that the ancient Chinese empire was unable to be its own doorkeeper” (Tyler
Dennett, quoted by Lyman 2000, 712), at a time when the decaying Qing Empire was in
fact desperately trying to do just that. Western privilege and the denial of Chinese
agency was made clear enough by the fact that the audience for Hay’s notes did not
include China. China’s government was not consulted despite having a minister in the
US since 1878. Alternative formulations were not considered.
Viewing the American relationship with China in terms of an Open Door both had
the effect of denying agency to the Chinese government, but it also obscured the difficult
relationship the US had with its domestic Chinese residents. While Hay promulgated the
Open Door policy, the US government dealt with its domestic Chinese “problem”
through recourse to a policy that, on its face, was the complete opposite, calling for the
162
exclusion of various classes of Chinese and thus the closure of the American polity from
dangerous Chinese influence. The effort to prevent Chinese penetration of the homeland
was underwritten by virulent strands of anti-Chinese racism, and supported by a
Congressional and labor campaign based in California and aided by the national labor
movement, and implemented by a Bureau of Immigration controlled by anti-Chinese
administrators, though some argue it was largely the initiative of national politicians who
harnessed anti-Chinese racism and manipulated immigration policy (carrying the Western
states was seen as important for national politics) (Gyory 1998). After passage in 1882,
the Chinese Exclusion laws were modified repeatedly with the intent of improving
enforcement and the result of making the exclusion more onerous: in 1884 to mandate
identification certificates, twice in 1888, once to make explicit that exemptions to the law
were only for designated (i.e., non-laboring) Chinese classes, and again in the form of the
Scott Act in response to continuing concerns about fraudulent re-entry, to prohibit the
return of any Chinese laborer who left the US; the Geary Act of 1892 extended exclusion
for 10 more years requiring the registration of all Chinese resident; the McCreary
Amendments restricted the class of exempt merchants; and the Immigration Act of 1902
extended the Chinese exclusion policy indefinitely (Calvita 2001).
Despite the metaphorical entailments of US policy, China—its government and
people—did respond to the American abuses it perceived, with its own diplomatic
initiatives at governmental levels (including post-Boxer collusion with the US), massive,
government-backed attacks on foreigners, resistance of Chinese in America to Exclusion
policy, as well as the 1905-6 Anti-American boycotts in China which later led the
Theodore Roosevelt administration to take some action on the part of excluded Chinese
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(though Chinese efforts were unable in the end to have much effect on the Exclusion).
Two further points are important to note. As McKee argues, the Exclusion acts should
not be seen solely as a domestic phenomenon; they were up until 1904 based on treaty
arrangements with China (1977, 11). Taking the protests of the Chinese government and
its sympathetic citizens into account, the metaphor systems used by the US government
to constitute Chinese in the domestic realm also must be understood as foreign policy.
Secondly, disastrous US immigration policy reflected the drawing of the boundaries of
American identity as it did the difficulties of prosecuting the exclusion policy, the apex of
which involved the development of new technologies to aid in the visual inspection and
distinction of laborers, who were to be excluded, from Chinese merchants, whose
exemption from exclusion was demanded by both Chinese protests and the preservation
of profitable commercial relations with China. The cruel character of the Exclusion
policy was perhaps most colorfully and alarmingly demonstrated in the “Bertillon
identification system” introduced in 1903, a scientific method imported from France for
identifying criminals by carefully measuring and inspecting their naked bodies.
The Open Door, to the extent that it promoted an anti-imperialist view of US
policy, also obscured identity-laden debates about whether America’s newfound
international status should be actualized through an imperialist framework. In domestic
debates, senators such as Henry Cabot Lodge and Beverage promoted an Anglo-centric,
territorially expansive foreign policy, their case for imperialism bolstered by the
imperative to Christianize the world’s backwards people and the results of the war with
Spain in 1898. Other domestic groups, including Chinese-Americans, economically
sensitive merchants, but also those that opposed the China policy and imperialism on
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moral grounds such as William James, Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, and W.E.B.
DuBois, raised the contradiction between openness and closeness in their critiques of US
policy. Twain put the anti-imperialist position in the form of an ironic question: “Shall
we go on conferring our Civilization upon the peoples that sit in darkness, or shall we
give those poor things a rest?” (Boller 1981, 221).
The Open Door policy then, expressed the United States’ non-imperialist identity,
even as events in the Philippines precipitated by the Spanish American War and
assumption of American control over Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Hawaii would
launch the US into the ranks of imperialist world powers. At the same time, the Open
Door discourse obscured severe forms of closure in the domestic sphere and a markedly
more complex relationship with the Chinese.
A cognitive metaphor approach
The cognitive approach to metaphor in IR has identified several schemas that
seem to underwrite discourse about international relations and academic IR. One such
schema, the CONTAINER, is particularly useful to understanding the co-existing Open
Door and Exclusion policies. From the cognitive perspective, as Mark Johnson writes,
“Our encounter with containment and boundedness is one of the most pervasive features
of our bodily experience” (1987, 21). One salient entailment of metaphors that draw on
CONTAINER schemas is “typically involves protection from, or resistance to, external
forces.” It is thus difficult to avoid CONTAINER metaphors in forming concepts of
identity, community and self-self and self-other relationships.
Applied to IR theory and American foreign policy, Chilton argued persuasively
that in part by its reliance on the CONTAINER schema, George Kennan’s 1946 Long
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Telegram and 1947 “X Article” filled a policy vacuum, disciplining uncertainty about
Soviet behavior, making Soviet expansionism appear natural and self-evident and
ultimately restructuring geopolitical space. Security, understood by reference to
CONTAINER schema which neatly captured the threat of Soviet expansion, was seen to
have an inside and outside (and thus a domestic and external defense component), as well
as a bounded perimeter, unmoored to national territory and movable to wherever national
interests dictated (Chilton 1996, 132). Through its understanding of states as bounded
entities and security as the application of a strong container, Kennan’s metaphorical
understanding of the USSR as CONTAINER provided the overarching concept and logic
that lent the Cold War coherence and the US its foreign policy goal: containment of the
spread of Communism. As Chilton notes, by the end of WW II and the establishment of
the containment doctrine, US discourse already featured “a conjunction of concepts based
simultaneously on affirming the container schema (America was a safely isolated
continent) and on negating it (other societies should open their doors to American trade)”
(133). The Long Telegram text seemed natural, and was convincing, according to
Chilton, because it emanated from familiar, conventionalized metaphorical systems
derived from basic image schemas.
The CONTAINER schema, made up of an interior, boundary and exterior
elements, and with its basis in the bodily experience of body-physical environment
interaction, is what tied together the American Exclusionist immigration and Open Door
imperialist policies and thus the construction of China and the Chinese by lending
coherence to otherwise logically inconsistent US policy. CONTAINER metaphors like
the Open Door entail an enclosed space with the quality of being susceptible to
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penetration such as a building or other edifice. Container metaphors, prevalent in
international relations discourse, also construct domestic space in particular ways. As
Christopher Hart notes, mapping properties of the source domain CONTAINER schema
onto a target domain the NATION is a common discursive strategy used in constructing
debates over immigration. The entailments of viewing nations as akin to containers—
having limited space with borders susceptible to being stretched beyond capacity—helps
justify one immigration policy over another, activating and perhaps exploiting innate
cognitive dispositions in a way that NATION AS CUISINE, and the view that
immigration as a vital ingredient, would not (Hart 2005, 190).
The Open Door’s metaphorical dependence on the CONTAINER schema might
also help explain the resonance and staying power of the policy. Perhaps reflecting the
political savvy of Hay, in the simplicity of the Open Door lay an emotional appeal to
audiences, reassuring them that the complex political issue of American trade and China
policy was a simple matter. By simplifying the situation into an easy-to-grasp and
support policy, the STATE IS A CONTAINER metaphor hid a complex domestic debate
about China and the Chinese just as Americans wrestled with a powerful imperialist urge.
In their separate political containers, issues of imperialism and immigration were not seen
as naturally linked at the level of national discourse. More concretely, the Open Door,
like Chilton’s interpretation of the Long Telegram, gained part of its coherence from
familiar conventionalized metaphors derived from the basic image schema of the
container.
Another insight developed from a cognitive approach pertains to the manner in
which the container metaphor constituted China by entailing its territorial integrity. By
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this logic, the Open Door metaphor’s entailments, besides unconstrained movement also
include a kind of “guarantee” at the conceptual level; it allowed (preferably free) passage,
yet still posited at pivotal points a unified and sovereign Chinese state, one that’s
existence was very much in doubt after the Western reaction to the Boxer Rebellion. By
establishing and supporting the integrity of the Chinese state in diplomatic practice,
United States policy helped reconstitute China as a viable actor in international relations.
The avoidance of territorial dismemberment at the hands of European and Asian powers
had obvious consequences for China’s emergence in the later half of the 20
th
century.
The Open Door was not merely the only rational response the dictates of the brute
materiality of international relations; it metaphorically organized China in a particular
way. It is possible to imagine alternative routes to maintaining free trade in China or
preserving its territorial integrity, ones that recognized Chinese initiatives, built policy to
a greater extent on Chinese agency, or even abandoned the Open Door to adopt full-
fledged “Spheres of Influence” imperialism.
12

Conclusion: Towards a dialectical “middle ground”?

The distinction between social constructivist “cultural” and “cognitive”
approaches is of course, in some sense an artificial separation of two analytical

12
The United States indeed nearly abandoned the Open Door on several occasions. While Hay and
McKinley both briefly considered carving out an American sphere in China, evidence suggests that they
felt constrained, in part by public opinion. In 1900 Hay persuaded McKinley, who was rattled by both
Russian and British threats and a challenging re-election campaign, to stick to the Open Door by appealing
to the background conditions of the Open Door: “The inherent weakness of our position is this: we do not
want to rob China ourselves, and our public opinion will not permit us to interfere, with an army, to prevent
others from robbing her. Besides, we have no army” (LaFeber 1989, 209).
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approaches that in practice are combined in most metaphor analysis projects in IR.
13

Both approaches use language as data, stress a non-ornamental view of metaphor, share
anti-objectivism, and demonstrate that metaphors are ontologically creative. Yet the
distinction, while blurred in the early political work of Lakoff and his collaborators, does
help us understand the state of metaphor theory in IR by helping to clarify what is at
stake in metaphor analysis.
Anthropologists and linguists engaged in political discourse analysis have
criticized the cognitive theory of metaphor for neglecting cultural factors. For example,
Quinn (1991) argues that culture is a missing level in Lakoff and Johnson’s analysis.
Metaphors, Quinn argues, “do not structure understandings de novo. Rather, particular
metaphors are selected by speakers, and are favored by these speakers, just because they
provide satisfying mappings onto already existing cultural understandings” (65). She
surmises that Lakoff and Johnson’s neglect of culture is in part methodological, as they
“pursue a methodology, time-honored in the discipline of linguistics, that relies on
idealized cases, disconnected from the context of actual use in natural discourse” (91),
leading to inattention to contextual usage. Michael Leezenberg (2001) rejects Lakoff and
Johnson’s cognitive semantics as unsatisfying, in part, due to the poorly defined notions
of culture and meaning at the heart of their theory, and the lack of a systematic treatment
of contextual influences on interpretation (138-9). Jorge Zinken (2003) criticizes Lakoff
and Johnson, suggesting a division of labor between the sorts of conceptual metaphors
posited in cognitive linguistics and “intertextual metaphors” that can account for “the

13
More generally, of course, it is important to acknowledge that an interpretive component is inescapable
in both self-consciously interpretive theoretical modes and positivist social scientific inquiry. As critical
realist Andrew Sayer notes, “meaning has to be understood, it cannot be measured or counted, and hence
there is always an interpretive or hermeneutic element in social science” (Sayer 2000, 17).

169
importance of culturally stabilized models in the conscious imagination of abstract social
phenomena” (511).
There is much more work to be done to flesh out this dialectic. Recently the
cognitive linguistics literature has started to take note of the criticisms, moderating or at
least qualifying its claims to universality, and attending to the socio-cultural dimensions
of metaphor use by carving out greater space in the theory for cultural variation.
Kovecses (2005) for instance, explores metaphoric variation, arguing that metaphors are
both potentially universal and culture-specific; variation (and the possible overriding of
embodiment) occurs as a result of discrepant social-cultural experiences and differing
cognitive processes. Moreover, viewed broadly, “embodied realism” seen as part of an
interdisciplinary interest in theories of embodiment, can be taken as an “attempt to break
down the binary opposition between nature and culture that has all too often been
symbolized and reinforced by an association of the body with nature and consciousness
with culture” (Weiss and Haber 1999, xiii).
This is not a call to arms or attempt to sponsor a new ontological clash within IR
theory. The study of metaphor is seen here as one way the “positive knowledge interests”
of scientists who prize prediction, explanation, and control but typically devalue
linguistic evidence can be reconciled with the “hermeneutic interests” of humanistically-
inclined scholars who “search for the roots of human action in terms of verbal action”
(Alker 1996, 57). Indeed, in the context of IR theory, the larger argument is that
“metaphor theory” represents an opportunity for the discovery of an argumentative
common ground between scientists, verificationists, and rationalists on the one hand, and
philosophers, constructivists, and interpretivists on the other. That these two tribes can
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meet in a common conversation would be reason for optimism in late modern IR theory.
By grounding discourse analysis “from below” in cognitive science, and “from above” in
context and practice, it is possible to cultivate a theoretical and political space for these
vital arguments.
14

Seen metaphorically, the American “idea of China” was predicated on the trick of
keeping Chinese out of US container while preserving the ability to penetrate theirs.
Restated over and over again in American diplomatic practice (explicitly reaffirmed, for
example, on the occasion of the Russo-Japanese war in 1905, and in the Root-Takahira
Agreement in 1908), the metaphorical policy institutionalized the conceptual system at its
base and became a durable feature of Sino-American relations. To be sure, subsequent
American foreign policy towards China varied in the strength with which the Open Door
was implemented and defended; some presidents, such as Theodore Roosevelt, de-
emphasized it (Hunt 1983, 206) while others, such as William Taft and Woodrow
Wilson, would return to the policy, though giving it a different emphasis than it had
under McKinley. The key is not to deny the Open Door policy was reinterpreted or de-
emphasized by successive American administrations. As Chilton argues, metaphorical
argumentation is underspecified and can be made discursively explicit in variable ways
(1996, 154). Instead, it is to argue that within the cognitive framework supplied by Hay’s
Open Door policy, US policy makers found a flexible guide to action that, though subject
to reformulation by different actors over time, retained its ostensive coherence.

14
Mark Turner notes that the cognitive emphasis on the universality of basic mental operations of modern
humans across time and culture will seem “unbearably broad” to the typical interpretive social scientist
(Turner 2001, 52). Turner argues, “Cognitive science is at once an interpretive science in search of
meaning and an experimental science weighing linguistic, behavioral, genetic, sensory, and neurobiological
data, making hypotheses, building models, offering explanations, sometimes offering even predictions or
tactics for intervention” (59). Turner, at least, imagines interpretivism and cognitive science in a
relationship of productive tension.
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Chapter 5: Significant Others? The United States and the Evolution of
China’s Great Power Status

Introduction

Avery Goldstein has recently argued that China’s perceived rise to great power
standing in the 1990s is a result of the way “history had established the expectation that
China was a country in some sense deserving a place in the ranks of great powers,” an
expectation which in part stemmed from its imperial past and the inheritance of the
Republic of China’s (ROC) inclusion in Allied plans for Axis defeat (Goldstein 2005, 69-
70). In this chapter I take up the significance of the particular American representation of
China that followed upon its “Open Door” construction, initiated in the closing years of
World War II by US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). This process
temporarily constituted the Nationalist or GMD (Guomindang) ROC as a world power
and constituted US identity as not only world orderer, but also as “China’s champion.”
The relevant cycle of diplomatic events includes China’s signing of the Four Nation
Declaration on General Security at Moscow in October 1943, the ROC regime’s
participation at Cairo in November 1943, and the Teheran Conference in December of
1943. But as I will argue below, these events must be seen in their social context, the
web of understandings about the meaning of China that dominated both the US media
and the minds of American policy makers who argued for China’s inclusion.
China’s position as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council
(UNSC) is in a dialectical relationship with China’s current evolving self-identity and
role as a great and responsible world power. After the founding of People’s Republic,
China’s new leaders had an ambivalent attitude towards the UN, focused as they were on
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resisting the imperialists and gaining the recognition of the Soviet Union. As Odd Arne
Westad has argued, membership in the United Nations “was in and by itself not of great
importance” to the Chinese Communists, yet “many of the CCP’s nonsocialist allies”
were anxious “to see tangible and immediate results at the international level from their
new state” and, since the CCP eschewed “recognition from the imperialist Great Powers,
a seat in the United Nations would be a welcome consolation” (Westad 2003, 309-310).
Today, along with China’s demographic weight as the world’s most populous country, its
territorial bulk, sizable economy, modernizing military with the world’s largest armed
forces and its membership in almost all important global institutions, China’s veto power
(and power to threaten a veto) on the UNSC buttresses China’s claim to world power
standing. China’s UNSC standing and veto “serves as a great-power status symbol as
well as a highly useful and fungible instrument of renewable leverage in the service of
China specific interests” (Kim 1999, 65). For China the benefits of UN status include the
legitimacy it is afforded as a global citizen, the low-cost financial and technical assistance
necessary to boost economic development, and an effective position from which to
contest Taiwanese sovereignty (Kim 1999). While any analysis of the post-WWII “rise
of China” that did not account for its UN position would be incomplete, the historical
record shows that the idea of China as a great power, in the West at least, precedes the
Chinese state’s attainment of a prominent position in the UN. Thus, the twentieth century
integration of the Chinese state into the international institutions of the contemporary
world order is more complex than commonly understood.
From the fall of the Qing through the maturation of Chinese Communist Party
rule, the Chinese state has been represented in the United States in a variety of subject
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positions from a partner amenable to cooperation and worthy of international stakeholder
status, to an enemy, implacably alien and beyond the reach of negotiation. In terms of
Sino-American relations, China’s attainment of great power status under US auspices in
the 1940s is an important episode in cooperative relations between the two states.
Indeed, while taking into account the primacy of Europe in American planning, the
degree to which China (and the idea of China) was integral to the postwar imaginary has
yet to be fully recognized by IR scholars. While the arrangements reached by the allied
powers in the series of conferences and summits in 1943 and 1944 certainly only
included China as a mere junior partner, the status bestowed upon the Chinese state
during this process has proved a resilient feature of the international system, one that is
increasingly key to international security. Since, as I will argue, constructions of China
in official policy making realms as well as the domestic American media played an
integral role in the constitution of China’s new status, it is a mistake to analyze US
constructions of “China” starting only from the advent of Communist control of the
Chinese state in 1949. Without FDR’s failed attempts to guarantee ROC China’s status as
a great power “policeman” of the post-war order which nonetheless created an important
role for a Chinese state, the UN and Communist ruled Chinese state might have a very
different relationship today. Further, many of the representations and discourses used to
understand China are the legacies of earlier periods and they can be said to contribute to a
robust narrative of China that predates Chinese Communist Party rule.
As explained in Chapter 3, narrative articulates relationships between characters
or agents and their environments or structures, and imputes sets of cause and effect
relations, goals, and morals to social life. The human ability to share a narrative plays a
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large role in identity formation on the individual, social and political levels. Margaret
Somers provides a helpful typology of narrative for the analysis of international relations.
Somers argues that narrative has four dimensions: ontological (used by social actors for
sense-making, self-defining), public (“attached to cultural and institutional formations
larger than the single individual” ranging from family to nation), meta (master narratives
such as progress, enlightenment, capitalism versus communism), and conceptual
(explanations for social life created by researchers) (Somers 1994, 618-620).
This chapter uses narrative in two senses consistent with Somers’ ideal types.
First, I argue that the dominant conceptual narrative, the received historical and other
scholarly wisdom about China’s role in the American post-WWII imaginary, often
neglects the meaning of the process by which China came to assume the status as a world
power, along with the important historical events through which the process unfolded.
Second, to the extent that Roosevelt’s personal narrative for China can be considered an
ontological narrative, and if we take into account FDR’s key position in the decision-
making structure, his faith in China’s latent potential made sense of China in ways that
buttressed the American articulation and interpolation of China as a great power, and
perhaps more importantly, as a partner in the post-war order. For a fuller understanding
of the ways discourse worked to constitute the meaning of China within American
understandings, narrative analysis can be augmented by careful attention to the
mechanisms of articulation, interpolation, and metaphor.
Social constructivist theories of IR, theories that foreground the importance of
culture, identity and ideas in international relations and security politics have become
increasingly prominent (Katzenstein 1996; Lapid and Kratochwil 1996; Wendt 1999).
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Constructivism as practiced in IR, broadly speaking, reverses the emphasis of traditional
studies of security within IR, which have focused on the threat and implementation of
military force between nation-state entities, and have emphasized material and structural
factors at the expense of social and cultural variables. Much constructivist work plays an
ideational approach off of a strictly material approach; sticking to causal, variable-
oriented analytical frameworks, it uses social factors to account for behavior that does not
fit neatly into materialist explanations (see Alagappa 1998 for constructivist approaches
to Asia).
However, departing from causally oriented, mainstream or sociological
constructivism (e.g., Katzenstein 1996; Wendt 1999), I am not interested here in the role
institutions such as the UN have played in the diffusion of norms, beliefs or behavioral
standards, nor will I draw on the literature centering on whether China is “learning” or
“adapting” (Johnston 1996b). Extant constructivist scholarship on institutions focuses on
rules and norms, paying less attention to the mutual co-constitution of identities. Thus
mainstream constructivists pay less attention to explaining how membership in an
international institution or regional arrangement is determined, for instance in the case of
current debates over Turkish accession to the European Union, or Australian efforts to
reimagine itself as a Pacific Rim state and thus a natural participant in Asian Pacific
institutions. While mainstream constructivism offers many advantages, it requires some
modification for use in inquiry directed at understanding the conditions of possibility of a
given discursive production.
To restate the main assumption of this thesis, threats to national security call for
policy-makers and state actors to make particular responses in the name of the state, and
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thus whether another state is represented and constructed as a source of threat, or a
partner amenable to negotiation, is key to understanding international politics.
Constructivist analysis has contributed much to our understandings of the processes of
threat construction, whereby foreign policy elites maneuver state identities into
exclusivist opposition, often in the face of more benign possibilities. In this chapter,
however, the focus is on how China came to be represented and thus constituted as a
partner, a state to which cooperative behavior was the appropriate response.
This chapter asks how China’s original status as UNSC member became possible
from a discourse-focused social constructivist perspective, one that foregrounds how state
identities—conceptualizations of self and other—change through social interaction. How
did American policymakers constitute China as a great power? What were the conditions
of possibility under which China gained its largely symbolic, yet important status during
this period? To provide an interpretation that begins to answer these questions, I ask
how-possible questions and attend to the production of meaning and its attachment to the
object of China, thus constituting this distant Other as “significant.” Assuming that the
dominant interpretations presented by policy-makers, even when their purposes are
justificatory or propagandistic, must also “make sense” in the public realm,
1
I pay
particular attention to constructions of China within domestic US discourse.

1
This is clear for example, in the delicate groundwork necessary for US President Nixon’s opening to
China in the 1970s. Upon the July 1971 announcement of Kissinger’s dealings with the Beijing regime and
Nixon’s invitation to visit Communist China, in order to “sell” these developments to the public, the
administration had to be “ready to provide an explanation of the radical change in China policy, made more
coherent by their ability to refer to a bank of Nixon’s writings and statements…which apparently pointed to
this consistent and logical development” (Goh 2005, 121).
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I. Existing Narratives of China’s Achievement of Great Power and UNSC Status

Whether viewed at a state or international level, the intersubjective historical
construction of China’s great power status is not a linear process. As current Chinese
self-conceptions of Chinese great power demonstrate (see Chapter 7), “great power”
status has a contingent, malleable nature, one tied to historical contingency and evolving
constructions of national identity. In the wake of the declining salience and appeal of
communist identity, the 1990s saw discursive contention among several
conceptualizations of Chinese national identity, as Gilbert Rozman (1999) nicely
summarizes:
First, the belligerent claim to be the savior of socialism through the power of
reform was rejected at the beginning of 1992 as Deng Xiaoping conclusively
resolved the bitter disputes about the meaning of the collapse of socialism and the
Soviet Union. The second, more modest claim to be the model for developing
countries requiring a long period of catch-up has been swept away in the
confidence born of sustained double-digit economic growth. Thirdly, the claim to
be the latest and ultimate exemplar of Asian civilization and vanguard of the
Pacific Century died in the Asian financial crisis that swept across the region in
1997-8. Finally, even the claim to be heir to primordial Confucian values failed
to become the centerpiece of Chinese nationalism (121).

By the late 1990s, these alternatives had given way to an influential conception of China
as daguo, great power, while the “preoccupation with great power identity suffices to
draw attention away from socialism and China’s domestic weaknesses to the blemishes of
the other major actors on the global stage” (121). To the extent that they serve this state
strengthening function, it is likely the interactional history with the United States treated
in this chapter—the co-constitutive process of US China relations—must be “forgotten”
by contemporary Chinese planners intent on championing this identity.
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Outside of China, the dominant narrative of the establishment of China’s formal
great power status in the postwar period often starts from either 1949 or 1971. In other
words, Western scholarly interest in China and the United Nations has focused on the
pre-Korean War “recognition” controversy of the late 1940s (see Tucker 1983), or the
“representation crisis” of the 1970s (see for example, Foot 1995, ch.2). But this chapter
will concentrate on an earlier episode where roles and identities were unsettled and on a
prior set of “representations,” those understandings and imaginings of China that made it
possible for China’s American benefactors to promote and justify great power status for
the Chinese state. Expanding this narrative, and exposing it to criticism, we can trace this
discourse back to the original institutionalization of China’s global status, its Big Four
membership, and thus better understand current debates over China’s rise to prominence.
As Cecelia Lynch has shown in her study of the constitutive role played by American and
British social movements in the creation of the United Nations, dominant narratives, if
not subject to critical assessment, can lead to explanations which lack the complexity
appropriate to the events they explain, impoverished interpretations, and the formulation
of policy lessons with misleading normative implications (Lynch 1999).
Scholars have captured important facets of the events surrounding China’s
accession to preeminent, if symbolic, status within the post-WWII liberal world order.
Historians have emphasized the idealistic and instrumental aspects of Roosevelt’s support
for China. One standard historical overview of China reduces the events under
consideration here thusly: “American ignorance and sentimentality reached the point
where President Roosevelt pictured the Nationalist Government moving into the East
Asian power vacuum that would be created by the fall of Japan” (Fairbank and Goldman
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2001, 327). According to another authoritative history of Sino-American relations, US
planners hoped a grateful, dependent China, elevated to great power status and installed
in the UN “in past compensation for wartime neglect” would side with the US on future
questions (Cohen 2000, 133). One IR study devoted to China’s entry into international
society makes only passing mention of the process by which China gained status at this
time (Zhang 1998, 15).
To argue that the meanings ascribed to China are more than merely
epiphenomenal to material concerns is not to deny that China’s instrumental importance
as an ally played an important role in its attainment of world power status; Chinese
airfields were thought to be vital for bombing Japan, the Chinese kept Japanese troops
who would otherwise face off against the US in the Pacific theater occupied. However,
accounts that see China’s original status as given solely by the dictates of power politics
or material factors do not present a complete picture. First, American efforts to
underwrite China’s great power status were in the near term counterintuitive, and in the
long run, counterproductive. Historian Tang Tsou has argued that China “gained only a
formal status devoid of the substance of power, while the United States maximized the
consequences of her own defeat when the Chinese Communists triumphed in China”
(1963, 59). US policy resulted in Washington being tied to the failing Nationalist regime,
and had serious ramifications for American flexibility in Asia.
Evidence suggests that US planners were aware of the Chinese state’s
shortcomings both as military ally and as postwar power soon enough to reverse course,
or at least downgrade Chinese status before China’s big four status was institutionalized
through UNSC permanent membership. According to Tsou, from the Washington
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Conference in May 1943 and through the Quebec Conference of August, Allied plans for
the defeat of Japan clearly included the idea of China as a strategic base of military
operation (Tsou 1963, 61). However, though early planning envisioned China as a
military base, “[a]ll…important agencies in the United States were questioning the future
importance of China as a base by the time of the Cairo Conference” and further, in the
aftermath of the Cairo Conference, “the United States gradually abandoned the idea of
China as an essential base of operation, which had given the policy of making China a
great power whatever validity it had” (Tsou 1963, 69, 73 italics added). By the time of
the Yalta conference in February 1945, although there was significant doubt as to
Chinese great power status, American decision makers did not “search for an alternative
political policy” (Tsou 1963, 73). Although willing to compromise the Cairo agreements
at Teheran and even Chinese sovereignty at Yalta, US planners did not take action to
revise its construction of China; the US did not develop alternative imaginings of China,
or any plan to replace China as a big four power. Thus, an alternative reading of this
evidence might lead us to ask why American policy towards China persisted despite the
increasing post-Cairo criticism of Chiang and the GMD regime that took place in the
United States. FDR was under no illusions as to Chinese abilities as his comments to
Churchill at Malta, that “three generations of education and training would be required
before China could become a serious factor” (Tsou 1963, 71) indicated. Indeed,
according to Tsou’s account, by the time of the Yalta Conference, “leading American
officials clearly recognized that China would not emerge a great power at the end of the
war” (71). This suggests that the “validity” of American policy was not premised on
China’s military utility alone, or a faulty measure of Chinese capabilities.
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Second, China’s successful diplomatic articulation as great power was not
inevitable, nor was the American’s preferred vision of a global post-war system of
organization. FDR was the main entrepreneurial force behind China’s rise to
prominence, but his conception of China was contested by his main diplomatic
interlocutors, British Prime Minister Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Both
Stalin and Churchill preferred regional arrangements to FDR’s proposed universal
collective security system, arrangements that minimized Chinese international influence.
Though they eventually capitulated to Roosevelt’s scheme, the other leaders did not
easily accept Roosevelt’s construction of China, doubting China’s militarily ability
during wartime, as well as its suitability to perform the role of global policeman. China’s
claim to world power status, summed up in Churchill’s words, “has only to be stated to
be dismissed” (Iriye 1986, 533).
Third, though the military goal of securing Chinese participation in the anti-
Japanese effort undoubtedly influenced American planning, the particular post-war role
ascribed to China was not inevitable. Balance of power explanations dictate that China
as an ally would act as Asian balance against European powers, Japan and the USSR
(Riccards 2000, 102). China’s candidacy as a bulwark, whether posed against Soviet
post-war aims, against a possible British imperialist reassertion, or as an anchor for
American power in Asia, most certainly played a role in American planning. However,
to accept the “bulwark” argument without qualification is to discount possible alternative
post-war designs, such as one that gave a bigger role to the USSR or, somewhat less
likely but still imaginable, one that relied on a Japan under American/Allied control or
trusteeship. While an imagined democratic China was a convenient candidate for the role
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of a Western client in Asia for a future Pacific or global order, it was not the only
possibility. Further, Chiang Kai-Shek’s acceptance of the role ascribed to China as
articulated by Roosevelt was not guaranteed. The process by which the GMD
government participated in this process has been understudied, but it should be noted
that, far from the passivity implied by Western accounts, Chiang’s diplomatic posture
could be truculent and stubborn. Chiang’s willingness to frustrate and impede Chinese
military reform, and unwillingness to cooperate with American General Stillwell are
evidence in this regard (Tsou 1963, 76).

II. China Attains Great Power Status within the Post-World War II Framework

The diplomatic groundwork for China’s great power status was laid at the
Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers in October 1943. At Moscow, the American
agenda, in contrast to the Soviet insistence on the primacy of military resolutions for the
end of the war, included a four power declaration that would include China among the
stabilizers of a post-war order. The point was vital enough to American concerns that
Roosevelt and his Secretary of State Cordell Hull concurred that “the four-power concept
should be preserved, even at the cost of getting agreement at this time” (Russell 1958,
129). The US successfully sold the UK and USSR the idea of a future international order
which included the Chinese, and the American achievements at Moscow resonated back
home. This was illustrated by Senate passage of the Connally Amendment endorsing a
postwar international organization, and in the way FDR involved himself more directly in
the details of the future international organization (Moore and Pubantz 1999, 36).
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Despite its historical importance as the first summit meeting between the US and
ROC, the Cairo conference that followed the Moscow meeting is often overlooked in the
dominant narrative of WWII and post-war planning (see for example, Moore and
Pubantz, 1999). Robert Sherwood’s influential early account, for example, degraded the
conference, saying that while it offered “color” including “the pyramids, the Sphinx and
the extremely chic costumes of Madame Kai-shek” Cairo’s impact “on the progress of
the war or on history was negligible” (Sherwood 2001, 736). Another commentator
describes the Chinese presence at Cairo as merely “distracting” and focuses on media
reports of the effects of Madame Chiang’s appearance on the participants (Permutter
1993, 157-8). As Keith Sainsbury has noted, the significance of Cairo is overshadowed
by the “myth of Yalta” which takes Yalta as the locus of post-war planning,
sensationalizing it as the conference where Nationalist China was betrayed to the
advantage of the Russians. It is more accurate to say that decisions concerning the Far
East were established at the earlier conferences of Cairo and Teheran and ratified at Yalta
(Sainsbury 1996, 174).
The three powers represented at Cairo, the US, UK and China, brought different
understandings of the meaning of security. For Roosevelt the referent of American
security was expansive; FDR’s aim was to win the war, but also to secure his preferred
vision of the post-war order. Aside from bolstering China to meet current military
demands as an ally and fill its future roles, the American approach was imbued with anti-
colonialist ideas; decolonization and trusteeship were among FDR’s key postwar
strategies. Signaling his commitment, Roosevelt had prevailed upon Churchill to join the
United States in renouncing extraterritorial rights in China in January 1943, boosting
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Chiang’s domestic political standing (Hoopes and Brinkley 1997, 95). The impact of
rising Asian nationalism on any post-war order was never far from Roosevelt and Hull’s
concerns, and the idea of strengthening China’s position was in part meant to signal that
the Western and allied powers “had no intention of trying to dominate the world”
(Russell 1958, 129). Roosevelt was also keen to demonstrate “interracial cooperation
between East and West” to stem the influence of Japan’s “antiwhite” propaganda
campaigns during the war (Kimball 1991, 131). Although it strained his relations with
Churchill, Roosevelt was sure to express this normative stance in his discussions with
Chiang.
Churchill’s concerns were to protect Britain’s long range imperial interests while
avoiding committing troops to a planned Burma land campaign against the Japanese
(Sainsbury 1985, 146). Churchill greatly mistrusted the Chinese and disdained the “Great
American Illusion” (Schlesinger 1992, 16) as he called FDR’s grand vision of China.
Churchill wrote that he “found the extraordinary significance of China in American
minds, even at the top, strangely out of proportion” (Waldman 1973, 56). Churchill’s
attitude, illustrated by many colorful comments, was that America was exaggerating
China’s present and future potential. In order to protect Britain’s imperial holdings, as
well as its European influence, in discussions with FDR, Churchill promoted regional
institutions instead of FDR’s universal post-war plan, with the argument that locally
based arrangements made states more likely to take an interest in keeping the peace
(Moore and Pubantz 1999, 35). At Cairo, Churchill was incensed that the UK took a
back seat to Roosevelt and Chiang’s closeted discussions.
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Chiang’s government at Chongqing defined ROC security in terms of regime
security, which dictated that Chiang’s strategy aim first at containing the domestic
Communist enemy, to the detriment of the effort against the Japanese. As Manser notes,
“Mao was not the only Chinese leader who understood the historical dialectic governing
China’s recent past. The Generalissimo knew that no western power had ever
successfully invaded and conquered China—that feat had always been accomplished
from within” (Manser 1987, 328-9). Chiang’s nascent foreign diplomacy was predicated
on both its alliance with the US, and a persistent distrust of the USSR and UK.
According to the account of his son Elliot Roosevelt, FDR saw no other choice
but to rely on the Chiangs despite their “shortcomings” (1946, 154). At Cairo on
November 23, 1943, Roosevelt hosted Chiang for dinner at his villa, a meeting for which
there are no existing American notes or records.
2
Among the issues Roosevelt and
Chiang discussed: Korean independence, the post-war settlement with Japan, including
reparations and occupation, American aid to China, the maintenance of US military bases
in the Pacific, negotiations with Russia and Britain over formerly Chinese territories, and
the recovery of China’s lost territory seized by Japan. Most importantly for present
purposes, FDR extended recognition of China’s international position as Big Four
member and the right to “participate on an equal footing in the machinery of the Big Four
Group and all its decisions”, which Chiang accepted (US Dept. of State 1961, 323).
In Elliot Roosevelt’s account of the dinner meeting, FDR pressured Chiang to
form a “more democratic” unified government with the Communists during wartime,

2
Archivists preparing the official archival volumes, the Foreign Relations of the United States, relied on
the assistance of Hollington Tong for an English translation of its record of the conversation (US Dept. of
State 1961, xiv, 322), so the only US record is taken in translation from the Chinese summary, though
historians have also relied on the fallible recollections in the diaries of FDR’s son, Elliot Roosevelt
(Roosevelt 1946).
186
with the result that the two discussed a bargain by which Chiang would incorporate the
Communists into the government in exchange for US pressure on Russia over incursions
in Manchuria, and pressure on the British concerning any plans Churchill had to enjoy
pre-war-style extraterritoriality in Hong Kong, Canton or Shanghai (Roosevelt 1946,
164). Roosevelt’s view of the possibility of a “democratic” solution to the Nationalist-
Communist conflict was at odds with Chiang’s preoccupation with the eradication of the
Communists.
Perhaps the greatest evidence that Roosevelt discounted China’s circumstances
while maintaining confidence in its future is his offer of a leading role for China in
administering post-war Japan. According to the Chinese summary record, Roosevelt
expressed to Chiang his conviction that China should play the main role in a post-war
military occupation of Japan, an offer that Chiang declined to accept (US Dept. of State
1961, 323). However, while willing to champion China and its future symbolic status,
Roosevelt hedged when it came to allowing China more of a voice in the on-going
military arrangements, stalling on Chiang’s requests for a more prominent role in war
planning. Chiang’s proposal for China’s full membership of the Combined Chiefs of
Staff or a new Sino-American Chiefs of Staff Committee was met with Roosevelt’s
equivocation and ultimate rejection (Sainsbury 1985, 189).
FDR’s underwriting of Chinese status came with risks to US military policy.
Roosevelt’s offerings at Cairo—the very promises intended to bolster Chinese status and
encourage Chiang’s continued resistance to the Japanese—may have ultimately served to
undermine China’s will to fight. In Manser’s interpretation, the American pledge of
support and friendship along with its guarantee of both the post-war return of China’s lost
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territories and the defense of Chinese rights in Manchuria left Chiang with less incentive
to fight, touching off a war of wills between Roosevelt and Chiang that would leave the
American president frustrated and disillusioned with the Generalissimo (Manser 1987,
325-6).
Indeed, after Cairo, Roosevelt’s confidence in Chiang and China’s usefulness
ebbed and he turned his attentions to Stalin. Tuchman raises the possibility that, as
Roosevelt turned his attentions to Stalin at Teheran, the USSR emerged as a stronger
partner, and a possible replacement for China in America’s postwar design (Tuchman
1971, 521). Roosevelt decided was Stalin was “getable”—amenable to the US postwar
UN plan—and as a result, China began to recede into the background of military and
postwar planning. In their attempts to coax the Soviets into a cooperative post-war
arrangement, the Americans had compromised several times, going to great lengths to
accede to Soviet demands while assuring them there was no Anglo-US or Sino-US
collusion. As Roosevelt remarked to the American ambassador, “if I give him everything
I possibly can and ask nothing of him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex
anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace” (Tuchman 1971,
521). On route to the Moscow conference, Cordell Hull had previously declined to meet
with the British Foreign Minister, in hopes of avoiding arousing Soviet suspicions that
the US and UK were colluding in advance of their meeting with the USSR (Russell,
1958, 128). Stalin’s Teheran announcement, now promised at the highest levels, that the
USSR would join the war against Japan upon Germany’s defeat changed the calculus of
Allied planning, and resulted in the aborting of the Andaman Islands Campaign,
Operation Buccaneer, vital to the Chinese. Chiang’s demands, upon hearing the news of
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Buccaneer’s cancellation, included a loan of $1 billion and only added to the
disillusionment with him in the US (Tuchman 1971, 526).
Despite both these developments, and his intentions to win over Stalin to his
postwar arrangements, the post-war schematic Roosevelt presented to a skeptical Stalin at
Teheran still included a prominent role for China. The Four Policemen, the US, USSR,
UK and China, would be an enforcement agency, remedying the faults of the League of
Nations by being endowed with the “power to deal immediately with any threat to the
peace or any sudden emergency” (Sherwood 2001, 750). Though they acquiesced under
US pressure to the recognition of China as a great power, the Soviets would not be so
accommodating at Dumbarton Oaks in August through October of 1944. At Dumbarton
Oaks, the USSR successfully pressured the US to exclude Chinese representatives from
the main discussions of the nascent international organization (Garver 1988, 207). China,
however, as a result of Big Four ranking, already had its position in the UN assured.

III. The Discursive Construction of China’s Great Power Status

In this section, I address how China came to “make sense” to the American
public, focusing on the ways that the “official” discourse of diplomacy dovetailed with
the “public” media discourse and wider culture. A discourse analysis can help answer
important questions. What were the public understandings of China in which Roosevelt
and other US planners were enmeshed? How were they reflected in Roosevelt’s
discourse for China?

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The Context of Roosevelt’s Discourse for China
Several factors led to Roosevelt’s China discourse becoming particularly salient
and controlling despite the constraints on his freedom of action inherent in a democratic
system. Sino-American relations at this time were conducted through narrow channels
that enhanced the effect of the personal impact of the leaders of the US and China. Not
only were both Roosevelt and Chiang dominant wartime leaders, but they both preferred
a more personal brand of diplomacy, cutting out entire support bureaucracies from
discussions and debates as they saw fit. FDR’s style of informal personal diplomacy and
Chiang’s familial diplomatic efforts to build up a personal channel between himself and
Roosevelt led to the State Department and the Foreign Ministry (Waijiaobu) being cut-
out of the Cairo loop (Liu 1996, 32-3). The advantages conferred by personal diplomacy
and a lack of reliance on normal diplomatic channels included an increased pace of
communications and personal correspondence, and enabled the men to speak bluntly
without risking their state-to-state relations; personal diplomacy also allowed Chiang to
access the “frank reports and harsh assessments” he was normally shielded from (Ch’i
1992, 140-1).
The interrelationships between the allies also played a role in narrowing
communication channels; for example, political concerns resulted in Stalin and Chiang
not meeting face to face at either Cairo or Tehran. Hoopes and Brinkley argue that the
Russian stance was that China be excluded officially because it would endanger the
Japan-Russia relationship, but also, they suggest, because Chinese participation would
undermine Russian status as a predominant Asian power (1997, 95). Garver argues that
Chiang may have wanted to avoid meeting directly with Stalin because he feared being
190
faced with demands previously agreed upon by the three other great powers, the refusal
of which would lead to “Chinese self-expulsion from the ranks of the Big Four” (Garver
1988, 197). Whatever the real reason, the upshot of this arrangement was that FDR’s role
as intermediary was given even more significance. Though he faced the resistance of his
immediate interlocutors, Churchill and Stalin, the situation allowed Roosevelt’s narrative
to become particularly influential.
In addition, there are good reasons to assume a close relationship between
representations of China found in the American public or cultural sphere and the realm of
“high” affairs of state. Wartime censorship in both the US and China guaranteed some
continuity in the wartime message that China was not only an ally, but was tantamount to
an “Oriental” America. As several scholars note, Roosevelt was concerned to keep step
with public opinion (Moore and Pubantz 1999, 36). Mindful of both American
isolationism and the Congressional failure to ratify Woodrow Wilson’s League of
Nations, Roosevelt and Hull “were concerned to carry Congress and the public with them
every step of the way” (Russell 1958, 93). This sensitivity to public opinion only
attenuated the extent to which American discourses of China in the 1930s and 1940s
provided context for American official’s diplomatic construction of China.
China’s Population: Promise and (Yellow) Peril
Many studies of Roosevelt and China note FDR’s particular sympathy for China;
FDR would often mention the Delano family’s long mercantile history in China in
defense of his favorable disposition to China. How much of this sympathy was genuine
and how much staged for political purposes is a matter of some debate among historians
(see Waldman 1973). While FDR’s trumpeting of his family legacy in China may have
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served political aims, his belief in China’s latent potential was a deep element of his
thinking. On more than one occasion, Roosevelt invoked China’s great population as
justification for inclusion in his post-war plan. For instance, after convincing the USSR
to allow China’s inclusion in the Four Power Declaration of 1943, Roosevelt wrote Lord
Mountbatten about the “great triumph” of getting hundreds of millions of Chinese on the
Allied side (Range 1959, 179). Later that year during his November 29
th
meeting with
Stalin, Roosevelt explained that his vision, though recognizing China’s present weakness,
took a view to China’s future noting: “after all, China was a nation of 400 million people,
and it was better to have them as friends rather than a potential source of trouble” (US
Department of State 1961, 532). Touching upon late 19
th
century worries over the
awakening of a “yellow peril” in Asia, Roosevelt feared that this large population if
alienated would develop in an aggressive manner like the Japanese had (Range 1959,
179). In this, FDR echoed Alfred Thayer Mahan, a great influence in Roosevelt’s
formative years, who held that these “yellow races” posed a grave threat to Western
societies and should be co-opted through a process of civilization, lest they overwhelm
the West with their sheer numbers (Range 1959, 178).
FDR’s vision was consistent with popular understandings of the time. For
example, the publisher Henry Luce based his advocacy of US support of the Nationalist
government in part on this theme, for instance, arguing in a letter to the National War
fund that funding to China needed to be increased due to China’s physical size and
enormous population; Luce took it as a “simple fact” that China deserved support
because it contained America’s greatest number of allies (Jespersen 1996, 36). Whether
positive or negative, this representation of China focused on China’s large population,
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alternately eager masses primed by generations of missionaries for conversion to
Christianity, manpower that China could potentially bring to bear on military problems
and domestic labor markets, or a market for Western goods the size of which was
unrivaled in history.
The Campaign to Americanize China
Within the wartime American domestic discourse, representations of China in
media, government and non-governmental organizations represented China as a
democratic nation laboring under the guidance of a heroic leader enlightened by Christian
ideals against Japan as an enemy “Other.” Building on earlier missionary activity,
cultural events like Pearl Buck’s 1931 Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Good Earth
created a new interest in the Orient, and sympathy with the plight of Chinese peasants.
The American entry into WWII after Pearl Harbor in December 1941 made the US and
China allies. This spurred interest in China, now nominally unified under a converted
Christian, Chiang Kai-shek, to new heights. Positive ideas of China were promoted by
notable humanitarian initiatives of groups like the United China Relief (UCR)
organization, which produced pamphlets and educational films and distributed
educational materials to schools (Jespersen 1996). Under the influence of both a wartime
censorship system and the media empire of Henry Luce (which included Time, Life, and
Fortune magazines) the American public was fed a steady diet of China sensationalism.
A representative theme was the historical and geographical similarities of China and
America; one 1942 issue of Time described a Japanese military advance through “China’s
Boston (Peking), New York (Shanghai) and Washington (Nanking)” (Jespersen 1996,
39). The extent of the shared conception of China in the cultural imagination of
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influential Americans across the political spectrum is demonstrated by the fact that,
although two of China’s main boosters, Luce and FDR, were at ideological loggerheads,
clashing over FDR’s New Deal policies and Time coverage of the 1940 election
(Jespersen 1996, 17), Roosevelt and Luce shared the conviction of China’s special
promise for the United States.
The Generalissimo’s wife Song Meiling (Madame Chiang Kai-shek) waged her
own well-timed campaign to “Americanize” China and win increased wartime aid for the
Nationalist regime. Mme. Chiang’s American tour, beginning in February 1943, was a
cultural and diplomatic watershed in the American construction of China. Song took the
country by storm, capturing the public’s imagination while she established personal
relationships with many important US decision makers (Li 2006). Among the first
women, and certainly the first Chinese to make an address to both houses of Congress,
Mme. Chiang often stepped beyond the bounds of what was strictly authorized in her
diplomatic efforts (Fenby 2003, 394; Li 2006).
The glowing public appraisal of China and its leaders was not limited to media
and non-governmental organizations, but also appeared in the foreign policy literature of
the time. For example, Edgar Snow, famous for his sympathetic journalistic portraits of
Mao Zedong, wrote a profile piece in the July 1938 issue of Foreign Affairs which bears
attention. In “China’s Fighting Generalissimo,” Snow, undoubtedly aiming for a
balanced tone and displaying the skepticism that lie under all discussions of the Chiang
regime, still portrayed Chiang as the personification of China (Snow 1938, 616), whose
flaws were at the same time humanized and rationalized taking account of the challenges
faced by his regime. Chiang’s personal flaws, such as his inflexible insistence on national
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discipline or his lack of a sense of humor, were portrayed by Snow as all to China’s
benefit. For instance, Snow wrote, Chiang’s “absence of humor in a country where its
abundance constitutes a national menace, is a great asset in leadership” (622). The
predications Snow attached to Chiang were clearly consonant with the general public
discourse on China’s leader: “devout,” “master,” “chivalrous,” possessing of “boundless
energy and “astounding…physical vigor” and the virtues of “courage, decision,
determination, ambition, and a sense of responsibility.” Snow colorfully underscored
Chiang’s leadership strategy: “Chiang is the apex of a loose pyramid of sand, and his
peculiar gift is his ability to anticipate the shiftings in the immense weight beneath him in
time to maintain his own precarious balance” (616). From this perspective, Snow
imagined that Chiang was “supported both by China’s Communists and by her Fascists”
(616), a conclusion shared to great detriment by US officials.
China and the Japanese Other
An identity between China and the US was imagined, based on a variety of shared
American and Chinese qualities, from physical differences with the Japanese enemy to
geographical similarities. One UCR publication, China Primer, borrowed from a US
Army manual an educational cartoon titled “How to Spot a Jap.” This cartoon put the
construction of China against the Japanese Other in stark relief, using a racialized
discourse to highlight purported physical similarities between Chinese and Western
(Americans and Europeans) peoples (Jespersen 1996, 73). Important possible Chinese
analogies to the Japanese experience also influenced wartime planning. As Iriye notes,
“American officials considered it axiomatic that China would sooner or later develop into
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a modern industrialized, militarily strong power, paralleling Japan’s growth after the
middle of the nineteenth century” (Iriye 1986, 533).
Roosevelt mirrored the American public at large in his “rudimentary awareness of
Chinese nationalism challenged by Japanese imperialism. For Roosevelt, suspicion of
Japan had become the corollary of his special regard for China—a beleaguered but
aspiring nation worthy of American encouragement” (Waldman 1973, 11). Roosevelt’s
conception of China was an amalgam of his familial narrative and the constitution of the
Chinese “oriental” vis-à-vis the Japanese. As Michael Hunt, quoting FDR, notes “[f]or
Roosevelt it was clear on which side Japan stood in the sharpening global struggle
‘between human slavery and human freedom—between pagan brutality and the Christian
ideal’” (Hunt 1987, 145).
Though subject to backlash, the idolization of the Chiangs and affinity for the
Chinese in the year before Cairo was consistent across media, policy and government
discourse. In his Christmas Eve, December 24, 1943 “fireside chat,” Roosevelt glossed
the Cairo and Teheran conferences for the American public. He spoke of Chiang in
glowing terms including “unconquerable” and the people of Asia as “freedom loving”
(Roosevelt 1950, 555, 558). Chiang, Roosevelt gushed, was “a man of great vision, great
courage, and a remarkably keen understanding of the problems of today and tomorrow”
(556). Roosevelt also stressed the unity of US, Chinese and Soviet interests using
metaphor to describe their interactions: “We had planned to talk to each other across the
table at Cairo and Teheran; but soon we found that we were all on the same side of the
table” (555). The US and China, he said, were now “closer together than ever before in
deep friendship and unity of purpose” (556).
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Articulation, Metaphor, and Interpolation
It was out of these extent cultural, symbolic, and linguistic resources that the US
attempted to constitute China as a great power. But given these representations, how did
the process of constitution work? Discourse analysis provides useful tools. As used by
Laffey and Weldes (2004), Weldes (1999) and Muppidi (1999), “articulation” and
“interpolation” are two analytical concepts that provide purchase on the constitution of
China as a great power. Following Stuart Hall, Laffey and Weldes describe articulation
as the process of “creating and temporarily fixing meaning through the contingent
connection of signifying elements”; these sets of meanings or representations can then be
institutionalized or embedded in social relations (2004, 28). These signifying elements
are often linguistic in nature, such as nouns, adjectives, analogies or metaphors (Weldes
1999, 98). Linking, or articulating these elements of meaning in a discourse gives them a
unity they do not necessarily possess, and discourse analysts stress the contingent and
contestable nature of these links and the need for regular reproduction. Thus,
articulation also implies that “these connections are socially constructed, historically
contingent, and therefore require a great deal of ideological labor to establish and
maintain” with the caveat that rearticulation, though difficult, is possible (Laffey and
Weldes 2004, 28). Through articulatory processes, meanings are fixed together,
bestowing particular political subjects with certain articulated meanings in a specific
historical period.
Roosevelt’s articulation constituted China as a unified power and by default,
Chiang as its unquestioned leader. As Garver notes, the “Nationalist regime of the
wartime period was so fragmented that in many respects it makes more sense to think of
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that entity as a diverse collection of bureaucratic, partisan, and regional groups joined in a
loose coalition against Japan” (Garver 1988, viii). Thus there was no structural or logical
necessity that China be cast in the great power role; the American construction of China
was only one among multiple possibilities, including military assistance or other forms of
partnership granted to an ally without the privileged status, or an enlarged post-war role
for the USSR or Japan. It is possible that China could have been linked to several subject
positions which either fell short of great power status, or sidestepped the issue altogether.
By articulating then “hailing” China as one of the “Big Four” Roosevelt, acting on
behalf of the US not only ascribed to China the qualities of a unified entity and a much
more powerful state, but also (re)established American power as capable of calling into
being a new world power and a new world order. One of the ways the US government
“articulated” China was through the extension of the “state as policeman” metaphor.
Roosevelt envisioned a United Nations organization in a tripartite arrangement, with a
world assembly of nations, an executive committee, and “Four Policemen,” as his
sketches made at Teheran indicate (US Dept. of State 1961, 622). As early as 1939, the
State Department under Hull’s guidance had developed plans for the postwar
international order, recommending that the new organization consist of a security council
like entity; the “four policeman” formulation was largely the result of these discussions
(Perlmutter 1993, 154). FDR suggested in various conversations that after WWII, the
Big Four would take on the role of policemen, ensuring the peace through disarmament
enforced by inspections and perhaps eventually merging into the international
organization (Kimball 1991, 85) Thus, the metaphor reified great power dominion,
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obscuring both questions about the limits of great power in such a system and a
problematic disarmament program.
According to the theory of conceptual metaphor, people understand and reason by
“mapping” (finding systematic correspondences) between “conceptual domains” (any
coherent organization of experience such as knowledge about journeys) one a “source”
domain and the other a “target” domain (Kovecses 2002; but see Chilton 1996; Chilton
and Ilyin 1993; Lakoff and Johnson 1999). Roosevelt’s metaphor for China, “China as
Policeman” not only replaced the “Open Door” as the operative American understanding
of China, it served as a focal point for the Allies’ diplomatic debate. The articulation of
China as a policeman, and all that it entailed—China as a guarantor of international order,
an agent of security, and a responsible member of international society—immediately
raised China’s international status to one of equality and even superiority. No matter the
depth of their democratic identity, the Soviets, British and Chinese all eventually
accepted the metaphor—the basic premise that a post-war world would be best served by
a “policing” that ensured the permanence of the status quo power distribution—though
they did not immediately acquiesce to its entailments. Stalin and Churchill both doubted
China’s postwar power would be sufficient to serve in such a role, and suggested regional
enforcement arrangements that would avoid future European resentment at Chinese
enforcement authority (Sherwood 2001, 750).
The post-Marxist theorist Louis Althusser developed the concept of
“interpolation” or “hailing” to theorize how ideology works to recruit individuals and
transform them into subjects (Althusser 1984). Althusser’s concept, as it has been
developed and adopted for application to the study of international politics by Laffey and
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Weldes (2004) and others, works in concert with processes of articulation to fix meaning.
Interpolation also involves the recognition of their new subjectivity on the part of the
individual. Chiang accepted FDR’s interpolation as Big Four member, but not passively;
under Chiang, China also sought to exercise agency within this interpolation.
Without discounting the important consequences of Roosevelt’s vision and US
construction of China, it is possible to note that in the dominant narratives of this period,
the Chinese regime is largely either explicitly or implicitly deprived of agency, viewed as
a mere puppet, or a complacent and willing tool of US designs. However the Chongqing
regime “was not a mere passive beneficiary of American generosity” but on the contrary
was able, through the “manipulation of American fears and hopes” by “repeated hints
about a tacit Chinese separate peace with Japan” to prompt America to “grant China at
least symbolic status as an equal allied great power, to make China one of the Big Four to
compensate for the low levels of material support going to China and the low priority
assigned to the war against Japan” (Garver 1988, 193). The Chiang regime accepted the
American construction, but actively worked within it to achieve its own ends. In fact,
Chiang had long sought US support, and sought, though unsuccessfully, to “hail” the US
as an ally and fellow traveler. This was reflected for example, in Chiang’s May 1941
farewell speech to Ambassador Nelson Johnson, which equated the ideals of Dr. Sun Yat-
sen’s “Three Principles” with America’s democratic principles, envisioned the two
countries as “two pillars supporting the peace and well-being of humanity” and a
“foundation” for “universal brotherhood, ” and perhaps wishfully, described the Sino-
American relationship as such that “a blow struck at one [was] also an injury to the other”
(Chiang 1943, 242)
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Discourse analysis of the ROC reception of the policeman metaphor brings
Chinese agency further into view. Though the Chiang regime accepted the status entailed
by the metaphor of global policeman, Roosevelt’s discursive move, far from being
passively accepted, was redeployed by Chinese actors. As Chinese diplomat T.V. Soong
complained: “You are assigning police functions to us. But policemen must be armed”
(Liu 1996, 134). The Chinese thus used Roosevelt’s metaphor to pressure the American
government to accede to ROC policy preferences, in this case the provision of additional
resources, military and financial, to fulfill the role ascribed to it by Roosevelt.
The articulation and successful interpolation of China as “Big Four” and post-war
“policeman” weathered apparent challenges in the aftermath of the Teheran and Yalta
conferences. Although the Cairo agreements were undermined at Teheran at British
insistence, and the Chinese were excluded from negotiations at Yalta by Soviet
maneuvers, the Chinese state managed to maintain its ideational, and later
institutionalized prominence. As Laffey and Weldes note, [s]ome discourses are more
powerful than others because they are articulated to, and partake of, institutional power”
(2004, 29). In part because of its institutionalization first in the “Big Four” Alliance and
then in the United Nations, the idea of China as a great power became conventionalized
despite China’s representation by multiple political regimes. Conventionalized
articulations, contingent yet not completely arbitrary, “are the product of concrete social
practices in concrete historical circumstances” (Weldes 1999, 100). As a result, a durable
understanding about China was formed and ready to act as a resource for future
constructions of China.

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Conclusion

No state at the close of the Second World War, not even the US, was completely
under the illusion that China’s tangible capabilities were those of a great power. Viewed
in terms of the military challenges at hand, or in terms the cooperative vision of an
international organization that would keep the peace after the defeat of Germany and
Japan, China did not measure up. The creation of China as a world power discursively
overcame these material disjunctures. American attempts to fix the meaning of China
struggled to assume taken-for-granted status, and ultimately failed under the weight of
shifts in Allied military fortunes, Chiang’s perceived intransigence, and the USSR’s
increased prominence in American officials’ estimation. Institutionalized in the Big Four
alliance and eventually, the UNSC, the idea of great power China became a durable
feature of the post-war period, to the extent that the People’s Republic of China would
take the inheritance of this role, authorized and legitimated by the international
community, as a priority.
There were to be sure, costs of the American discursive construction of China and
its attempts to create a great power China. Despite many doubts, the post-war order
imagined by the US was predicated on Chiang’s leadership of a unified, democratic and
responsible power; the US did not effectively nurture contacts within the Communist
Party and had no influence with China’s future ruling party. FDR’s understanding of
China blinded him to the contingencies of the Communist-Nationalist divide, as well as
the real power of anti-imperialist discourse in China. Moreover, as Cohen notes, had
FDR been familiar with Chiang’s polemic China’s Destiny, or had he grasped the
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salience of the Communist movement, “he would have understood that neither major
force in China excepted the United States from the hostility directed against the
imperialists” and thus “how absurd were American pretensions to the role of China’s
champion” (Cohen 2000, 133). Thus, in the end, FDR “discounted the possibility of a
cataclysmic Communist success” (Waldman 1973, 100). Though in part the product of
political (and military) expediency and pragmatic idealism, the status of China in the
1940s, as it is today, was produced in a discursive framework that stressed China’s
immense potential, latent democracy, and America-like qualities. Though the United
States ultimately failed to install the ROC version of China in a role as great power, the
status the Chinese state briefly achieved in the late WWII era has echoes in continuing
American attempts to imagine China’s relationship to the Western international order.
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Chapter 6: “Uncle Wen Says Hello”: US National Security Discourse,
Technoscience, and “Chinagate” 1999

Introduction
In 1989, the end of the Cold War and the June 4 Tiananmen Square crackdown
prompted important sea changes in US-China relations. When the Soviet Union under
Mikhail Gorbachev “opted out” of the Cold War, the strategic rationale for US China
relations was undercut significantly (Cohen 2000, 215). After Tiananmen, American
public opinion and Congressional ire turned decidedly against the Chinese government,
and images of student demonstrators and the crushed democratic possibilities they
represented seemed to put the deleterious role of the Chinese government, the “Butchers
of Beijing,” front and center in American discourses of China (see Madsen 1995;
Suettinger 2003). Meanwhile, favorable views of the United States held both by the
public and an increasingly internationalized intellectual class in China came in the 1990s
to be replaced with suspicions of American hostility towards China, a trend reinforced by
perceived American triumphalism at the fall of Soviet and Eastern European socialism,
and the United States role in the Beijing’s failed bid for the Olympics in 2000 (Fewsmith
2001, 105-7). Against this background, a high-profile Chinese espionage case in 1999
captured the attention of the national media in the United States, raising further serious
questions for Sino-American relations.
Espionage and accusations of espionage have played an important role in Sino-
American relations since before the establishment of the People’s Republic of China
(PRC). The relationship between the US and the new Chinese Communist regime got off
to a rocky start in 1948 when Chinese authorities detained Angus Ward, American consul
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general at Shenyang (Mukden), on charges of espionage until 1949. This move, in
Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s view ruled out US recognition of Communist China,
and helped to establish an antagonistic atmosphere in Sino-American relations that would
lead to the Korean War (Chen 1993, 149). Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communists
used the Ward case to send the message that the new regime was not averse to
confrontation with the US (Xia 2006, 35).
In the 1980s, 1990s and again in the early 2000s, espionage, spies, reconnaissance
and subversion have constantly upset relations between Washington and Beijing. In
April 2001, the EP-3E Spyplane incident rekindled tensions over information technology
and espionage. In 2003 the case of Katrina Leung, a suspected Chinese double agent
known as “Parlor Maid,” made headlines until charges against her were eventually
dropped (Broder and Madigan 2005; Lefebvre 2005). In 2005 Chi Mak, a naturalized
American citizen born in China who worked as an engineer for a US defense contractor
was arrested for leaking US military secrets and sentenced in the spring of 2008 to a 24 ½
year prison sentence (Warrick and Johnson, 2008). And in 2008, the Dongfan Chung spy
case had Chinese espionage back in the news (Lewis, 2008).
Threats to security call for particular responses on the part of state actors, and thus
whether another state is represented and constructed as a source of threat, or a partner
amenable to negotiation, is key to understanding international politics. This thesis argues
that international security threats are not self-evident, or given solely by material factors
Following this assumption, it is important to detail the process of threat construction and
show how threats, far from being natural occurrences, actually take much interpretive
work on the part of decision-makers and security elites in order to maneuver state
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identities into exclusivist opposition, often in the face of more benign possibilities. The
discourses of Sino-American relations as they relate to efforts of each state to “know” the
other through clandestine methods provide an illustrative case.
In this chapter, I reconstruct the discourses and narratives that dominated the
prosecution of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) weapons scientist and
naturalized Taiwanese-American Dr. Wen Ho Lee from 1999 to 2000 and the events that
surrounded it. The case prompted a media circus, debates over racial and ethnic
profiling, and wide-spread security reforms in the Department of Energy (DOE), but has
attracted little sustained interest from students of International Relations (IR) or China
specialists in political science. Rather than focus on Lee’s guilt or innocence of
espionage, which may never be conclusively established, I examine the discursive
construction of the event –how it came to mean what it meant, and how its meaning
worked to help constitute national security for the US. I argue that, put in the context of
US-PRC relations, the episode was understood discursively, particularly through Cold
War narratives that stressed both the external and internal nature of China’s threat to US
security and the intimate relationship between security and technology.
The quotation in the title of this chapter is from FBI agent Robert Messemer, a
key government witness in the Lee case at a motion hearing in December 1999 held to
determine whether Lee could be released on bail. Suggesting Lee be held because of the
possibility that he could be passing directions in code to his family or other co-
conspirators through casual conversation, Messemer argued that coded comments such as
“Uncle Wen says hello” or “How is the weather today” could gravely threaten US
security (Hoffman 1999; Lee and Zia, 2001 233). Though much of Messemer’s
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testimony was later discredited, his statements are indicative of the paranoia that
characterized the atmosphere of “Chinagate” or “Spygate” as the events came to be called
by conservative commentators in the US.
Most important for the case is the high-profile bipartisan Cox Commission, and
their findings, published in the declassified Cox Report (1999). In 1998, after two
scandals, one involving Republican accusations of Chinese influence in the 1996 general
elections (tagged as “Donorgate”), and another involving two US aerospace companies
that were said to have provided the PRC with technical help on its missiles during a
satellite launch in Beijing, the Cox Committee was founded by Republican Newt
Gingrich. Chaired by California Representative Christopher Cox and originally charged
with investigation of American corporate impropriety, the committee’s focus over the
course of its investigations shifted from how China appropriated missile technology from
the Loral and Hughes companies to Chinese efforts to use Chinese scientists, students and
visitors to the national laboratories to compromise US nuclear secrets. To understand the
construction of national security in this case, it is necessary to understand the role that
textual representations and discursive practices, such as the Cox Commission’s
investigations and report, play in the discursive construction of the Los Alamos
espionage scandal. The factual controversies, inaccuracies, and exaggerations of this
heavily politicized report have been vetted thoroughly by knowledgeable specialists such
as Alastair Iain Johnston (May 1999; Johnston 2000), as they have been hotly contested
by Chinese officials (People’s Republic of China, 1999). However, scholars working in
IR have not examined the discursive power of this or other relevant texts, nor have they
attended to its ramifications for US representations of the PRC. Following the lead of the
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Cox Commission, the stakes were set high in the court and media discourse, as
government witnesses testified that the codes allegedly mishandled by Lee could “in the
wrong hands, change the global strategic balance” despite the fact that the information
Lee downloaded was not classified Top Secret (Stober and Hoffman 2001, 256-7). The
problem became, as delineated by the Cox Report, how to protect America’s high
technology from China’s “quest” to obtain it.
Standard overviews of Sino-American relations discuss the major events of 1999
such as the Cox Report and the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia, but
have not yet treated in any depth the case of Wen Ho Lee (Cohen 2000; Lampton 2001,
84-5). Looking at the discourse at the time, however, we can see that these events were
linked quite strongly by the actors. Robert Suettinger (2003, Ch.9) is one exception to
the academic oversight of the Los Alamos case. Suettinger’s excellent analysis links the
Chinagate scandals to negotiations over Chinese World Trade Organization (WTO)
accession and to domestic politics in the US and China. Indeed, domestic politics is an
important part of the story, backgrounded as it is by Republican resistance to the Clinton
Administration in general and in particular, its controversial “engagement” policy and
initiatives to press for better relations with China. But Suettinger still only tells a partial
story because he neglects to account for the background understandings that enabled the
dominant interpretations of the Wen Ho Lee case, that it was espionage perpetrated by
China against the US, to make sense to actors in the government, the intelligence
community and the public at large.
Analyzing a broad range of materials including government documents, news
analysis, media punditry, and books from the popular press, I use the Lee case to
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illustrate a discourse analytical approach to security and to start to answer several
questions. How and at what sites is the US-PRC security relationship constituted? What
is the process by which US-China security threats are constituted? Given the possibilities
in discourse, how do the narratives “selected” become understood as most appropriate
constitutions of political events? How was it that a Taiwan-born naturalized American
scientist was chosen out of hundreds of other suspects with similar backgrounds and
profiles at labs across America to represent American political and technological
insecurity?

Chinagate: a discourse analysis

Background

With the arrest of accused spy Larry Wu-Tai Chin in 1986 and Republican
allegations of Chinese donations influencing the 1996 Clinton presidential campaign
(“Donorgate”) as backdrop, the Wen Ho Lee Los Alamos spy case fit into a pattern of
post-Cold War US-Chinese interactions. Information—technological, intelligence,
surveillance—joined issues such as Taiwan and human rights to become a leading cause
of friction in the relationship. American reaction to alleged Chinese subversion
intensified in the late 1990s, prompting media, congressional and executive action, many
subsequent government agency reports, and an atmosphere with distinctly Cold War
overtones. While the Chinagate case prompted a significant response on the part of the
US government, the implications of the case were wide-reaching, tying discourses of
national security to domestic debates over race, while setting the stage for increased
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diplomatic tension with China.
1
The Chinagate scandal constrained the Clinton
Administration in closing the World Trade Organization (WTO) deal during Premier Zhu
Rongji’s April 1999 visit to the US. Though Clinton had sought to accelerate China’s
accession to the WTO as a key component of his “engagement” policy toward the PRC,
the aggravated state of Capitol Hill put any agreement with China at risk. As a result of
this, negotiations stalled for six months and Zhu faced severe criticism at home in China
for his failure to reach an agreement (Suettinger 2003, 366-9).
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and DOE launched the investigation
after US intelligence determined that the PRC had “stolen” the designs of the W-88, the
United States’ most advanced warhead to be used on the Navy’s Trident II D-5 missile
and launched from submarines. It was thought by harsh critics of the Clinton
Administration and the PRC that the acquisition of knowledge of the W-88 warhead
would allow China to take a short cut to upgrading its nuclear arsenal, while the
attainment of miniaturization technology would allow the PRC to deploy mobile ICBMs
and retain second strike capability in the case of a US-PRC confrontation over Taiwan
(Gertz 2000,150). The fact that, even those who possessed design specifications faced
prohibitive difficulties in the production and maintenance of such a warhead (the product
of decades of effort on the part of American scientists) was largely overlooked in the
public discourse.

1
A sample of Congressional Committees investigating the Lee case: Senate Armed Services, and Energy
and Natural Resources, March 16, 1999; House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, State,
and Judiciary, March 17 1999; Senate Select Intelligence, March 17, 1999; Senate Armed Services, March
25, 1999; Senate Energy and Natural Resources, April 14, 1999; House Armed Services Subcommittee on
Military Procurement, April 15, 1999; House Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations,
April 20, 1999; Senate Select Intelligence April 29, 1999; Senate Judiciary, May 5, 1999; House
Committee on Energy and Commerce, May 5, 1999; Governmental Affairs, May 20, 1999; House Science,
May 20, 1999; House International Relations Subcommittee on East Asia and the Pacific, May 26, 1999;
Governmental Affairs, June 9, 1999; Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, June 10, 1999 (as
compiled by Lee and Zia, 2001, 139)
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US authorities concluded that the PRC had obtained information on the design of
the W-88 and others as a result of two key events: a 1992 Chinese bomb test thought to
indicate that China had made significant advances towards more compact, and thus more
dangerous, bombs, and the cache of documents turned in to Taiwanese officials by the
1995 “walk-in” defection of a supposed Chinese missile expert and double agent (later
suspected of actually working for China). The “walk-in” documents included a memo
that accurately characterized the W-88 and other weapons, and were taken by some as
evidence that the PRC had successfully learned to mimic US accomplishments.
However, the documents were dated prior to the June 1988 Beijing hotel meeting during
which Lee was thought to have transferred the W-88 information to the PRC, indicating
to some observers that if the information was lost to the Chinese, Lee was not involved
(Stober and Hoffman 2001,199).
Despite a lack of consensus over whether or not the “loss” of W-88 design had
occurred, and no conclusive evidence that LANL had been the site of the loss, officials
within the US government proceeded to locate a “suspect” to match the “crime.” (Stober
and Hoffman 2001, 164-5). The investigation quickly settled on Lee, who investigators
believed had a history of suspicious behavior, though he had worked for the FBI in the
past. The investigation led to Lee’s firing from LANL, as well as his interrogation,
confinement, and prosecution for 59 charges of mishandling nuclear secrets under the
Espionage Act of 1918 and the Atomic Energy Act of 1954. However, the prosecution
was hampered by a lack of hard evidence that the weapons data had been acquired by the
PRC or that Lee had actually committed espionage by passing classified information.
After keeping Lee in prison for nine months, often in solitary confinement under onerous
211
conditions, federal prosecutors offered Lee a plea agreement. Lee pled to one relatively
minor charge of mishandling computer information. A US District Court Judge, after
freeing Lee in September of 2000, accused the US federal government of embarrassing
itself in its drastic treatment of the scientist. President Clinton expressed reservations that
he claimed to have had throughout the process.
In this chapter, I show how several discourses drawing on historical narratives
worked together to constitute the meaning of this case within the American discourse. In
what web of already constituted meanings did the actors in the Los Alamos case act?
Chinagate discourse drew particularly on three antecedent discourses, the Cold War and
“Yellow Peril” narratives and the “Donorgate” subversion discourse. I show how these
discourses in turn relied on constructions of security, race and espionage. In the
antecedent “Donorgate” discourse of 1996, we see the threat created in the actions of
Chinese operatives, who by purchasing a voice in the system (the US general elections),
ironically participate in American-style politics even as they undermine those politics.
Most representative of the dominant discourse of Chinagate, the Cox Report discourse
relied explicitly and implicitly on the discursive practices I articulate. I develop these
antecedent and competing discourses which I argue were all active in the process of
narrativizing China into the Cold War discourse, an understanding which implied certain
actions (the prosecution of Lee, security reforms, less cooperative diplomatic efforts
towards China) over others.
Discourses and narratives: recontextualization and intertextuality
Linguist Barbara Johnstone provides a useful schematic for the structure of
narrative. She argues narrative is formed by six elements: 1) an abstract summarizing
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and foreshadowing the coming story, 2) an orientation which sets the scene for the story
introducing characters and context, 3) a complicating action which signals “the point of
maximum suspense”, 4) a resolution of the tensions which tells the story’s result, 5) an
evaluation underscoring the important or unusual elements of the story, and a 6) coda
which summarizes and connects “the world of the story with the present” (Johnstone
2002, 82-83). Though the exercise is undeniably interpretive, following these elements
loosely, we can sketch the US Cold War narrative as such: 1) the US faced an aggressive
USSR; 2) after World War II the US and USSR formed blocs with Japan and Europe, and
China, respectively, and competed in the Third World for influence and in armament
“races” for technological superiority; 3) the Cold War got “hot” during events such as the
Cuban Missile Crisis and due to Reagan’s defense spending and belligerence; 4) by
nature of its military/ideological/capitalist strength, we see the triumph of the US, and the
West generally; 5) therefore liberal capitalism proved the better system; 6) US triumphs,
overcomes the Vietnam syndrome, New World Order story starts, and the Terror War
story begins, while the expansion of liberty and freedom continues. The main plot of the
Cold War narrative can be summed up: Western/Freedom/Capitalism vs.
Eastern/Slavery/Communism in a Political/Technological/military/ideological contest
resolved in Western Victory. In the next section, I detail how this Cold War narrative was
recontextualized by the Chinagate scandal through a consideration of American
discourses.
2

2
Though it is beyond the scope of this chapter, there is much recent work exploring the narratives that
China uses to understand itself and its Others. This burgeoning literature includes examinations of the
“Yan’an” discourse, which mythologized the Long March in Mao’s revolutionary China (Apter and
Saich,1994), the “rise of modern China” discourse (Flowerdew 2003), the “waishi” or foreign affairs
discourse that regulates all PRC interactions with foreigners (Brady 2003) and the “century of humiliation”
narrative (Renwick and Qing1999; Callahan 2004,148-155).
213
The Chinagate discourse recontextualizes (see chapter 3) the logic of the Cold
War narrative, reproducing main elements while adapting the elements that do not fit.
China is thus narrativized as an aggressive, expansive, subversive, communist state to be
met with all the secrecy and security techniques of the Cold War. From its beginning, the
Cox Report puts the PRC threat in the frame of the Cold War, in the course of arguing
that the threat is more diffuse and challenging:
It is extremely difficult to meet the challenge of the PRC’s technology acquisition
efforts in the United States with traditional counterintelligence techniques that
were applied to the Soviet Union. Whereas Russians were severely restricted in
their ability to enter the United States or travel within it, visiting PRC nationals,
most of whom come to pursue lawful objectives, are not so restricted. (Cox
Committee 1999, 2)

Fit into a Cold War narrative, the discourse of internal subversion and the referent
of technological superiority, specifically in the area of nuclear science, work together to
promote the need to secure and protect American “secrets,” symbolic of the American
technological advantage, from the threat of operatives within the body politic. The fact
that the Cold War story ends in the triumph of the United States/West might explain why
this narrative is recycled. It makes sense to use an approach that “won” the Cold War to
best new “enemies.”
It is in this sense that the Cold War arrest, trial, conviction, and execution of
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were invoked in one of Lee’s FBI interrogations. Historical
discourses and narratives are strategically redeployed by actors, in turn creating new
meanings. Caught off-guard by the early New York Times publication of the story, the
FBI rushed to interview Lee, and, as Stober and Hoffman (2001) report, the Albuquerque
FBI Chief instructed his agent to raise the Rosenberg case during her interrogation of
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Lee. Under pressure to deliver, and flummoxed by her inability to coax a confession
from Lee, the agent demanded of a lawyer-less Dr. Lee:
Do you know who the Rosenbergs are?...The Rosenbergs are the only people that
never cooperated with the federal government in an espionage case. You know
what happened to them? They electrocuted them, Wen Ho…They didn’t care
whether they professed their innocence all day long. They electrocuted
them…The Rosenbergs are dead. (from FBI transcript, in Stober and Hoffman
2001, 201-2)

The Cold War discourse of espionage was thus brought to bear on a micro-level, the FBI
invoking history for the purpose of threatening Lee into admitting to espionage in order
to escape the Rosenberg’s fate.
Each discursive interpretation aims at naturalizing itself, and the interests it
promotes, as a plausible account of the event under consideration (Martin and Wodak
2003, 7). Within the event, history is contested intertextually by the actors themselves.
For example, such contestations were apparent in the Cox Report reading of the story of
Qian Xuesen (Tsien Hsue-shen), a Chinese scientist and contributor to the American
rocket program, who, when his career was ended by accusations of communism during
the McCarthy era, returned to China to become the “father” of the Chinese ballistic
missile program and an important developer of the PRC space program. The Cox Report
retells Qian’s story, claiming that Qian was accused of spying for the PRC and that the
“allegations that he was spying for the PRC are presumed to be true” (Cox 1999,178).
This reading of history is contested by Wen Ho Lee’s autobiographical narrative, which
casts the Cox representation as a “blatantly distorted” history, points out that the
allegations went unproven, focuses on Qian being driven back to China by McCarthyite
tactics, and compares allegations against Lee to those against Qian, “a well-known tragic
story among Chinese American scientists” (Lee and Zia 2001, 143).
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Juxtapositioning: counter and antecedent discourses
Juxtapositioning can illustrate the tensions in entrenched discourses, as
demonstrated by the case of John M. Deutch, a former CIA director. Rather than pursue
the concurrent story of a Justice Department investigation into charges that Deutch faced
for storing classified information on unsecured personal computers (Jackson 2000), the
bulk of both government and media resources were devoted to articulating the China
Threat and to the literal and figurative (media) prosecution of Lee. That Deutch’s
mishandling of classified information was seen as a “breach” and Lee’s was understood
as a grave historically important threat to national security worthy of a death sentence
was seen by Lee’s defenders as evidence of ethnic and racial profiling.
A juxtapositional strategy can be employed to throw light on “Donorgate” of
1996, an antecedent discourse that provides context and has intertextual import for the
subsequent “Chinagate” discourse. The Donorgate case involved Congressional
Republican accusations that the Chinese-American community was funneling campaign
donations from government officials of the PRC into the Clinton campaign in a bid to
influence US policy. Senator Fred Thompson opened Senate investigations into the
campaign fund-raising abuses by charging that the Chinese government poured
“substantial sums” of illegal money into the political process with the intent to “subvert
our election process” (Zuckman 1997, A1). Though the charges were not substantiated,
Chinese-American contributors to the Democratic Party, some of whom were
investigated by the FBI, were suspected of disloyalty.
Counterpoising the elements of the governing discursive understandings against
those of subordinate discourses, we can challenge and denaturalize the dominant political
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construction of Donorgate. Such a counter-discourse exists illustrated in a journalistic
exposé of international lobbying published in the Donorgate period. Using Congressional
and Justice Department records of lobbying efforts of foreign governments, corporations,
and organizations, an article in US News and World Report compiled a list of the nations
that spent the most money in attempts to influence the American Congress and executive
branches in 1996. By the authors' estimation, “nearly 100 nations pay some 1,500
lobbyists and public-relations consultants to influence the US government” and the top
ten investors, in order, are Canada, Mexico, Japan, Britain, Taiwan, Israel, Haiti,
Indonesia, Angola, and Hong Kong. Notably absent, of course, are the Chinese. In fact,
“even if China's alleged illegal campaign contributions—which in July the FBI put at less
than $100,000—were added to the total it spent on legal lobbying ($327,000)” the article
notes, “China still wouldn't make” the top ten list (Barnes and Murray 1997, 29).
Through this exercise, we can see that the juxtapositional method, though a blunt
instrument, works by positioning
the ‘truth’ about a situation constructed within a particular discourse to events and
issues that this ‘truth’ fails to acknowledge or address, and also by pairing
dominant representations with contemporaneous accounts that do not use the
same definitions of what has happened and that articulate subjects in different
ways” (Milliken 1999, 243).

Displacing critical questions about the legitimacy of the American electoral system, the
dominant “Donorgate” discourse functioned to locate threat externally in PRC operatives
while raising the danger of internal subversion through its scapegoating of an
inassimilable Asian-American population.

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Antecedent discourses: from subversion to espionage
As Donorgate implies, the permanent alien status of Chinese in America along
with the image of invading hordes with subversive intent are representational themes that
have proved resilient. The imagery in this discourse blends the resources of the
espionage discourse with historical understandings of Chinese in America drawn from a
racialized, historically based storyline. This discourse, the “Yellow Peril” narrative,
which understands China and ethnically Chinese-Americans through “a collage of fear-
inspiring stereotypes”, has traditionally worked through the multiple discourse genres of
diplomacy, law, fiction, and art (Dorsey and Harlow 2003, 690). We can trace this
narrative back to the 1800s when, their Transcontinental Railroad duties completed in
1869, the increasingly visible Chinese moved into American cities (Takaki 1989, 105)
exacerbating the “China Problem” in the American imagination. Often compared to
blacks and Indians, the Chinese, “intelligent and competitive” and threateningly prone to
increasing populations, were viewed as “an industrial army of aliens from the East”
which “threatened to displace and force white workers into poverty” (Takaki 1989, 103).
Sinister, parasitical, heathen, and a danger to racial purity, the Chinese threat was likened
in 1879, by President Hayes, to an “invasion” (103). As recounted in Chapter four, the
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was designed to ‘close the gate’ to Chinese laborers, who
in 1880 represented .002 percent of the US population (110-111). Many familiar themes
dominated the discourses of the time, for example, the Chinese taking advantage of
steamship transportation technology, flooding the California labor market, and subverting
American identity by its existence as “a population born in China, reared in China,
expecting to return to China, living while here in a little China of its own, and without the
218
slightest attachment to the country” (Takaki 1989, 109). According to Hunt, in the
1910s, competition between two narrative approaches to China, the metaphorical “Open
Door” which was “attuned to China’s future development” and its trade and missionary
promise, and the “Yellow Peril” narrative embodied by the Exclusion movement, was
resolved in favor of the latter, anti-Chinese nativist discourse (Hunt 1987, 71). Subsumed
under the “Asiatic” label, these imaginaries would later be used to perceive Japan after
Perry’s 1854 expeditions set the stage for Japanese immigration in the early 20
th
century
(71-2).
3

The novels and short fiction that populated the discourse of “Yellow Peril”
literature in the late 19th Century were so well-established that a reviewer of a genre
exemplar with the self-explanatory title A Short and Truthful History of the Taking of
California and Oregon by the Chinese in the Year A.D. 1899 could complain “that it was
a poorly written elaboration of an idea that had already been sufficiently developed in an
earlier short story by a different writer” (Lyman 2000, 690). The process by which Asian
Americans were racialized (became classified according to a racial category instead of
their national and ethnic category) and thus presumed disloyal, foreign, and not
assimilable, can likewise be traced through 19
th
Century Supreme Court decisions from
the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 through Plessy v. Ferguson in 1898
(Gotanda 2000). The “permanent foreignness” of Chinese Americans is thus well-

3
Hunt further describes the seesaw like relation between American images of China and Japan “It seems
that by juxtaposing these two oriental peoples Americans had found a means of keeping their hopes and
anxieties in equilibrium. While oriental villains served as the lightning rod of American racial fears, more
worthy Orientals could be summoned up to keep alive liberal dreams of a prosperous, stable, and
democratic East Asia” (Hunt 1987, 77).
219
ensconced in cultural and legal norms, and lay at the base of American perceptions of this
group’s recurring threat to order.
4

The Chinagate discourse combines the pursuit of spies and the protection of
nuclear technology, two security discourses prevalent in Cold War discourse that
discourse analysis is particularly well-suited for because of their textual quality: in the
absence of verifiable facts, consensus meanings are contested and arrived at mainly in the
discursive realm.
5
Further, as James Der Derian (1989) has argued, the “sober” study of
espionage is hindered by the source material: “Any inquiry into espionage faces false
leads, intentional errors, and the ever-ready lie” (164). The availability of reliable
information of the sort scholars could use would unquestionably compromise operations,
and the subject has not attracted mainstream interest perhaps for this reason. A study
ordered by Clinton in the midst of the Lee case to assess threats to the weapons
laboratories illustrates the “unknowability” of espionage:
The actual damage done to US security interests is, at the least, currently
unknown; at worst, it may be unknowable. Numerous variables are inescapable.
Analysis of indigenous technology development in foreign research laboratories is
fraught with uncertainty. Moreover, a nation that is a recipient of classified
information is not always the sponsor of the espionage by which it was obtained
(President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board 1999, “Findings”).

In the Lee case, this “unknowability,” encompasses a lack of hard evidence of any crime,
of the alleged crime’s location, or of espionage. This not only foregrounds interpretive

4
In the pre-Exclusion Act era, the ambiguous nature of the term “Chinese” was apparent in People vs. Hall
(1854) a case where the California Supreme Court weighed the testimony of a Chinese witness when
statute dictated that Blacks and Indians were not permitted to testify against white defendants. Chinese
were clearly not white so the court busied itself formulating a “generic” sense of the classification “Indian”
so as to include “the whole of the Mongolian race” (Gotanda 2000, 1696).
5
As William Chaloupka reminds us, infused by “information, communication, codes, and decoding”,
nuclear politics was seen by Jacques Derrida as “fabulously textual, through and through” since “a nuclear
war has not taken place: one can only talk and write about it” (Chaloupka 1992, 8). Derrida’s provocations
aside, perhaps the textuality of nuclear discourse is best illustrated by the fact that it was H.G. Wells who
coined the term “atomic bomb” (1992, 9).

220
processes of threat construction, but also functions to broaden the boundaries of what
must be secured, as I explain below.
Espionage discourse constructs the information technology involved in nuclear
security unambiguously as secrets to be protected, secrets though susceptible to shifting
definitions, always vulnerable to enemy intelligence. The nature of counterespionage
prosecutions is paradoxical, however, in that public attention to secrets undermines the
very secrecy the state wants to keep classified. This became clear in the legal maneuvers
of the case, when Lee’s defense deployed a strategy of “graymail,” an option available to
the defendant hoping to escape or mitigate prosecution “by threatening to blurt out the
nation’s secrets in open court” (Stober and Hoffman 2001, 276). But the case also raises
questions about what exactly constitutes a nuclear secret in the age of information
technology. Joseph Masco comments that the circulation of secrets in the story “within
and between rival nuclear states”, from the active US surveillance of Chinese weapons
program which involved “inviting Chinese weapons scientists to Los Alamos just to
chat”, to the Chinese signaling of their 1992 successful test (and the chance that the
“walk in” papers were authorized to be delivered by a triple-agent), to government leaks
of the story to US media help to make this question stand out (Masco 2002, 445). The
1995 “walk-in” documents included classified information on missile range and accuracy
that could be gathered from congressional records and was available on the Federation of
American Scientists’ website (Stober and Hoffman 2001, 116). The US District Court
Judge James Parker, who presided over the case, observed that much of the information
Wen Ho Lee was accused of “stealing” was “open source,” or publicly available, and
even internet accessible (Stober and Hoffman 2001, 325).
221
The need to protect nuclear secrets, to “secure” the boundaries of technoscience,
authorized far-reaching regulation of the scientific community. Partially as a result of
“Chinagate,” weapons scientists and their relations with foreign nationals were subject to
stricter scrutiny, including polygraph tests and new rules guiding their travel, computer
usage, and even their personal lives; the DOE’s rules, “Close and Continuing Contact
with Foreign Nationals” went so far as to stipulate the reporting of any “sexual or
otherwise intimate contact on more than one occasion with the same foreign national”
(Masco 2002, 457). While casual sexual encounters, such as one-night stands were
explicitly found not to threaten US national security, the new regulations punished more
lasting relationships.
6

Discourse analysis brings our attention to the way the media and government
discourses characterized the key “events” in terms of the espionage discourse I have
discussed. The dominant storyline worked from the assumption that the PRC gained the
details of nuclear knowledge through espionage, not through the work of their own
scientific community. Rather than viewing the miniaturization as an expected (a
comparatively mundane) Chinese step in “a basic technological milestone on the
scientific path to nuclear super power status” (Masco 2002, 445) in the manner
accomplished by Americans and Soviets previously, this narrativization constructs the
Chinese as passive recipients of Western technology. This narrative delegitimizes the
discursive strategy deployed by PRC officials in their response to the case. For example,
no discursive space is provided for Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji’s confident claim
that China's scientists are capable of developing sophisticated weaponry as their

6
For more evidence of the role that the regulation of sex plays in security and interstate relations, see
Moon’s (1997) analysis of military prostitution and US-ROK relations in the 1970s.
222
production of long-range missiles, nuclear warheads and satellites might indicate: “China
is fully capable of developing any military technology…It's only a matter of time”
(Pomfret 1999, A13).
This denial of PRC agency on one score, the supposed inability of the Chinese
state to practice atomic science, while having the resources to manipulate overseas
Chinese ethnics through nefarious espionage at first seems paradoxical. But such
contradictions are commonplace in state security discourse. For example, contradictory
security representations are seen in constructions of “illegal immigration” as a threat to
the state. At one (political) level, the state tightens its borders, representing its
community as naturally distinct. At another level, the state’s economic policy works to
produce the very transnational flows that undermine its border policies (Doty 1996;
Shapiro 1997). In the effort to project a unified identity, the state often tries, sometimes
successfully and sometimes not, to resolve such contradictions through identity
producing narrativization.
The dominant discourse also subtly affects policy focus. According to leading
American experts, China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS or Guojia Anquan Bu), its
leading civilian intelligence agency, is said to favor in its foreign operations the slow
clandestine accumulation of intelligence through use of large numbers of overseas
Chinese traveling or residing in target countries (Eftimiades 1994). Echoing this
estimation, but in a Cold War frame, the public discourse of Chinagate portrays Chinese
intelligence methods as insidiously “subtle” compared to the “blatant” approach of the
USSR. The President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) report found that
Chinese agents were “sophisticated… increasingly more nimble, discreet and
223
transparent” and “proficient in the art of seemingly innocuous elicitations of information”
(1999). In his account of the case, Lee cites this Washington Post representation of
Chinese espionage, which he found particularly offensive:
China’s spying, they say, more typically involves cajoling morsels of information
out of visiting foreign experts and tasking thousands of Chinese abroad to bring
secrets home one at a time like ants carrying grains of sand. The Chinese have
been assembling such grains of sand since at least the forth century B.C., when
the military philosopher Sun Tzu noted the value of espionage in his classic work,
The Art of War. (Lee and Zia 2001,157)

Through this imagery, the nature of Chinese espionage is represented as threatening in
the manner of the Yellow Peril, seemingly innocuous but actually insidious, rooted in a
timeless subversion, and carried out by masses of ant-like automatons under central
control. Insecurity seems sensible in the face of such a threat. The patience of alleged
Chinese operatives is raised, not to emphasize the potentially low impact of such a slow
process on the quality and usefulness of Chinese intelligence, but to stress the obstacles
faced by American counterintelligence measures. This line of thought led one expert to
editorialize that it was not any one particular spy, but “China’s espionage methodology”
that constituted the main threat to US security (Moore 1999, A21).
The discursive construction of Chinese espionage worked to cast suspicion on all
Chinese in America, any of whom, it seemed, could be PRC agents. The code name for
the Lee investigation “Kindred Spirit” was chosen by the DOE’s chief
counterintelligence investigator to represent the assumption that PRC intelligence would
seek to exploit scientists “who felt a kindred spirit with a particular regime” though it is
denied that this means Asian-Americans (Stober and Hoffman 2001,122). Soon after
Wen Ho Lee’s release, a survey by the Committee of 100 (an Asian American advocacy
group) and the Anti-Defamation League found that “68 percent of Americans feel
224
negative toward Chinese-Americans; 32 percent believe that Chinese-Americans are
more loyal to China than to the United States; and 46 percent believe that Chinese-
Americans passing secrets to China is a problem” (Miscevic and Kwong 2002). But
while discourses of the US intelligence community have “generally promoted the notion
that PRC collection operations primarily employ Americans of Chinese descent and that
the focus of such operations is high technology” a fuller picture of MSS activities would
include active MSS efforts to penetrate and recruit within US policymaking and
intelligence institutions (Eftimiades 1994, 37).
The “Chinagate” discourse built upon understandings fostered by “Donorgate”
and featured the themes of the Yellow Peril narrative quite prominently. We can see an
iteration of the fear of a flood of Chinese in the Cox Report. The report broadens the
scope of investigation to include all visiting Chinese nationals as well as some
unspecified number of Chinese-Americans when it claims that “almost every [Chinese]
citizen allowed to go to the United States" as part of an officially sanctioned delegation
"likely receives some type of [intelligence] collection requirement”(Mesler 1999). The
report claims that the PRC intelligence structure includes 3,000 US-based PRC
corporations which are used as “fronts” and “sleeper agents” who “can be used at any
time but may not be tasked for a decade or more” (Cox 1999, 34, 36). In place of a horde
of Chinese “coolie” laborers, Chinagate warns of Chinese business “fronts” and well-
trained spy-visitors. This articulation potentially implicates all ethnically Chinese
visitors and residents as threats to US security.
Thus Wen Ho Lee’s status as a legitimate citizen, his “American-ness” is de-
emphasized and he is constructed as a Chinese agent and inassimilable threat. Combined
225
with the intelligence community’s assessment of PRC espionage methodology, one that
focuses only on the strategy of manipulating overseas Chinese among multiple PRC
strategies, the trope of inassimilabilty does the bulk of the work in the dominant
discourse. The meaning of his Taiwanese (though it attracted some investigation) origin
and cultural ties is lost in his interpolation as “Chinese.” Though at odds with the
“melting pot” construction of the American story, this recycling of the Yellow Peril
narrative functions to re-locate danger outside the American borders, and thus perpetuate
representations of the US as a culturally unified polity. Since the implication of
Chinagate is that PRC Chinese scientists are incapable of certain scientific advances
without resorting to crime, the discourse reinforces the technological superiority of the
US national identity as well.
Metaphor
Without metaphor analysis, the guiding trope of Chinagate discourse, “Wen Ho
Lee stole US nuclear secrets” seems commonsensical. However, we can see two
metaphors in this formulation. The first, “secrets as possessions” (or information as
possession) is indicative of America’s proprietary interest in high technology and its
assumption of ownership of nuclear information technology. This metaphor hides the
unstable nature of nuclear secrets. While it shores up US self-understandings as the
world’s premier producer of information technology (knowledge most important for
continuing status as a super power), it also obscures the international, intercultural aspect
of scientific knowledge production. For instance, this metaphor obscures the history of
LANL’s international workforce, such as the European backgrounds of the physicists—
Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, etc.—who worked on the Manhattan Project (Masco 2002,
226
452), and makes no room for its current multicultural constitution of Asian American and
other “foreign” workers. The “secrets” metaphor is consistent with one of the main
(meta)metaphors of international relations during the Cold War, “State as Container”
which buttressed George Kennan’s “containment” policy. The relation between secrets
and the state is commensurate with the “basic concept of the container schema [which]
entails the notion of contents, whose spread, extrusion, and even explosion is prevented
by the container” (Chilton 1996,133). Under the logic of the container, the US not only
had to territorially, economically, and politically restrain the Soviet threat, but it had to
limit and control the contents of its own society, including its science and technology
apparatus.
The Cox Report, through its use of the term “stolen” prepares the search for an
agent, a thief, in a way that other possible descriptions of the alleged impropriety
(“compromised,” “mishandled”) do not. The “Lee as Thief” metaphor structured the
public discourse ensuring it would be a story about espionage, not mistakes or
coincidences, although there is abundant evidence to support alternate narratives. The
metaphor interacts with a common script of crime, raising the expectation that someone
will be punished or sanctioned for such actions. However, the “thief” metaphor seems
not to be entirely coherent within the discursive construction of the Lee case. Outside of
war-crimes discourses, crimes are generally thought of as domestic problems, while war
is put in the international realm (the same action, killing, is taken very differently within
the frames of domestic crime and international warfare). The Cold War narrativization
(the Lee case threatens the international balance of power) and the metaphors of the Lee
case (Lee as a thief) seem to work at cross-purposes here. This contradiction tentatively
227
suggests several explanations in discourse analytic terms. If Lee is simply subsumed as
an agent of China under the “State as Person” metaphor, than we can clearly see this
dominant metaphor articulating the Chinese as robbing from the US. But no punitive
actions against China were suggested in the public discourse. Alternatively, it could be
seen as a metaphorical scaling of international events down to human dimensions, acting
metonymically in much the same way that “fictional” narratives of espionage do. It
could also be evidence of the strain that security practices are constantly under, given the
impossibility of permanently fixing meaning and the impossibility of remedying every
vulnerability or insecurity.
Narratives, metaphors and discourse not only help to constitute events and the
government responses to them, they also act as resources through which new events can
be interpreted. For example, we can see how the constitutive elements of Chinagate
provide the background for a domestic interpretation of the US accidental bombing of the
Chinese embassy in Belgrade on May 7, 1999 in an editorial in Santa Fe New Mexican
on May 11 under the broken English headline: “So sorry. We'll hit right target next time”:
Dr. Fu Manchu, that evil-genius character created by author Sax Rohmer, has
made fools of the CIA again. Imagine this scenario: Sneaking into the NATO war
room, the clever Chinese stole the bomb-target map of Belgrade. In its place he
left a fake map showing the Chinese Embassy as the site of a Yugoslav arms-
procurement office. A US stealth bomber blew up the target with three bombs.
“We hit what we were aiming for,” a NATO official said. “But we did not mean
to hit the Chinese Embassy." Fu Manchu, however, had a much grander purpose:
For 10 years, he had been stealing nuclear bomb secrets from Los Alamos
National Laboratory. He had been found out. US public opinion had turned
against him. He was threatened with subpoenas to testify before US
Congressional committees. His top-secret security clearance had been canceled.
But, suddenly, Fu Manchu turned the tables. Today angry Chinese mobs riot
around US government offices in Beijing. (Santa Fe New Mexican, 1999)

228
This textual bricolage, though likely deployed with ironic intent, addresses the domestic
Chinese reaction to the NATO bombing, links the fictional villainy of Fu Manchu with
the person of Dr. Lee, espionage and Los Alamos, creating an interpretation of the
Belgrade incident consistent with what I have called the Yellow Peril representations of
the Chinese in America. In the process it emphasizes the strong American reaction to
Chinese subversion, while rehearsing Chinese stereotypes particular to American culture.
In addition, the text, though it incorporates the NATO officials fascinating doublespeak
(“We hit what we were aiming for…But we did not mean to hit the Chinese Embassy”)
seemingly manages to deflect American responsibility for the accident, subtly shifting the
blame for Belgrade onto the Chinese. The Fu Manchu example is hard to accommodate
using other than an interpretive approach. Moreover, a scholar taking a representative
sample of media most likely would pass right over it. However, because it “makes
sense,” it is clear evidence of a certain discursive economy that can be drawn upon by the
public to interpret new events. Even read as satire, the representations it proffers are
consistent with the dominant discourse: China and “Chineseness” as a threat to American
security.
Possibilities: dominant and counter discourses
To illustrate the discursive constitution of security it is helpful to reconstruct
specific alternate imaginings, or competing discursive and narrative constructions of
Chinagate and of the Chinese espionage threat. To provide examples, I articulate three
discourses out of the many available, which I label China Threat, PRC Official, and
Asian-American/Chinese National, to illustrate the interpretive contestation over the
meanings of Wen Ho Lee, international security, China and the Chinese, and technology.
229
Of the three, elements of the China Threat (anti-PRC) discourse share the most with the
dominant Chinagate discourse that provided the background against which the events of
the case could become possible.
While the “China Threat” Conservative (Blue Team) Discourse textual examples
presented here are drawn primarily from the discourse of conservative pundits, some
elements were embraced by major media generally considered liberal, such as The New
York Times. This discourse aimed, instrumentally, at inflicting political damage on the
Clinton administration, which was viewed as losing American technological secrets to
China and suppressing the Cox report. The case from this vantage point is indicative of
Clinton’s cavalier attitude toward nuclear weapons; the Clinton Administration is loosing
“our” technological secrets to China and suppressing Cox report
“Every day brings new revelations” of spying… “Nothing is going to stop the
Clinton administration from pursuing its policy of engaging the Chinese military
and selling off US security…”

“Whether its nuclear weapons secrets from our labs, or supercomputers and
advanced telecommunications gear from Silicon Valley, this administration has
presided over the greatest transfer of military technology to a potential adversary
of any administration in history.” (Timmerman, 1999)

Deploying the metaphors and narratives detailed above, it assumes that Wen Ho Lee was
a Chinese spy who had “robbed” America, and places Lee in the broader context of a
Chinese “fifth column” made up of Chinese nationals controlled by Beijing.
“Now, no fewer than nine congressional committees are investigating. So far,
their aim has been to prevent anything like this from happening again. And in this,
they can't help but succeed: After what Wen Ho Lee stole from the laboratories,
there are hardly any nuclear weapons design secrets left to protect. So, what did
he lift? Two kinds of nuclear weapons design information: the national
laboratories' “legacy code” and their input data. The legacy code is a computer
file containing all the information scientists have gleaned from over four decades
of US nuclear testing. It's designed to predict how nuclear weapons will perform.
230
What it won't tell you are the key aspects of any given warhead design. That is
largely captured by input data. Put the two together and you not only can project a
weapon design's likely performance, you can generate a blueprint of the weapon
itself. Before he was fired, Wen Ho Lee was updating these codes and, from the
FBI's investigation of what he downloaded onto his home computer, it looks as
though he pretty much stole everything Los Alamos had. Intelligence officials
recently established that someone accessed his home computer. They even have
documents proving that China secured exact data on at least a half-dozen of
America's most advanced weapons. What they lack is legal proof that Lee passed
this information on to China. Still, given Lee's known communications with
convicted Chinese spies and his effort to hide evidence (he tried to erase between
1,000 and 2,000 of the stolen files after his last interview with investigators), it's
reasonable to assume the worst.” (Sokolski 1999, emphasis added)

Finally, there is a Chinese “fifth column” and PRC is using Chinese nationals “among
us” to “spy the pants off us”:
…the message of the Cox Report is devastating in its simplicity: Communist
China is spying the pants off us, and it is using some 1,000 commercial
companies, employing more than 10,000 Chinese nationals residing in the United
States, to do so. “The weapons suppliers and procurement companies are also
collectors,” says one source familiar with the report's conclusions. “The
operations that led to some of our most significant losses were not run by
(China's) Ministry of State Security, but were done right out of those companies,
which are closer to cabinet departments than commercial companies.” The
administration is desperate to quash this information because it has done nothing
to curtail Chinese spying in the US since Clinton claimed the White House. Some
would say the president and his policies actively encouraged the Chinese to
expand their intelligence and influence- peddling operations in the United States.
(Timmerman 1999)

By contrast, another alternative, the People’s Republic of China Official discourse
highlights issues of legality, appeals to international norms and stresses Chinese agency.
Through often colorful rhetoric, Chinese spokesmen predictably deny espionage charges,
but also argue that the US is constructing China as an entity in need of technological
assistance. First, official statements claim that China has not acquired any nuclear codes
illegally.
231

[The Cox Report accusations are] a groundless, vicious slander and a grave
calumny on the Chinese people and Chinese scientists. (People’s Republic of
China 1999)

[While the Cox Report claims that] The PRC has in fact acquired some US
computer codes, including: the MCNPT code, the DOT3.5 code, and the NJOYC
code. In fact, the three codes are standard ones extensively used worldwide for
decades in nuclear reactor engineering design, nuclear reactor radiation shielding
safety analysis and other fields of nuclear energy research. They are widely
applied by many research institutes, universities and atomic energy engineering
research and design institutes of IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency)
member countries. They have nothing to do with the design of thermonuclear
warhead. (People’s Republic of China 1999)

This discourse maintains that the US is constructing China as an entity in need of
technological assistance, in one sense a passive victim of its own backwardness. As Tsui
Sze-men, a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC),
editorialized in Hong Kong Wei Wen Po, China is “fully capable of independently
standing in the family of nations” (Tsui 2000, A12). State officials also asserted China’s
ability to develop technology independently:
Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji argued that China's scientists are capable of
developing sophisticated weaponry as their production of long-range missiles,
nuclear warheads and satellites might indicate: “China is fully capable of
developing any military technology…It's only a matter of time” (Pomfret 1999,
A13).

Chinese State Council spokesman Zhao Qizheng that the ‘secrets’ such as the
design of the W88 warhead China was accused of stealing were available on the
Internet and made public by sources such as the Nuclear Weapons Databook
series published by the Natural Resources Defense Council, and academic post
boards utilized by US scientists. (Laris 1999, A10).

The Chinese alternative promotes the image of China as a responsible member of the
international community, following international norms of security and self-help, forced
to develop nuclear weapons in order to defend itself:
232
As everybody knows, the Chinese Government has consistently proposed the
complete prohibition and thorough destruction of nuclear weapons. China, as a
developing country, needs a peaceful international environment, so that it can
concentrate efforts on economic development. Over the past few decades, the
Chinese Government and people have always stood in the forefront of the struggle
for complete prohibition of nuclear weapons. However, facing the direct threat of
hegemonism to China's national security and state sovereignty, and under the
circumstance that nuclear blackmail and nuclear monopoly still exist in the world,
the Chinese people have no other choice except to conduct self-defense… The
nuclear weapons that China was forced to develop are quite limited in power and
are solely for the purpose of self-defense. Never did they in the past, nor do they
at present, or will they in the future, pose any threat to peace-loving countries and
peoples. (People’s Republic of China, 1999)

A survey of Chinese media and opinion on the Wen Ho Lee case
7
finds many official
themes repeated, but with a focus on explanations that draw upon American domestic
politics. Commentators argue that the US must divest itself from the “Cold War
mentality” (Ta Kung Pao 1999) that underwrites this “shameful” wave of “anti-China
Hysteria” (Liu 1999a) that recalls the McCarthy-era (Gu 1999) or risk damaging bilateral
relations and alienating Chinese American and other factions. Others emphasized this
domestic factionalism, urging US Chinese to unity (Ming Pao, 2000) and noting
sympathy and support for Wen Ho Lee (Liu 1999b). Another prevalent framing of the
case was in terms of human rights, using Wen Ho Lee to counter American pressures.
Commentators pointed to racial prejudice in the case to show that the US was not
qualified to criticize China (Ta Kung Pao 2000), and raising the double-standard used to
deal with Lee and John Deutch (Ming Pao 1999). Xinhua (2000) reported the February

7
To sample the Chinese state and media discourse on the Wen Ho Lee case, Foreign Broadcast Information
Service (FBIS) reports and Chinese media, accessed through the World News Connection service between
1999 and 2006 were searched for “Wen Ho Lee” (and alternates Lee Wen Ho, Lee Wen Ho, etc.). After
discarding passing mentions and other irrelevant mentions, 30 articles (8 were in English source language)
from sources such as Renmin Ribao, Liaowang, Hong Kong Da Gong Bao, Zhongguo Xinwen She,
Zhongguo Tongxun She, Hong Kong Wen Wei Po, Hong Kong Ming Pao, Beijing Xinhua, and Xinhua
Hong Kong were analyzed.

233
release of the Information Office of the State Council’s “US Human Rights Record in
1999” report, which featured the Wen Ho Lee case prominently as an example of racial
discrimination, “the most serious social problem plaguing the United States.”
The final alternative discourse, which could be called Asian American-Chinese
National Discourse situates Chinese nationals as a liminal group, and argues that
transnational relations will promote progress of American values in China. This
discourse stresses the extent to which scientific progress depends on exchange and
international technological exchange promotes international order and stability, an was
given expression in an article published in Newsweek in 1999 by Yasheng Huang, a
Beijing-born associate professor at Harvard business school:
True, many of us maintain close ties to China, but we are working to bridge the
enormous cultural and political gaps between our two countries. We believe
deeply that closer relations with the United States will help move China toward a
more tolerant and humane society. If anything, we are agents of American values.
(Huang 1999)

It argues that scientific progress depends on exchange, arguing “It is profoundly troubling
that reporters and politicians fail to distinguish between espionage and the exchange of
ideas. Scientific progress depends on the increasingly free exchange of ideas among
researchers and across national borders” (Huang 1999). It is, this position holds, true that
international technological exchange promotes international order and stability: “Until
recently, at least, many American academics embraced such exchanges, and not only in
the interest of science. In the 1970s South Korea and Taiwan moved up on the
technological ladder as their engineering students acquired American know-how. Such
advances helped foster prosperity and stability in Asia” (Huang 1999). Huang
234
reimagines China’s efforts to buy sensitive equipment as endeavors to improve US-PRC
trade relations:
China's large trade surplus is reported as a threat to American economic interests.
Yet when China tries to buy satellite equipment from Hughes Electronics Corp.,
which would shrink some of this surplus, the press cries out that Beijing is
grabbing sensitive military technology to unleash against America.” (Huang
1999)

Finally, seen on websites such as the one that promotes Dr. Lee’s perspective
(www.wenholee.org), this discourse constructs “Chinagate” as a case of racial profiling
and ethnic scapegoating, one antithetical to American values, and harmful to loyal
hardworking Asian-Americans.

Conclusion: US-China relations, technoscientific communication, and language

Identifying and locating threats to a political community is one of the primary
tasks of the state, and a main task of foreign policy. If these threats are discursively
constructed as the case suggests, then we should pay close attention to the construction of
technoscience in security discourses. US intelligence analysts believe that in the near
future, China can be expected to continue to prioritize the acquisition of “American”
technology, targeting the American industrial process through industrial espionage and
illegal technology transfers (Eftimiades 1994, 6). The process of protecting its ownership
of information technology, and securing America’s identity as world technological leader
is complicated by ambiguities that confound the American proprietary view of secret
technology. The continually shifting boundaries of “classified information” and the need
to distinguish it from unclassified and “open source” information is compounded by its
235
internet availability. This can make for policy flux and confusion, illustrating the
importance of scholarly attention to representational practices. The difficulties of fixing
meanings in this realm can often lead to the “hypersecuritization” practices that adversely
affect US security policies and endanger civil liberties (Masco, 2002).
An examination of the discourses constituting Chinagate reveals the continuing
“securitization” of information technologies. In this case the American public accepted a
narrative that constituted Lee as a Cold War-style traitor and, metaphorically, a thief, and
the PRC as a destabilizing force in US security. Thus, while Kenneth Timmerman
(writing in The American Spectator) is hyperbolically expressing the American political
right’s opposition to Clinton’s approach to cyber-security, he also is tracing the
development of referent object of security—information technology—from the nuclear to
post-nuclear age when he writes that the Clinton “administration has presided over the
greatest transfer of military technology to a potential adversary of any administration in
history” (Timmerman 1999). The securitization of information technology is sure to be a
problem faced in the policy world and by scholars increasingly in the future. Future
research might investigate the constitutive role race and ethnicity play in securitizing
practices, even when these are linked to scientific discourses that traditionally have
strong claims to a base of authority disconnected from cultural practices.
The securitization of language itself played a recurring role in the Lee case.
While he was incarcerated, Dr. Lee’s voice was quite literally taken away when he was
prohibited from speaking Chinese to his family for fear that he would signal an outside
236
agent. But the realities of techno-speak are also difficult to fully secure.
8
The President's
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board’s consideration of the security challenges posed by
the “Culture and Attitudes” of the nuclear physicists, whose arrogant esotericism presents
a management issue provides an example. In it, there is a notable anxiety over the
control of information technology and a concern with language. The report wrestles with
the question of how to achieve conversational security: “how are security officials to
weigh the risks of unauthorized disclosures during international exchanges if they have
only a general familiarity with the cryptic jargon used by the scientists who might
participate?” (President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board 1999). The worries that
animate this question could be applied to information technology more generally.
The dominant discursive practices in the case also point to the challenges of
demarcating a political community’s “inside” from its “outside.” Discursive hunts for
internal subversion have the effect of destabilizing the state’s collective identity. Are
naturalized citizens truly American? Can Chinese Americans be afforded the same rights
and protections as other Americans? These are questions that the state would prefer to
defer. In 1995, National Science Foundation statistics showed that Asian American
scientists accounted for the largest ethnic minority working in the scientific workforce,
more than 300,000 scientists and engineers accounting for some 10 percent of the
workforce (cited in Badash 2000).

8
The contours of the threat posed by spy-language is perhaps traced in Lee’s memoir, his own account of
the FBI’s argument in court against allowing Lee bail and being held in home-detention, cited earlier, but
presented below in full:
It could be as innocuous…something like, ‘How is the weather today?’” [Messemer said] “It could
be as simple as, ‘Uncle Wen says hello,’ that is the message that is given to the right party who
understands now that they are to do something with those tapes. You see why we are concerned,
even messages of (sic) appearing to be nothing but good will and gestures of good will have to be
taken with a grain of salt, if you will, and have to be examined and reevaluated to see whether
there is something that is insidious” (Lee and Zia 2001, 233).
237
Finally, the dominant Chinagate narrative works discursively but paradoxically to
deny certain forms of agency to one of the “main characters” in the current international
“drama.” This points to the need for further attention to the discursive practices I have
identified, particularly American foreign policy narratives that treat China as a passive
object, subject only to manipulation or management by the West.
Theoretically, this chapter has attempted to demonstrate the benefits of discourse
analysis from a modest and pragmatic perspective. Identifying competing narratives and
intertextuality tracing processes can not only link the discursive economies of state and
society (through the public acceptance of state discourse as making sense), but can give
us clues as to how history works (through its attention to antecedent discourses and to
citational practices). It promises to give us a way to talk about these most important
processes. A discourse analysis focus on the reconstruction of political possibilities
should be an important component of any political analysis that wants to understand the
background meanings against which action occurs. In the form presented here, discourse
analysis facilitates the recognition of and respect for triangulated academic discourses. It
should foster the recognition that no discourse, academic or “real world,” can be
totalizing. Discourse analysis is thus relevant to recent debates among scholars as to how
to best foster dialogue among competing approaches to IR. If method is viewed as a
means to “facilitate communication and debate among scholars” (Milliken, 1999, 236)
then discourse analysis is a methodology worthy of further development.
238
Chapter 7: What’s at Stake in US-China Relations? Interpretation,
Discourse Analysis and the “Responsible Stakeholder” Debate

To what extent have the United States and China, despite the historical threat
relationship, come to share social reality? What does qualitative, interpretive political
science tell us about the Sino-American relationship? US-China relations, thanks perhaps
its perceived proximity to the policy world and the hegemonic influence of political
realism in both American and Chinese International Relations (IR) theory, are rarely
viewed through interpretive lenses. However, this thesis has argued that the empirical
complexity of Sino-American relations cannot be fully captured without interpretivist
attention to meaning-making processes through the use of discourse analysis. Relying
upon interpretive discourse analysis, this final case study treats one of the more
significant moves in post-Cold War US-China relations: the shift in US policy from one
approaching China as a candidate for integration into the Western-led international
system, to one that offers the role of responsible partner in the maintenance and
reproduction of that system. A key interaction in this regard developed over the concept
of China as a “responsible stakeholder,” introduced by US Deputy Secretary of State
Robert B. Zoellick in September 2005 in his remarks to the National Committee on US-
China Relations. In this heavily metaphoric speech, Zoellick presented a vision of Sino-
American relations that was novel in several important respects. Although Zoellick
pressured China on a host of issues normally promoted by the American side—
intellectual property, trade, energy security, the Korean peninsula, terrorism, and non-
proliferation—he framed this policy overture by suggesting China take a new,
239
responsible role in the international system. Zoellick, in short, offered the PRC a new
role.
To many, the speech signaled a shift in American China policy, the
transformation and culmination of a thirty-year policy of integration and engagement. In
a more narrow sense, the speech moved away from positions taken in the early George
W. Bush Administration, signified particularly by candidate Bush’s rebranding of China
as a “strategic competitor.” It also seemed to depart from what many Chinese observers
understood as US efforts to contain China for the purpose of short-circuiting China’s
“rise.” Zoellick’s “speech act” also fueled an on-going debate among Chinese scholars.
While the concept did not meet with universal acceptance, it met with widespread
interest; they accepted the role and discussed the formulation’s consequences for China’s
foreign policy. The chapter treats Zoellick’s remarks (as did Zoellick himself) as part of
a conversation initiated by Chinese scholar Zheng Bijian, champion of China’s “peaceful
rise” discourse, and then traces the process by which the Chinese made sense of the
“stakeholder” concept, both in translation (there exists no direct translation in Mandarin)
and interpretation. I show how Chinese scholars and observers, through ideological
filters but also by modeling Chinese identities, are interpreting, contesting and adapting
the meaning of this concept to the extent that the responsible stakeholder debate
represents, more so than in the past, a shared narrative based on mutually constitutive
roles.
This case takes a closer look at the micro-politics of the constitutive relationship
between US and China, with special attention to the discursive construction of China. I
place the stakeholder discourse in the proper context, as part of an exchange meant to
240
negotiate meanings between the two states, but also view it as having profound effects on
each states’ ordering practices, constructions of self and other. As in previous chapters, I
identify competing and antecedent discourses, stressing the intertextual processes, the
particular contestation they engender, and the creative co-constitution of a new role out of
existing discursive materials. But unlike previous chapters, here I focus on the reception
within Chinese discourse, focusing in particular on what Nicholas Onuf called
‘influentials,’
1
those experts and opinion-leaders who have a disproportionate influence
on government discourse. An elite focus here is a conscious attempt to capture the
location or interface point of this encounter. More work remains to be done on how the
rest of Chinese society understands Chinese “responsibility” or “stakeholdership,” but my
focus on elites allows us to make a preliminary assessment of this encounter.
The chapter’s argument is that the US positioned China as a subject in discourse,
“interpolating” (see discussion in chapter five) the Chinese state as a “responsible
stakeholder” and making a series of demands commensurate with the new status. As it
had at the end of the Second World War, the US constructed a role for China, yet this
time with a different attitude towards Chinese agency and in the evolving context that
Chinese strategists and planners were growing into the idea of China as a great power.
This chapter mainly traces how the “stakeholder” role came to make sense within
Chinese discourse and how this potentially reconstitutes Sino-American relations. It is
divided into three parts. First, I assess the constructivist and relevance of available
discourse analytic tools. Next, I address the ‘antecedent’ discourses that provide the

1
Influentials are elites whose “value-oriented activities disproportionately affect ours” and who, by degree
“exercise control over the means by which we—people in general—invent, produce, exchange, and
maintain whatever we value” (1989, 230).

241
relevant context for the case. A third section then discusses the speech itself, and the
debate it caused in the US and China, with special attention to how Chinese scholars
interpreted the stakeholder move and the formulation of international responsibility it
implies.

I. Threats, roles and discourse

First, if we understand the Zoellick speech as creating a role for China, the role of
“responsible stakeholder.” how should we understand ‘role’? For constructivist IR
scholars, roles are an important, if still under-theorized phenomenon. David Rousseau,
offers a useful definition of roles as “any pattern of behavior involving certain rights,
obligations, and duties which an individual is expected, trained, and indeed, encouraged
to perform in a given social situation” (2006, 12, following Reber 1995, 673). By
creating stable expectations about social behavior, roles facilitate social action while they
help determine social identity. Where do roles come from?
In systemic constructivist terms, roles play a significant part in constructing
international social structure. Alexander Wendt makes several distinctions regarding his
concept of role. For Wendt, roles are positions, “the objective, collectively constituted
positions that give meaning” to “role identities” which are “subjective self-
understandings” (259). Wendt does not treat role as the foreign policy role theorists do,
as agential properties or “qualities that states attribute to themselves.” He calls the
foreign policy theorist understanding of roles as subjective self-understandings, “role
identity” (264) while emphasizing that, in his view, roles are intersubjective. In focusing
242
on the Other’s role, Wendt sees role as “a position in or property of a social structure”
(264).
For Wendt, “role-taking” is the act of choosing among available representations
of Self with which one will interact, while “altercasting” refers to the process that goes
with the assumption of a role identity whereby: “Ego is at the same time ‘casting’ Alter in
a corresponding counter-role that makes Ego’s identity meaningful. One cannot be a
trader without someone to trade with, a proselytizer without a convert, or a conqueror
without a conquest” (329). Wendt likens these concepts to “interpolation” as explored by
Doty (1996b) and Weldes (1999) (as discussed in chapter five).
For Wendt, threat is a function of the degree to which a given “culture of
anarchy” and its attendant shared identities and intersubjective understandings dominate a
given international system, and the degree to which this culture is internalized. Wendt’s
typology of roles has three ideal-types: enemy, rival and friend (related to Hobbesian,
Lockean, or Kantian international cultures). These roles, for Wendt, can be internalized
through recourse to coercion, self-interest or legitimacy. Wendt notes that these roles
endure because they are a property of a particular social structure, not a particular agent
(259). Wendt argues against the assumption that shared ideas are cooperative, a
recognition that allows us to “see that roles belong in structural theories of world politics
even if states have nothing more in common than the knowledge that they are enemies”
(1999, 259). This insight is commensurate with the discourse analytic insight that even
strategic or hostile use of language is cooperative in a deep sense (Grice’s maxims), but
Wendt’s general structural theory does not provide a complete or clear picture of the
process by which roles are offered, accepted, and become durable. In other words,
243
empirical enquiry into how ideas come to be shared in relation to roles (how roles
become “objective,” collectively constituted positions in Wendt’s terms) is needed.
It is here that discourse analysis can supply a better account of the process by
which states can entrepreneurially constitute other states into certain positions. These
positions can be the outgrowth of bilateral relations particularly between significant
others, not necessarily generally systemically accepted as in Wendt’s focus. Self-interest
and legitimacy no doubt play a part in the success or failure of China’s uptake of the
“responsible stakeholder” role, but understanding the possibilities inherent in this
discourse requires attention to the narratives and metaphors that give the role meaning.
A discourse analytic perspective first views Zoellick’s “responsible stakeholder”
move as a speech act, that is, not as mere rhetoric, but as communicative action aimed at
a particular goal. Zoellick’s speech is best viewed as a ‘directive’ speech act, with an
implied commissive. In other words, Zoellick’s act of calling upon the Chinese to accept
a stakeholder role is an imperative or demand (that China take responsibility and assume
this new role) along with a promise (a promise to continue to cooperate, and continue to
maintain existing international system, for example). But it is more profitable to turn our
attentions to how the role of “responsible stakeholder” comes to make sense in both
American and Chinese foreign policy narratives. In addition, the study of metaphor can
further clarify this discussion. A long-standing, if implicit, assumption common to much
analysis of discourse of international relations is that it is carried out within a particular
speech community, one “whose members share not only a language but a common set of
experiences and symbolic practices which enables them mutually to communicate with
each other” (Alker and Sylvan 1994, 4). Though this is not unreasonable given the
244
limited focus of most studies and the linguistic abilities required for multi-language
analysis, the possible scope of the study of cross-cultural relationships characteristic of
IR is still constrained. One implication of conceptual metaphor theory is that, though
they may be separated by language and culture, actors share common experiences of
interpersonal struggle, journeys, and physical violations that can serve as a shared
framework for intercultural dialogue.
2
As Lakoff and Johnson note, while “we have no
access to the inner lives of those in radically different cultures, we do have access to their
metaphor systems and the way they reason using those metaphor systems” (1999, 284).
The extent to which shared metaphorical meanings contribute to international cooperation
is an empirical question, but in the absence of direct access to the minds of the actors they
study or the benefits of previous anthropological studies, scholars can still gain valuable
insights from metaphorical discourse.
Pioneering this insight, Paul Chilton and his co-authors study a particular
CONTAINER metaphor, the STATE AS HOUSE metaphor, which Mikhail Gorbachev
deployed in 1985 as a component of ‘New Thinking’ in the Soviet Union (Chilton and
Ilyin 1993; Chilton and Lakoff 1995; Chilton 1996). First in the context of debates over
missile deployment in Europe, but then later in a number of situations, Gorbachev spoke
of a “common European house” to denote the idea of a united Europe and USSR in a
single contained space engaging in “neighborly cooperation” (Chilton and Lakoff 1995,
54-5). Using a “cognitive interactive” account of metaphor, the authors show how

2
In an article written with P.G. Bock and published in 1972, Hayward Alker observed that “[m]ost of what
is currently believed, known, or knowable about international relations is painfully inaccessible. Not only
are public belief structures hard to ascertain adequately by means of inexpensive and valid methods, but
international policymakers are also difficult to observe or interview in depth…All of these problems of
accessibility are compounded by differences in language, culture, and geopolitical context” (Alker and
Bock 1972, 385).

245
metaphors can become contested as their underspecified entailments are formulated in
different linguistic and political contexts. In this case, the intercultural entailments of the
house metaphor became salient to the reception of Gorbachev’s metaphor and policy
proposals. Soviet understandings of house or dom, as an apartment tenement building
clashed with the more Western image of a free-standing, family-owned house sitting on
the owner’s property. Thus, while in the West, the metaphor entailed “a single unit, a
family structure, no internal separations, no common structure, boundary walls or
fences”, for the Russians, its entailments included “collective responsibility, a plurality of
separate independent units but common structure (roof, entrance, etc.)” (Chilton and
Lakoff 1995, 54). This led to confusion and contestation over who would be included or
excluded from the community Gorbachev envisioned. The theoretical implications of the
case were that: “Metaphors are not transferred with fixed meanings, but are processed in
accordance with local languages, local discourse formations, local political interests”
(Chilton and Ilyin 1993, 27).
Chilton and Ilyin recognize the options (or “interactive strategies”) one speaker
has when presented with another state spokesperson’s metaphorical understanding of a
particular situation. State representatives can reject the metaphorical source domain
outright, deploy a different metaphor, or avoid using metaphor at all. Alternatively, they
can accept the proposed metaphor, but re-specify its target domain. They can preserve
the proposed metaphor but resituate it in a different cognitive script or frame. Finally,
they can retain the metaphor, but select some other details of its entailments to emphasize
(1993, 12).
246
Of course, the responsible stakeholder case presents a different challenge to
analysis in several ways, first due to the existence of a preliminary stage of definitional
contestation. In this chapter I examine the Chinese “uptake” of the responsible
stakeholder role as offered by Washington mainly through the academic/policy discourse
genre, paying close attention to how the Chinese interpreted the American overture in
their top academic and policy journals, and elite opinion pieces, rather than in their mass
media. The metaphor at the core of the “responsible stakeholder” discourse is an
interesting example of how metaphors can become contested as their underspecified
entailments are formulated in different linguistic and political contexts. Despite the
threatful US-China relationship, some of the more dangerous implications of the
metaphor, such as the “gambling” entailment of stake-holding, did not become the main
focus of Chinese interpretation once Chinese scholars narrowed the range of interpretive
possibilities. In the following section, I treat the discursive context that did condition
Chinese reception of new US policy.

II. Antecedent discourses: responsible power, globalization, rise, great power

A discourse perspective views the context of contestation within Chinese
intellectual circles and possible transformation as being informed by several antecedent
discursive structures. In this section, I treat the intertextual relationship among several
discourses: China as a great power (and its antecedent, the century of humiliation),
globalization, China as a responsible power, and peaceful rise/peaceful development
discourse. Perhaps most important among them is the “China rise” narrative inherent in
247
the peaceful rise/development discourse: China rise is a narrative that at once orders
Chinese conceptions of international relations, “stories” the progress of the Chinese state
along modernist lines while endeavoring to represent China in a way that, by recognizing
and assuaging foreigners’ concerns, is conducive to further developmental and status-
achieving successes. The “rise” tracks China’s progress to its goal of achieving the status
and recognition it deserves, that of a great power. Despite the radical revolutionary
component of China’s identity, its quest for the status that goes with recognition as a
great power has always been present in PRC discourse, and is seen in events like its
pursuit of the KMT seat in the UN Security Council, its enthusiastic participation in the
1954 Geneva great power deliberations, its promulgation of idiosyncratic international
norms such as the “Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence,” or its establishment of an
overseas aid program “even though its populace was poorer than many of its aid
recipients” (Foot 2001, 7). The current conception of China as a great power
3
, according
to prominent Chinese IR scholar Wu Xinbo, is rooted in “its long, unbroken history, its
contribution to the progress of civilization, its vast territory and population, and its
significant geographic location” as well as “in its permanent membership in the UN
Security Council” and possession of nuclear weapons (2004, 58).
The discourse of globalization has played an important role in the way Chinese
thinkers order the international space since the Cold War. The term “globalization”
entered Chinese official discourse in 1996 (Yong and Moore 2004). The Asian financial
crisis of 1997-8 reinforced the potential dangers of globalization for Chinese leaders and,

3
Samuel Kim offers a definition of a great power as “a state that is among the top five in the primary
global structures—economic, military, knowledge, and normative—and that, because of massive resource
and skill differentials and relative economic self-sufficiency, enjoys relatively low sensitivity, vulnerability,
and security interdependence” (1998, 9). Yet, as Kim partially recognizes when he notes its normative and
behavioral qualities, great power status is a fuzzy, relational concept.
248
along with the struggle for entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), “revealed
not only that further reform and opening would be necessary to create a modern economy
capable of competing effectively in a globalizing world economy but also that severe
imbalances and inequities continued to persist in the international system” (ibid., 119).
Chinese conceptualizations of globalization eventually branched out from the economic
realm to recognize a relationship between globalization and great power politics, a
recognition that dovetailed with an already existing interest in promoting the politics of
“multipolarity” and led to a view of the United States as simultaneously empowered and
restrained by globalization, an interpretation the events of 9/11 and their aftermath did
little to dispel (121-3). Suisheng Zhao has described post-Cold War Chinese foreign
policy analysis in terms of resistance to unipolarity, offering a typology of mulipolar
systems envisioned by Chinese analysts: a three-pole world, constituted by the EU, North
America, and Asia Pacific regions, a five-pole structure with the US, Germany, Russia,
China and Japan, and a “one superpower and four big powers” (yi chao duo qiang) with
the US as the pre-eminent power along with the EU, Japan, Russia, and China (Zhao
2004, 13). Thus, Chinese foreign policy and analysis is characterized by recognition and
particular interpretation of globalization and the promotion of multipolarity which reflect
the way China imagines and orders the international realm.
Accompanying globalization is the idea of a “responsible” China. Coined by
Chinese scholar Wang Yizhou in a 1999 Strategy and Management article and
increasingly deployed in the wake of the SARS crisis for damage control to China’s
reputation, talk of China as a “responsible power” belies a growing concern with
reputational issues among Chinese elites (Shirk 2007,107, 289). Reputational efforts
249
include a general improving of ties with its neighbors, participation in UN peacekeeping
operations from 1992, participation in Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)
and in 1994, founding of ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), an embrace of multilateralist
approach to regional cooperation both in ASEAN ARF and driving force behind the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and mediation at the Six Party Talks
concerning North Korea in 2003. After September 11, 2001, an episode of cooperation
with the United States on the war on terror, culminating in the US State Departments
grudging recognition of the East Turkestan Independence Movement as a terrorist
movement, seemed to buttress further China’s claim to be a “responsible power,” before
later straining the relationship.
Chinese strategists and scholars have deployed “peaceful rise” and “peaceful
development” discourse quite consciously to undermine the analogy drawn between
China’s contemporary prospects and Germany’s rise in the 1890s or Japan’s in the early
20
th
century, as presented in power transition theory. When the CCP Central Party
School in 2003 began to promulgate the notion of “peaceful rise,” there was no shortage
of discursive contestation. After they assumed office in 2002 Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao
promoted the term, assigning Zheng Bijian to study it and using it in public speeches.
Components of the formulation, however, came under pressure from elites, some of
whom believed the term “rise” would aggravate international anxiety, while others
objected to the way “peaceful” might undermine China’s threat of force against Taiwan
(Shirk 2007, 108). As Suettinger (2004) relates, Jiang Zemin’s objections are thought to
have derailed the “peaceful rise” formulation, and by April 2004 the leadership jettisoned
250
“peaceful rise” from its public statements in favor of “peace and development” and
“peaceful development,” though “peaceful rise” lived on in academic theory.
Zoellick framed his speech as a response to discussions with Zheng Bijian, an
influential, longtime Central Party School intellectual who was at the time chairing the
China Reform Forum, and referenced an article Zheng had published in a prominent
American foreign policy journal, Foreign Affairs. In this article, Zheng (2005) laid out
China’s strategy for a “peaceful rise” to “great power status.” Zheng argued that PRC
leaders would be preoccupied with the domestic needs of its population for the coming
decades and, having embraced globalization, carried out a plan of rising unlike that of
past historical emerging powers. Unlike other emerging powers which “plundered other
countries’ resources through invasion, colonization, expansion, or even large-scale wars
of aggression”, Zheng argued, China’s emergence “has been driven by capital,
technology, and resources acquired through peaceful means” (2005, 19).
Zheng articulated three “transcendences” or strategies inherent to the Chinese
government’s “peaceful rise” policy, presented as a response to the tremendous
challenges of resolving the resource needs of a large population, environmental obstacles
to sustainable development, and narrowing the gap between economic and social
development. First, China would transcend the old model of industrialized development,
following instead “a new path of industrialization based on technology, economic
efficiency, low consumption of natural resources relative to the size of its population, low
environmental pollution and the optimal allocation of human resources” (Zheng 2005).
Second, transcending ideological constraints such as the Cold War mentality, China
would emerge cooperatively, without recourse to violence or pursuit of hegemony, in
251
contrast to Germany or Japan prior to WWII. Third, with the goal of building a
“harmonious socialist society,” China would “transcend outdated modes of social
control” by gradually transforming its government in the direction of stability, rule of
law, and strengthened democratic institutions. In Zheng’s formulation, China’s inner-
directed focus, benign intentions, and open markets pose an opportunity for, not a threat
to the international community.
If Zheng in his public discourse downplays the “great power” aspect of China’s
rise, there is no questioning Beijing’s goal of achieving commensurate status in order to
address the century of humiliation.
4
According to Chih-yu Shih, China’s official embrace
of both a “great power” reference group, and implicitly great power identity, can be
traced to the 1997 Fifteenth Party Congress, where Chinese officials first emphasized
“managing relations among great powers” (chuli daguo guanxi) (2005,755). Some
Chinese scholars noted that China, in the period after September 11, downgraded the
importance of relations with the United States, and “moved its ‘great power diplomacy’
(daguo waijiao) away from being 'US-centric' to a more balanced approach by putting
more emphasis on its interactions with other great powers and regional states” (Zhang
and Tang, 2002). In November 2002, the CCP’s Sixteenth Party Congress officially
prioritized foreign policy with major powers, which means that, although it “might have
been politically incorrect five or ten years ago” China is changing “for the first time, its
pattern of prioritizing its relations with neighboring countries, developing countries, and
poor countries” (Shen 2003, 323). In addition, the rising cultural currency of “rise” and

4
In American policy circles, China’s potential as a great or super power has long been a topic of
discussion, as has its “arrival.” Pollack (1980) was an early investigation of China’s potential for
superpower status.
252
China as a “great power” is seen in cultural products, such as the appearance of the 12
part documentary, “Rise of the Great Powers” (da guo jue qi), on China's main television
network, produced with the help of elite historians after originating in a Politburo study
session in 2003 (Kahn 2006, A1). Wang Xi describes the public sensation this series
caused, which he attributes to its novel, though still highly politicized, presentation of the
history of great nations, and the marked efforts to maintain a neutral tone in judging
Western accomplishments (Wang 2007, 295).
5

However, a rise to great power status presents a logical problem: how to criticize
great powers once you become one? Some Chinese thinkers solve this problem for
Chinese great power identity by drawing a distinction between great powers and the
“superpower.” As put in an editorial by Cheng Siwei, Vice-Chairman of the Standing
Committee of the National People's Congress, “China is not like certain superpowers,
who monopolize world affairs. China is not a superpower now, and will never act like a
superpower” (2007). This distinction is consistent with Deng Xiaoping’s claim in 1974
speech to the UN General Assembly, that “China is not a superpower, nor will she ever
seek to be one”, but China’s evolving identity is not so consistent with Deng’s other
claims that “China belongs to the Third World” or that “if capitalism is restored in a big
socialist country, it will inevitable become a superpower” (Van Ness 1998, 151). As will
become clear in the discussion, Chinese scholars are well aware of the contractions
between these conflicting role identities, and seek to provide a narrative that resolves
these issues. For instance Wu Xinbo writes of a “dual-identity syndrome” where
Beijing’s great power status demands that it respond to far-flung crises, yet its status as a

5
The creator of “Rise of the Great Powers” subsequently produced a six-part sequel documentary, entitled
“The Road to Revival” (Fu xing zhilu), aired on Chinese television and released on DVD in 2008.
253
“poor country” limits its effectiveness outside the Asia-Pacific region (2004, 58-9). As
one of the two types of major contradictions Yuan Peng sees in the 21
st
century,
contradictions between big powers and the superpower stand out (Yuan 2005, 12).

III. Interpreting Zoellick’s speech act

In his address, Robert Zoellick (2005) posed the question from the US
government’s perspective, “how will China use its influence?” and offered China the role
of “responsible stakeholder” in the international order as a way of demonstrating the
sincerity of Zheng’s peaceful rise claims. Zoellick envisioned the stakeholder role as a
“transformation” of the US policy of integrating China into its world order. As Zoellick
later said, in testimony in front of the House International Relations Committee on May
10, 2006, “over the course of some seven administrations over about 30 years, the goal of
the United States' policy has been to integrate China into the international system, but if
you step back and you look at currency markets, capital markets, clothing commodities,
counterfeiting, you have to say China's integrated” (US House 2006, 22).
Zoellick’s speech evoked US Open Door policy to signal a shift in the guiding
metaphors of US China policy: “it is time to take our policy beyond opening doors to
China’s membership into the international system.” At the same time, Zoellick rejected
the analogies of the Cold War, 19
th
century balance of power Europe, and Nixon-era
relations as approaches to managing China. Zoellick also rejected the “old model of
drawing-room diplomacy” now that China was “networked” and part of the “tightly
woven fabric” of the global economy. In a passage that drew much attention, Zoellick
254
relied on CONTAINER metaphors to differentiate China from the Soviet Union. While
the United States policy was to “fence in” the USSR, this is different from the previous
thirty years of attempting to “draw out” China. “As a result” (of US agency) according to
Zoellick, “the China of today is simply not the Soviet Union of the late 1940s.”
Zoellick’s speech gestured beyond the role of “member” to a new role. As
Zoellick explained in his House testimony, China should be understood as integrated into
the western international order, but “integration to what end? What's the purpose of this
integration? How will China use this new influence? It's not just a question of
membership in the international system, but how has it exercised responsibility and a
shared stake in this international system?” (US House 2006, 23). Zoellick tied the new
stakeholder role to China’s national interests. In his speech, Zoellick argued that
responsible stakeholders transcend the practice of conducting foreign policy “to promote
their national interests”; they “go further” because they “recognize that the international
system sustains their peaceful prosperity, so they work to sustain that system.” In his
House testimony, Zoellick further emphasized the transformation he envisioned, and the
impact bilateral relations have on international order, while articulating identity in terms
of interest, basically suggesting that China view the international system as one of their
national interests:
So this notion of a responsible stakeholder is a broader notion of national interest.
Like the United States, like the European Union, Japan and others, a more
influential China has a greater capacity than most to try to help build a peaceful,
prosperous, more open international system. So US-China relations are not just a
question of bilateral discussions. We want China to see its own interest in
working with the United States and others to deal with this set of issues.(US
House 2006, 24)
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Zoellick specifically framed his speech act in discursive terms, noting both the way he
challenged China’s “peaceful development” discourse and capturing the interpretive
component of the interaction:
Now, quite coincidentally, this has led to an active debate, and I think a very
useful debate in China. I wish I had said I thought of this, but it worked out fine.
Since the word “stakeholder” had no easy translation into Chinese, there ended up
a whole literature to say, “Well, what do they mean by this concept?” And that
actually helps create a debate in China, which we want to try to encourage. And
what I've emphasized to the Chinese—and it's a point a number of you have said–
is the Chinese have talked about peaceful rise, peaceful development. Well, we
encourage this, but they need to recognize that no countries are going to bet their
future on it, and that's where Chinese policy, Chinese transparency, Chinese
action on human rights, will be critically important. (US House 2006, 24)
Zoellick next went on to explain the source of the “cauldron of anxiety” in the west over
China and worries that “the Chinese dragon will prove to be a fire-breather.” Zoellick
urged China to take a more transparent approach to clarifying the intentions behind its
defense spending in order to assuage concerns about its military buildup. He noted US
concern over signs of Chinese “mercantilism,” and criticized efforts at achieving energy
security as efforts to “lock up” supplies of energy. He called upon Chinese leaders to
stop tolerating intellectual property theft and allow its currency to adjust to market. In
Zoellick’s understanding, a responsible stakeholder would help the United States “sustain
the open international economic system” by dealing with trade deficits and adjusting
exchange rate policies, cracking down on intellectual property theft, and developing a
more market oriented approach to energy security. In the security realm, China as a
responsible stakeholder the Korean peninsula, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan human
rights crisis, terrorism, and non-proliferation. Zoellick implied a responsible China
would choose ASEAN based cooperation over regional power predominance, commit to
the peaceful resolution of the Taiwan question, and make cooperative overtures to Japan
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via the establishment of dialogues among historians. Finally, Zoellick suggested
freedom, political reform to the point of “peaceful political transition,” media and
religious freedom were not antithetical to a strong China.
Zoellick’s speech occasioned a great deal of discussion on both sides of the
Pacific, with Chinese and American scholars and policy makers offering their
interpretations, especially when it came to Zoellick’s use of the term “responsible
stakeholder.” Among American China specialists, there was an immediate recognition of
the speech’s significance and discussion of its reception and implications. Richard Baum
described the speech’s reception in China, dividing the response into ‘nationalist’ and
‘internationalist’ camps, the former rejecting Zoellick’s call as an arrogant, thinly veiled
attempt to enlist China’s active support for the current U.S.-dominated global order” and
the subordinate role they see it offering, with the later interpreting it as an encouraging
launching-pad for improved relations (Baum et al 2005, 19). Kurt Campbell observed
that Zoellick did not mention “the predilection of the United States toward predominance
in the international arena. Simply put, the United States will not yield its position and
prerogatives either voluntarily or gracefully to another rising state in the international
order, regardless of the circumstances or the nature of the competition” (26). Robert
Ross noted the positive implications of the speech’s omission of the Taiwan issue, and
applauded Zoellick’s presentation of a future agenda for Sino-American relations, one
that returned to Clinton engagement and attempted to quell domestic pressures in US
domestic political realm for more confrontational China policy. However, Ross also
argued that Zoellick’s attempt to urge China to work within the existing political order
“suggests a dated view of China’s role in international politics: on many fronts, China has
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already become just as much a stakeholder in the international order as has the United
States” (Baum et al 2005, 34).
The “responsible stakeholder” formulation was later adapted across the US
foreign policy spectrum. The concept was picked up by the Defense Department’s
February 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review Report (QDR). The report, which identified
China as the United States’ most likely military competitor among major or emerging
powers, proclaimed the US “goal is for China to continue as an economic partner and
emerge as a responsible stakeholder and force for good in the world (US Dept. of
Defense 2006, 29). In comparison, the report, though voicing concerns over Russia’s
disruption of democracy and threatening arms sales, stated that the US “welcomes Russia
as a constructive partner” (ibid.).
The Defense Department’s 2006 report to Congress, “Military Power of the
People's Republic of China,” which balanced a concern with Chinese military
modernization and intentions with optimism towards relations with China, also deployed
the phrase: “US policy encourages China to participate as a responsible international
stakeholder by taking on a greater share of responsibility for the health and success of the
global system from which China has derived great benefit” (cited in Shanker 2006, A8).
During PRC President Hu Jin Tao’s first visit to the US in April 2006, President Bush
took up the term “stakeholder” claiming that as “stakeholders in the international system”
the US and China “share many strategic interests” (Sanger 2006). In August 2006,
Thomas J. Christensen, speaking in his capacity as US Deputy Assistant Secretary of
State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs before the US-China Economic and Security
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Review Commission, reiterated and reaffirmed the American “responsible global
stakeholder” China policy, noting that the policy “is in fact the crux of US policy toward
China today, a policy that combines active engagement to maximize areas of common
interest and cooperation, along with a recognition that we need to maintain strong US
regional capabilities in case China does not eventually move down a path consistent with
our interests” (Christensen 2006).
Defining “responsible stakeholder”
In China, the speech and its significance was followed with close interest.
Bafflement and much discussion characterized the initial Chinese reaction as to what
Zoellick meant by “stakeholder” a term with no direct translation in Mandarin. The
Washington Post noted that the focus on terminology was only the latest in a long line of
such occurrences in Sino-American relations, including the word “acknowledged” in the
1982 joint communiqué, and the use of the words “regret” and “apology” in the
resolution of the 2001 Hainan incident (King and Dean 2005). As posted on its Chinese
language website, the State Department translated stakeholder as “participants with
related interests” (liyi xiangguan de canyuzhe). China specialists in the US, such as
Elizabeth Economy of the Council on Foreign Relations put forth helpful interpretations:
“The stakeholder concept is a means of finding common ground between those who
perceive China primarily as a threat and those who view it more as an opportunity...It is a
recognition that China's influence and power are growing and that there is little that the
US can do to shape the evolution of this process other than to continue to draw China into
the international system” (quoted in Mitton 2005). Other American China hands, such as
David Lampton, helped the Chinese media present the term to their audience, explaining
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that stakeholder “bears similar meaning to ‘partner,’ but more strongly implies that the
United States thinks of China as an equal and important member in the current
international system that should share an interest in maintaining that system” (Xinhua
2005).
In public, Chinese influentials seemed to take Zoellick’s speech as a positive
building block for improving Sino-American ties, with some reservations. Zheng Bijian
(2005c), in a speech delivered at a conference in Beijing on November 3, 2005, presented
his response to Zoellick. Zheng praised Zoellick’s differentiation of China from the
former Soviet Union, seeing the speech as an expression of a new pragmatism. Zheng
referred vaguely to disagreements with Zoellick’s ideological prejudices towards
socialism and the CCP, but stressed that “minding of the overall situation” and
“pragmatism” were the key to progress in Sino-American relations. Playing off of
Zoellick’s invocation of the USSR, Zheng argued that the two communist regimes made
divergent choices in 1979 “that determined their fates”, with the USSR deciding to
invade Afghanistan, and China deciding to engage in reform and opening, thus
committing to a path of globalization which it has no intention of departing from. During
a speech at Yale University during his visit in 2006, President Hu Jintao appeared to take
up the term and go further: “We must not only become stakeholders,” Hu said but China
also “must become partners in constructive cooperation” (O’Neil 2006).
Chinese intellectuals eagerly took on the task of parsing Zoellick’s phrase. Wang
Jisi, director of the Institute of International Strategic Studies at the CCP Central Party
School, wrote that stakeholder in English “means shareholder. As a shareholder, you
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have to carry a certain risk. If you and I cooperate, the share price might rise, and
everyone will benefit; if you don't work hard, and you're not responsible, everyone will
lose” (King and Dean 2005). Scholars adopted an array of translations of stakeholder,
including “those with related interests” “liyi xiangguan zhe” (Pei 2006; Lin 2006), liyi
youguanfang (Niu 2007). Li Peng, writing in 2006, noted this lack of consensus
definition, listing six translations from official and scholarly discourse, including in
addition to liyiyouguanren: chirgu (“shareholder”), gongtong jingyingzhe
(“common/joint operator”), lihai gongdanzhe (“one who shares in gains and losses”),
gudong (“shareholder”), lihai guanxiren (“ parties concerned with gains and losses”), and
canguren (“shareholder”) (Li 2006, 7, fn.1).
Ma Xiaojun, commenting in Xuexi Shibao, argued that while it is usually
translated in Chinese as “lihai guanxi ren” any definition of stakeholder should take into
account the joint enterprise meaning. Ma wrote, “One of its meanings is, two sides
jointly invest in an enterprise, jointly manage it, bear responsibility together for how well
or badly it is run, share the risk together, and acquire interest together; the original
meaning seems to be better translated as "gongtong jingying zhe" (joint operators)” (Ma
2005). Similarly, for Kang Shaobang, Executive Deputy Director of the Institute of
International Strategic Studies at the Central Party School, Zoellick’s use of the term
stakeholder “seems similar to the relationship of a shareholder in an enterprise…stressing
… the common interests between China and the United States and the sharing of risks, so
(the relationship) must be a bit closer than a ‘constructive and cooperative relationship’”
(Kang 2005). Ma saw it as a progression from ‘partnership’: “According to authoritative
US sources, "partners" mean master and servant, and large and small, not a completely
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equal relationship; and "stakeholder" means more equal powers and obligations, hence
this concept has a more positive meaning of endorsing the Sino-US relationship” (Ma
2005).
The speech and stakeholder role were taken seriously enough by Chinese scholars
and spokespeople to be used as a resource; the stakeholder concept was redeployed in
Chinese rhetoric to pressure the US according to Chinese interests. For instance, the
Chinese media castigated the US government as an “irresponsible stakeholder” for
“politicizing business” when the State Department decided, under Congressional
pressure, to keep computers made by Lenovo, a partially Chinese owned company, from
being used on classified networks due to security concerns (Xinhua 2006a). Yuan Peng,
Deputy Director of the Institute of American Studies of the China Institute for
Contemporary International Relations, picked up on Zoellick’s advocacy of Chinese
Japanese historical dialogue on contentious historical matters by deploying the concept
against Japan. Yuan, on the occasion of Zoellick’s January 2006 visit to China, deployed
the new rhetoric urging that the US “consider whether or not steps should be taken to
exhort Japan to assume responsibility for what it had done in the past” and voicing an
expectation that the concept be applied to Japan: “People are expecting Zoellick, with his
strategic thinking and international vision, to be equally impartial and urge Japan to be a
‘responsible stakeholder’” (Yuan 2006).
China debates “responsible stakeholder”
Chinese scholars, in major international relations journals and opinion pieces,
have taken a range of common positions in regards to the “responsible stakeholder”
discourse. These positions range from enthusiastic to skeptical, and from optimistic to
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pessimistic. Often these varying positions are represented in the same argument. Many
note that this discourse replaces previous ones, particularly “China threat theory” and
“China collapse theory,” and their deleterious, foolish, or mistaken views of China.
Some focus on the change in US policy or attitude, taking it as somewhat genuine,
factional, or cloaking true intentions. Most commentators applaud the recognition of
China’s new role or American recognition of the “reality” of China’s rapid rise. Whether
or not the China responsibility theory represents a transformation in the West’s “idea of
China” is a popular topic of discussion. Exemplary is an opinion piece written by Zhang
Shengjun (2007), a Beijing Normal University professor, who lays out a common train of
logic produced for domestic consumption. Zhang concludes that Western concepts of
China have not really changed, and the appending of “responsibility” to stakeholder “is
nothing but a demand that China manage its international affairs according to the path
(dictated by) Western criteria.” For Zhang, “In a globalized world, all nations are
stakeholders,” and because “China has the proper position and clear policy on many
international problems” China is thus “in the process of gaining more and more nations
approval and consent.” The argument here is that, while showing some cosmetic
improvements, US China policy is flawed so long as there is an underlying
misunderstanding of China and a demand that China follow the dictates of Western
responsibility.
More optimistic accounts applaud Zoellick’s speech for its recognition of China’s
arrival, its positive shift in US foreign policy, and the strengthening of bilateral ties it
implied. The Zoellick speech was also taken as a symbol of the US government moving
away from China threat theory to redefine US-China relations, despite the persistence of
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a “Cold War mentality” and pursuit of unilateralism in some quarters. Observers such as
Qu Xing, vice president of China Foreign Affairs University, posited that the stakeholder
concept pointed towards the solidification of the bilateral relationship: “The common
expectations of China and the United States on many major regional and international
issues lead to a single choice—a constructive and cooperative relationship between the
two countries” (Xinhua 2006b).
Other scholars have applauded Zoellick’s speech as a break with past US policy,
particularly the “Cold War mentality,” but cast suspicion on factions within the US
government. From this perspective, even negative interpretations of the US QDR were
framed in terms of overall positive trends in US moderation towards China, locating
animosity towards China in the motivations of the Pentagon, not in the US policy making
community at-large. Li Xuejiang commends Zoellick’s rejection of the USSR analogy
for China:
More and more Americans have started to view China's development in an
objective and calm frame of mind. US Deputy Secretary of State Zoellick's speech
last September is a proof of this. He said, China today is not the Soviet Union;
China does not seek to disseminate anti-US ideology; China has no intention of
regarding the western democracies as enemies; and China does not believe that its
future lies in overturning the basic international order (Li 2006).

Chinese observers tend to frame their reception of Zoellick’s overture as an
implicit acknowledgement of China’s arrival as a great power, a great power of a new
kind. They cite approvingly US scholars such as Richard Haas, who believe that the
problems of globalization, such as nuclear proliferation, terrorism, infectious disease,
drugs, and global climatic change, mean that the US must develop great power partners
and therefore needs “other countries to become strong”(Qiu 2006, 26). Qiu Huafei
(2006), generally encouraged by the possibility of Sino-US cooperation and the finding
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of strategic common ground, states that Zoellick’s raising the point that China will
become a stakeholder in world affairs “implies a new type of recognition” (25) that
moves away from the assumption that Chinese development will follow the path of
Germany and Japan, and the assumptions of neoconservative China threat theory.
Many scholars understand Zoellick’s speech as an affirmation of China’s status
and a sign that the Bush administration had finally recognized the new “reality” of
China’s rise. For example, Yin Chengde, a fellow at the China Institute of International
Studies, observed that the “Bush Administration is paying attention to respecting China's
core interests instead of forcibly challenging them, and its China policy is tending to be
more moderate and pragmatic.” Yin argued the American adjustment of its China policy
from the early days of the Bush administration played a key role, noting that “This is the
first time that the US Government has so explicitly affirmed China's global influence and
raised relations with China to the level of global significance” (Yin 2006). Even for
scholars generally mistrustful of “stakeholder” discourse, such as Pei Yuanying (2006),
stakeholdership confirms their confidence that China, as a result of globalization, is now
indispensible: “no matter if its anti-terrorism, anti-proliferation, or economy and trade, or
resolution of regional and international questions, it is difficult to get away from (the
need for) China’s cooperation” (33).
Another theme is that Zoellick’s move is part of normal mid-term adjustment and,
while positive, does not represent any fundamental deviation from the pattern of Sino-
American relations. For instance, Wang (2006, 34) sees a second term correction as a
“law” of US China relations, presidents and presidential candidates talk tough playing the
“China card” but then facing reality must curb their hostility and moderate their China
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policy. Zoellick’s speech can be seen as a continuation of Bush’s post-9/11 adjustment,
and “for this reason Zoellick’s speech to a large degree does not depart from the inherent
patterns of China-US relations or US China policy” (34). Similarly, Lin Hongyu (2006)
argues there is a patterned influence of US presidential politics on US foreign policy that
accounts for the Bush Administration’s shift from its rejection of Clinton China policy
and its view of China as “strategic competitor” to the “stakeholder” position.
The analysis of Ma Zhengang (2007), president of the China Institute of
International Studies (CIIS) in Beijing is exemplary of the more critical, pessimistic end
of Chinese scholarly positions. Ma claims to uncover the essence of responsible
stakeholder idea and China responsibility theory, an essence that the west leaves
unspoken: the maintenance of US hegemony has left it unable to obstruct the objective
reality of Chinas rise or curtail Chinas influence now or in the future. In need of a
“transformational policy,” the US decided to urge a merger into the constraints of the
current international system which has its basis in the second world war, and is under the
leadership of a hegemon that doesn’t allow debate. Thus the new policy asks China to
shoulder responsibility under the terms set by the US and the West, and transform itself
according to US standards. Thus Ma sees China responsibility theory as in some sense
merely the latest version of containment policy, a more explicit and comprehensive
engagement policy. Ma further notes that the US and the West have already given China
a long list of responsibilities, including strengthening regional cooperation, combating
terrorism, WMD proliferation, playing a bigger role in managing the Iranian nuclear
problem, supporting rebuilding in Iran and Afghanistan, etc.
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Yet Ma also sees some positive development in China responsibility theory, since
it reflects that fact that the US is taking China seriously, recognizing its growing strength,
and admitting Chinas achievement of the effect and influence of a world great power.
Although China responsibility theory still contains the nucleus of China threat theory,
according to Ma, it also signals an awareness and switching of emphasis from hostility to
cooperation (2007, 3). Still in the final analysis, Ma urges that China’s responsibly be
seen in terms of its “greatest, most sacred responsibility”, the fostering of international
cooperation and establishment of a mutually prosperous harmonious society (3).
Other pessimistic scholars point to “structural contradictions,” incompatible
values, and the dangers inherent in the role the US has urged upon China. Wang Lianhe
(2006) takes Zoellick’s speech as an expression of the American side of a continued
strategic dialogue. Wang argues that the structural contradictions of the US China
relations remain the same as before Zoellick’s speech. In international history, the
phenomenon whereby a change in the power distribution among new rising great powers
and existing great powers leads to war is a common occurrence. Wang points to recent
American criticisms of exchange rate and military development as evidence that differing
basic values and philosophies can produce “structural contradictions” that constitute the
relationship’s most important problem (34). Wang points to the influence of a historical
inertia he sees as an innate pattern in Chinese American relations. Zoellick’s speech, in
this light, can be seen as a continuation of a trend of mid-term moderation towards China,
in this case the Bush Administration’s adjustment was hastened by the events of 9/11.
Wang argues that “for this reason Zoellick’s speech to a large degree does not depart
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from the inherent patterns of China-US relations or US China policy” (34). Wang also
raises doubts over whether Zoellick’s speech had President Bush’s support.
For Wang, despite the warm response Zoellick’s speech received, it hides a
“ruthless character behind a gentle appearance” (ruan zhong daiying, mian li cang zhen).
Wang spotlights the criticisms he finds in the speech and asks whether the international
system Zoellick offers China a role in is unipolar or multipolar, what the criteria for
determining responsible stakeholder is, and who precisely China is responsible to. While
there is “no harm in listening” Wang counsels that China maintain a cautious perspective,
challenging the US to put into practice its positive suggestions and be wary of the ways
the responsible stakeholder role can endanger China’s peaceful development.
Chinese intellectuals raise concerns that the implications of Zoellick’s speech go
beyond coordinating on the basis of interests, to values, a terrain on which they think
China and the US are incompatible. For Pei Yuanying (2006) former Chinese ambassador
to India, Zoellick’s speech does not symbolize a foundational transformation. Pei asserts
that US strategy in the final analysis still follows an “engage and contain” (jie chu + ezhi)
policy; the US may be preparing engagement prong of its strategy in light of China’s
rapid development, but it is not about to weaken the containment component. Pei warns
that Zoellick also wants to establish a foundation of “common values,” not just common
interests, and these values such as democracy and human rights, are sure to be American
values (40). Pei urges Chinese look beyond Zoellick’s rhetoric towards concrete US
foreign policy behavior, specifically, the United States’ stated ambition to prevent the
emergence of any challengers.
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Other Chinese commentators are explicit in warning that the “stakeholder” role
threatens the PRC’s formulation of world order. While stakeholdership can have its
advantages, Chinese observers express concerns that under this logic, China will become
a tool for the accomplishment of US national interests, integrating China into an
international order that is designed to serve American and western interests (Wang 2008).
As Wang Yingwei comments, “the American ‘stakeholder’ concept brings China into the
system’s orbit, but it does not permit the emergence of a different international system
that could endanger US national interests” thus flying in the face of “the new
international order China has built, based on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence
and the UN Charter, for the sake of establishing a global harmonious society” (2008, 22;
also Pei 2006, 40).
Rearticulating China’s Responsibility after Zoellick
As mentioned, discussions of Chinese “international responsibility” predate
Zoellick’s speech, dating from Wang Yizhou’s early discussions in the late 1990s of
China as a “responsible power.” An exchange in 2001 between Xia Liping, a professor at
the Shanghai Institute for International Strategic Studies and Colonel in the PLA reserve,
and Bates Gill an American China specialist indicates the evolution of Chinese notions of
“international responsibility.” Xia sets out to establish criteria of responsible power,
sorting the factors that determine whether China will become a responsible power into
‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ categories. Amidst boilerplate lectures on China’s defensive
posture and benevolent history (19), Xia points to China’s new focus on comprehensive
security (the consideration of economic factors alongside military ones), rejection of zero
sum and embrace of mutual security, involvement in cooperative multilateral security
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dialogues, support of confidence building measures in the Asia-Pacific region, and
gradual acceptance of military transparency (through publishing White Papers) as
evidence of a post-Cold War evolution of China’s concept of security (20).
Xia gestures at some domestic factors that presage “responsible” behavior, such
as progress in civil liberties, democracy, and rule of law, yet the “conditions necessary to
make China a responsible great power” Xia lists are almost entirely external. Other
countries should “help” China participate in international mechanisms such as the WTO
and achieve international integration, Japan and the US should not try to achieve
dominance within the Asia-Pacific region, and more Chinese reform is predicated on the
provision of a non-threatening security environment: “If China thinks that the
international security environment is stable and it is not facing serious military threats, it
will pursue its policy of reform (including political reform) and opening and its
independent foreign policy of peace” (24). Finally, Xia implies that China’s willingness
to take on the role as a responsible great power is conditional upon resolution of the
Taiwan question in China’s favor: “China cannot commit itself to renouncing the use of
force as a final resort to halt the independence of Taiwan and foreign intervention into
Taiwan. Therefore, force is also the guarantee that the Taiwan issue might be resolved
peacefully” (24).
Gill criticizes Xia’s approach for the way it formulates China as an object at the
mercy of outside forces. Gill conjectures that this “rather static approach to
understanding China’s future role in the world is on the one hand reflective of the
country’s century-long self-perception of being the ‘victim’ of imperialist history” but
additionally “reflects a certain propensity to absolve itself of its own responsibility for its
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destiny and to lay at the feet of outsiders either the success or failure of China’s evolution
into a ‘responsible great power’” (2001, 30). In reference to Xia’s article that could be
applied more generally, Gill notes that “the simple iteration of immutable principles does
not tell us about how China handles the tough problem of priorities and policy choice”
for instance in the event that these principles are self-contradictory such as the claim that
Chinese foreign policy is based on the interests of both the Chinese people and all of
humankind (31). The complaints Gill makes seem largely to characterize published
Chinese writings on the topic of China’s interpretation of national and international
responsibility.
In the wake of Zoellick’s speech, Chinese officials and scholars have continued to
form interpretations of Chinese responsibility, often adding specifics that approaches like
Xia’s overlooked. However, there is evidence of a shift brought about by Zoellick’s
speech as the Chinese grapple with what they see as an inescapable concept, and try to
give it Chinese characteristics. During a joint appearance in Shanghai with (then former
US Deputy Secretary of State) Zoellick in 2007, Zhao Qizheng, deputy director of the
Foreign Affairs Committee under the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference
outlined three areas of Chinese responsibility: its responsibility for self-development, its
responsibilities as UNSC permanent member, and its responsibility to face global
challenges of terrorism environmental protection, drug abuse, and disease, etc.(People’s
Daily 2007).
Ma Zhengang (2007) argues that China Responsibility theory and China’s “actual
record” of (and commitment to) international responsibility need to be differentiated. Ma
points to the way China, in its role as the only developing country that is a permanent
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member of the UN security council, has consistently taken principled stands, upholding
justice, opposing power politics, etc., without imposing its views on others. Some,
according to Ma, subjectively lay the blame for the worlds’ problems at Chinas door,
exaggerating Chinas responsibility for oil price rises, natural resource competition,
environmental degradation, and global warming. They accuse China of trying to expand
its political influence regionally and trying to push the other great powers out, obstructing
democratic transformation, forging particularly intimate links with human rights abusing
regimes, tolerating Iranian and North Korean fanaticism, and displaying a lack of
transparency when it comes to military development. Ma rejects the logic that says if
China rejects Western demands it is “irresponsible.”
In a 2007 essay in Shijie Zhishi, Wang Yiwei, a professor at Fudan University’s
American Research Center, lays out a Chinese approach to the problem of international
responsibility, noting like Ma that it has become fashionable to discuss international
responsibility as a means of laying blame at China’s feet for everything from Darfur to
global climate change. China, after “entering into the great power club” cannot forget its
developing nation identity. Wang raises what he sees as a pressing problem of how to
resolve a number of contradictions, including between “international responsibility” and
“non-interference into international affairs” (bu gan she nei zheng), but he does not
discuss it further. Instead, Wang focuses on several other contradictions, and frames his
contribution by asking who should China’s responsibility should be directed at, how it
should enact its responsibility, and what the ultimate goal of shouldering responsibility
should be. His answers: China is responsible first to its own large population, should
enact its responsibility through the UN and multilateral organizations, and should accept
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responsibility with the ultimate goal of “establishing a lasting peace and a mutually
prosperous, harmonious society.” For Wang, reaching this objective involves addressing
four pairs of contradictions: the balance of global public welfare and national meaning
and the sovereignty local national governments, the balance of responsibility and
ability/power with identity, the balance of orthodox international norms and new norms,
and the balance of short term interests and long term strategic goals (63).
According to Wang, China can manage its two contradictory identities by playing
the role of bridge between developed countries and developing countries, for example, on
the issue of global climate change and environmental deterioration. Wang criticizes
measures of environmental degradation that take the state as a unit as unfair to China;
since China is sacrificing its natural resources and environment to produce enough to
meet the demand of prosperous countries, he argues that China should not accept blame
for destroying the environment. For Wang, China needs to resist the attempts of
developed countries to make “China’s responsibility surpass its ability,” adversely
influencing its reform and development plan. The trick for Wang is to “win world
confidence” while autonomously deciding how to shoulder international responsibility
“within the scope of its abilities” (63).
Liu Jianfei (2007) develops a notion of China’s responsibility in terms of peaceful
development which sees “responsibility theory” as a threat to China. Liu argues that
“China responsibility theory” is peaceful development’s “baptism of fire” (yan jun kao
yan) or severe test; if China takes on too much international responsibility, it could block
peaceful development and frustrate China’s rise (23). For Liu, as for many other Chinese
writers, with the cycles of “China threat theory” and “China collapse theory” obviously
273
weakened from a confrontation with the reality of China’s continued rise, the birth of
China responsibility theory was an inevitable strategic move to find a new means of
managing China on the part of the west (23). Yet China due to its embrace of
globalization, is too integrated to be able to avoid the matter of international
responsibility (25). Nor can China afford to “turn a deaf ear (zhi ruo wang wen)” to
responsibility theory, because doing so would make numerous developing countries who
have placed their hopes in China lose hope, prompt Western suspicions of China’s rise
and peaceful development and thus invite intervention, and provide a new line of attack
for international anti-China forces (26). Liu presents three aspects of the principle
expression of China’s international responsibility. First, abiding by mutually
advantageous principles of “equality and mutual benefit” (ping deng huli), China does
not attach any other conditions to its assistance of developing countries, implementing a
development model that is according to Liu superior to the neocolonialist policies of
developed great powers. Second, Liu points to China’s responsibility with regard to
foreign aid, for example in African debt relief and increasing aid projects. Third, Liu
points to China’s participation in UN peacekeeping activities and its stance on UN
membership fees (26).
Liu also notes two problems, from China’s perspective, with taking on
international responsibility. First there is the problem of balancing international
responsibility with self-development, as for Liu, international responsibility is based on
China’s strength, which must be maintained by continuing self development. Moreover,
some feel that self-development is a form of international responsibility as it is “an
enormous contribution to the world.” Neglecting one’s own development while “blindly
274
accepting international responsibility,” Liu writes, is akin to “draining the pond to get all
the fish (jie ze er yu)”; it would be irresponsible not to develop China. Liu then develops
five ways that China’s self-development is really a form of international responsibility:
since China has 1/5 the world’s population, efforts at developing China count as a
contribution towards world collective development; since China is a peace-loving country
due to the legacy of its historical subjugation, a stronger China benefits world peace; if
China as a multi-racial, multi-cultural country can properly develop, it will serve as an
example of multicultural harmonious coexistence for the world; China’s success as a
socialist country will offer all nations, particularly developing countries, an alternative,
superior, model of development; finally under the guidance of a “scientific outlook on
development (ke xue fa zhan guan),”China will construct an resource conserving,
environmentally friendly alternative to orthodox industrialization and modernization
paths , simultaneously developing economy and society while realizing harmony between
people and nature.
The second big issue with notions of shared responsibility is coordinating with
western great powers. Liu writes, “Western great powers hope China is able to become a
‘stakeholder’ to their responsibility. This is impossible”(26). While China will not
prompt western resistance to its rise by becoming hostile and antagonistic, it will only
become a responsible great power by directing its responsibility towards the entire world.
Still, Liu sees coordination and understanding, along with China acting like a partner not
enemy, will ensure the two states can overcome conflicts of interest.
Niu Haibin’s (2007) discussion of China’s international responsibility is also
instructive, as Niu takes seriously the need for the discourse of responsibility, if only to
275
enhance national reputation, but places it in explicit identity terms. To establish China
responsibility theory, scholars first must grasp “the power of responsibility discourse”
(49). In the absence of world government, the ultimate authority over international
responsibility should be retained in national hands. China cannot be faulted for
conceptualizing international responsibility in a way that allows it to avoid being drawn
into US hegemonic politics, since the US itself was able to rise by avoiding European
struggles (49). Since there is no one criteria for “international responsibility” different
agents must, via discursive power, promote their own respective criteria. According to
Niu, China does not have the resources to sustain both its developing nation and great
power identities, and this can lead to “role tensions” between its dual-identities and
international responsibility. Niu argues that China’s developing country identity will be
progressively watered down (zhujian danhua) while the great power identity strengthens,
leading to a corresponding rise in China’s ability to fulfill its international responsibility
(50). However, fulfilling international responsibly must be done according to one’s
capabilities, and neglecting national conditions can lead to an unrealistic shouldering of
too much responsibility, since China still needs to make enormous investments in
building its domestic “harmonious society” (50).
Among the Party-line statements in the analysis of scholars like Wang or Liu can
be distinguished a certain self-serving theory of responsibility backed by relentless
sinocentric logic. When it comes time to shoulder international responsibility, for
instance, in Liu’s account, China is merely a “regional great power.” However, Chinese
scholars’ calculated efforts to reduce international pressure for China to take on a level of
international responsibility incommensurate with its incomplete rise, limited resources,
276
etc., are evidence of at least a partial battle of China’s identity. Zoellick’s speech helped
catalyze Chinese discussions of international responsibility, shifting the conversation
from one based solely on the instrumental cultivation of reputation, tying Chinese
influentials in deeper with American constructions of China even as they formulate
“international responsibility” in concert with prevailing Chinese IR discourses such as
“harmonious society.” Within Chinese academic discourse, it is possible for
responsibility theory to become a unifying concept that underwrites China’s development
project. It is also possibly a threat to China’s development and its preferred order.
According to Chinese thinkers, while the shouldering of too much responsibility could
prove ruinous for peaceful development, it also compromises Chinese power to order
international relations as it sees fit. China may be a stakeholder, but China does not
completely accept a Western-led international order. As Zheng Bijian said in 2005,
“There are of course illogical aspects in the existing world order. We therefore advocate
using reforms, and not other ways, to build up a new world order (2005c). Thus the goal
of peaceful rise is great power status and the ability to order.

Conclusion: Roles, ordering, and Sino-American futures

Taking a discursive approach to the stakeholder debate helps throw constitutive
relations into sharper focus. The American attempt to extend this role to China has been
a success, at least in terms of prompting among Chinese widespread debate, interpretive
contestation, and even re-articulation of the terms the US is offering. There seems to be a
growing interest in theorizing “China’s role” among Chinese scholars. Pang Zhongying
277
(2006) somewhat opaquely advocates for a stronger, “self-defined” role for China. He
argues that “contradictions begin to appear between the policy of hiding true capacities
and biding the time in stabilizing domestic politics and searching for political security
and joining the international system” (30) have led to China taking an undefined role in
the international system, and he urges China to take a more active posture while calling
for Chinese scholars to debate China’s role at the “stage of the post-‘tao guang yang
hui’” (31).
6

Viewed in narrative and identity terms, the “responsible stakeholder” metaphor,
though drawing on and appealing to existing discursive constructions, represents an
important modification of two narratives that have informed US-China relations. For the
US, the stakeholder discourse represents a newfound recognition of Chinese international
agency, a role, however that still makes sense within the “liberal China myth” narrative
identified by Richard Madsen (1995). For China, ultimate acceptance of the role is a
perhaps final move away from “century of humiliation” narratives and its related,
developing country identity; responsible stakeholder status is one way to achieve great
power status, one of the goals of PRC foreign policy since 1949. The “responsible
stakeholder” discourse constitutes US-China relations in a new way, and provides a
discursive basis for cooperative relations unlike any previous representations of China.
Ultimately, the “success” of Zoellick’s speech act will be conditioned by the extent to
which the US and China can come to share a narrative ordering of international relations.

6
The full formulation is tao guang yang hui you suo zuo hui, known as Deng Xiaopeng’s instructions
regarding the Chinese foreign policy approach at the end of the Cold War; the formulation on its face
proscribes foreign conflict while China is weak. Shirk, who translates it as “Hide our capacities and bide
our time, but also get some things done,” notes that “Deng’s cryptic instruction is often repeated but was
never published—perhaps because it was intended to deceive foreign countries that China was weaker than
it actually is, or because it might be misconstrued as intended to deceive” (2007, 105).
278
Chapter 8: Conclusion

This dissertation has explored the implications of taking Sino-American relations
as social, constitutive relations and threat construction as a social process in order to offer
a new perspective on US-China relations. Arguing that IR theorists have approached
Sino-American relations with a restrictive toolbox, the study focused on the meaningful
roles the two states have played in their significant Other’s foreign policies. As noted,
this was not an exhaustive treatment of the enormous history of Sino-American relations,
but a partial, interpretive account aimed at establishing the value of a constructivist
approach to one of the world’s most important bilateral relationships. The role of China
and the US in each other’s foreign policy discourse has grown more central in recent
years, and the ‘proto-constitutive’ encounters treated in this thesis give us a way to
discipline our expectations about the future of Sino-American relations.
I have argued that threats are not given or natural but must be constructed through
discourse, and that a focus on social relations and meaning is a valuable corrective to
rationalist models of threat. One way to understand these processes is to focus on
particular threat relationships and attend to the boundary producing effects of exchanges
of meaning. Threats are conditioned by the deployment of existing cultural and historical
materials and by the interplay of identities and the narratives that sustain them.
The starting point of this thesis was the American “idea of China,” a rich,
historically variable discourse that in its positive interpretations involves the recognition
of the ways “the Orient has repeatedly offered a line of flight from the banality and
spiritual vacuity of a materialistic Western culture” (Eperjesi 2004, 29). Building on this,
279
the study has framed Sino-American relations as joint products of American knowledge
of China and Chinese knowledge about the US. This leads to a better understanding, for
example, of the way the Chinese state has acted as a projective test for America’s
international imagination and vice versa.
This thesis has sought to make three general contributions to academic
knowledge. First, contributing to International Relations theory, it has synthesized and
developed a theory of threat politics informed by constructivist framework and applied its
insights to one of the most important bilateral relationships in international relations.
Bringing together and building upon existing notions of threat in the IR literature, the
thesis has promoted a third generation of threat studies within IR, one that moves away
from rationalist approaches, stress constitutive relations including boundary production
and maintenance, take language seriously, and attend to the historical construction of the
Other through specific representations at various sites.
The account presented here challenges neorealist theories of US-China relations.
By historicizing the relationship, we can cast doubt on structural realist theories of threat
that rely on the concept of anarchy to predict inevitable Sino-American conflict. We can
also see that there is nothing immutable about the Chinese threat; discourses of US
foreign policy and domestic politics constructed and reconstructed the Chinese state,
representing it by turns as a stagnant giant, blank slate or frontier, great power, internal
subversive, and responsible stakeholder. Internally, representations of Chinese living in
America have ranged from a dangerous influence on the American polity to inassimilable
Other to potential fifth column. My account can also usefully augment “balance of
threat” theories that to date have lacked a theorization of how states or other political
280
communities come to present a threat to others. But arguments against realist
international relations theories that depend on a psychological corrective also need to be
problematized. It is still common to frame US-China relations in terms of “perception”
and “misperception” (Gries 2009).
1
By moving away from objectivist ideas of
“misperception” and turning our attention to constitutive relations within the social
register of international relations (namely through attending to discursive interactions) we
can better understand how these exchanges of meaning take place. Psychological,
cognitivist and constructivist IR theorists will have to work together to formulate a more
satisfying theory.
Second, contributing to social theory, the thesis has developed a synthetic
approach to discourse analysis, one informed by the legacy of literature and philosophy
and the insights of the cognitive sciences. In doing so, it offers a new way to understand
the materiality of discourse, and a new way to think through the connections between
(embodied) realism and linguistic practice. It also expands the reach of interpretive
social science, and adds comparative case studies to interpretivist repertoire. I have also
sought to contribute to scholarship that is starting to make use of discourse approaches to
illuminate important aspects of Chinese politics and US-China relations (Callahan 2004;
Goh 2004). In a way, a focus on political language should not surprise any student of
US-China relations. “Sacred texts,” (Bush 2004) such as the 1972 Shanghai
communiqué, the 1978 joint communiqué on the normalization US-PRC relations, or the

1
Cognitive science has argued that the purpose of our embodied brains is not accurate perception but
“enacted perception”; that is, there are evolutionary reasons to doubt “that the purpose of human cognition
is to produce an accurate representation of the world” (Slingerland 2008 47-51). This means that there is
more work to be done adapting cognitive approaches to constructivist frameworks, a project that cognitive
metaphor theory can make important contributions to.

281
2001 EP-3 incident’s “very sorry” letter have long been at the center of Sino-American
relations. But as I have argued, the study of discourse must be conceptualized as
encompassing both texts, practices, and the ways that cultural and cognitive apparatuses
recruit material resources.
Another benefit of discursively historicizing this threatful relationship is that it
complicates accounts of the liberal international order that hold the Chinese state as
always ‘outside.’ Looking from a US perspective, constitutive theory shows the role the
idea of China has played in American attempts to order international relations, first in the
age of imperialism, later in the configuration of the post-WWII order, and most recently
in the globalized, post-911 period. To be sure, other actors, the USSR and Japan most
notably, have often eclipsed the Chinese state in terms of their centrality to US (and
Chinese) identity. What have been relatively stable in US-China relations are the above-
mentioned narratives with which state actors understand their histories and identities. At
key points, these discourses rule out of bounds consideration of that which does not fit
the prevailing “regimes of truth,” such as the elements of US behavior that did not
conform to the phenomenon of imperialist aggression towards the Chinese state, or
Chinese agential initiative that could not be disciplined to fit the American template of a
China that can be channeled along a liberal path. The current efforts of China’s leaders
to manage China’s domestic weaknesses while engaging in moderate diplomacy and the
always changing US interpretations of these efforts may have profound effects on future
Sino-American relations.
Third, in terms of the study of US-China relations, the thesis has championed a
constitutive approach, one that takes China and US not as pre-given, unproblematic
282
entities, but instead views Sino-American relations as the ongoing, historical
achievements of discursive practices. This has allowed us to better understand episodes in
the history of US-China relations that have been understudied, such as the Chinagate
scandals of the 1990s or the stakeholder debates of the 2000s, and those which can be
newly illuminated by constructivist accounts, such as the Open Door and Roosevelt’s
construction of China as a permanent member of the UN Security Council.
Reflecting on the development of the relationship over the period examined in this
thesis, it is possible to see how the US and China have become increasingly significant
Others. This is evident in the role China and the US play in the other’s ordering
processes, and the identity adjustments that accompany these roles. While the US-China
relationship is still best described as ‘threatful,’ as the responsible stakeholder case
shows, the discourses through which the US and China come to know the other show
potential movement in the direction of cooperation. The US discourse of China, though
still dominated by liberal assumptions and a belief in American agency, has moved from
its construction in the late 19
th
century under the Open Door of China as purely an object
with no control over its fate, to a representation that takes China as a member, even a
potential stakeholder, that’s actions matter greatly for the Western-led international order.
In this regard, I have tried to emphasize that, while identities can be maneuvered into
exclusivist opposition, it is also the case that the opposite can occur; significant others
that were once understood as threats can come to be represented as partners or
stakeholders. If such roles offered by ‘Ego’ are reciprocated by ‘Alter,’ there is a good
chance that China and the United States can come to share or partially share a narrative
(for instance, of modernity); this is one way that actors “socialization to and participation
283
in collective knowledge” (Wendt 1992, 399) can be profitably conceptualized. Sharing a
narrative may lead to the US and China, in some sense, embedding themselves in a
shared culture such as those Wendt discusses.
In other words, this thesis has placed stress on how components of discourse, such
as narrative and metaphor, are integral to the processes of socialization and participation
in collective knowledge that constructivists have put on the agenda of IR theory. Two
prominent “meta” narratives that recur in the case material are the American narrative of
China as a proper site of American agency and as subject of US reform and molding
(seeing China as a site of benevolent intervention, as an intellectual possession of West,
as a potential liberal or Christian nation, etc.), and the Chinese narrative of humiliation
and recovery of great power status (underwritten variously, by shared historical travails,
Middle Kingdom chauvinism, the legacies of WWII, etc.). The China “produced” by
these two narratives is a very different kind of modern China, and while there are signs
that these narratives are being rewritten in recent years, these developments bear
continuing close attention.
Discourses produced in the “domestic” space and disseminated by technology and
media will continue to impact the process of Sino-American relations. The relationship is
complicated by the element of internal security, by for example, the potential liminal
threat posed by Asian Americans and Chinese nationals living in the US. The
prosecution of Wen Ho Lee demonstrated again the modulating view of Americans of
Chinese descent and their securitization, and showed how threat and fear can come to be
attached to particular subjects. China’s own (socially constructed) domestic threat, the
Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province were troublingly the site of compromise and
284
improved cooperative relations on terrorism between the US and China in the years
following September 11, 2001. Further investigations of the intrasubjective component
of Sino-American relations are warranted by the presence of Chinese Americans in
evolving discourses of US identity.
Two further implications of the current study can be briefly mentioned. The view
that international relations can be understood as social relations is making some headway
in the study of Chinese foreign policy. For example, Johnston (2003b, 2008) focuses on
China’s involvement in formal institutions in the period 1980-2000, and whether this can
be attributed to “socialization.” Arguing that structural realism exaggerates the
homogenizing effects of international structure, Johnson instead tries to isolate the effects
of socialization processes by examining Chinese participation in international institutions
such as the UN Conference on Disarmament, the ASEAN Regional Forum and
negotiations over the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. To do so, he separates ideational
variables from behavior and identifies casual mechanisms by which China is being
socialized, including mimicking, status sensitivity, and persuasion (2008, xxv).
As Johnston makes clear (2003b, 144 n.7), he is not interested in studying the
interaction of agents with agents but wants to understand cooperation within institutions.
Yet, a complementary analysis, informed by this thesis, might focus on how the US-
China relationship itself can also be viewed as an informal institution. Institutions, as
defined by Alexander Wendt, are “relatively stable set or ‘structure’ of identities and
interests” which, though they “come to confront individuals as more or less coercive
social facts” are ultimately a function of actors’ collective knowledge (399). Institutions,
in this understanding, “can be cooperative or conflictual” (399). The narratives of self
285
and other presented in this thesis are an alternative way to approach “the social” since
knowledge is understood as a discursive construction. This is a warrant for further
attention to the way US-China relations are constructed by the knowledge either side
builds of the other. Such an effort should include both analysis of official, diplomatic
knowledge and reflections on scholarly knowledge. It is unlikely that China will be
“socialized” entirely outside of narratives that give this socialization meaning.
Another possible implication of the account developed in this thesis relates to the
discourse of “soft power” currently a part of many discussions of Chinese foreign policy
strategy (see for example, Kurlantzick 2007). Chinese notions of soft power depart from
that originally presented by Joseph Nye (2004), who focused on the way states can use
attraction and appeal instead of coercion to achieve their goals. China’s notions of soft
power focus instead on the growth of interest in Chinese language and culture, and
promote Chinese values such as non-interference in internal affairs, and state-directed
economic growth. They take an expansive view of “appeal,” broadening Nye’s notion to
include “anything outside of the military and security realm, including not only popular
culture and public diplomacy but also more coercive economic and diplomatic levers like
aid and investment and participation in multilateral organizations” (Kurlantzick 2007, 6)
In light of the PRC’s embrace of this new strategy and the United State’s falling
popularity after the Bush Administration’s pre-emptive invasion of Iraq, “soft power”
would seem to be the latest site of discursive contestation in Sino-American relations.
This encounter has thus far been framed in Western scholarship as the challenge of
rehabilitating America’s image while countering China’s efforts to strengthen its global
influence. Using the discourse tools presented here, scholars can study not only the
286
discursive construction of the soft power concept and its varying interpretations, but also
the academic discourses such as the new discipline of Public Diplomacy, that have served
as venues for the development and spread of these concepts. Bially Mattern (2005) has
begun such a project, placing the sociolinguistic construction of attraction at the center of
her inquiry into soft power. Following upon the analysis presented in the final case
study, we can also ask how China’s role as stakeholder relates to and interacts with its
soft power strategy.
As scholars and policymakers debate the implications of China’s “rise,” most note
that the unfolding of US-China relations promises to be one of the “main events” of the
21
st
century. The manner in which China and the US discursively position the other in
their preferred international orders continues to grow in salience, and because of their
prominence and power, whether each takes the other as threat is a key to future
international security. Since meanings of the US and China are always in process, and
even dominant representations can never exhaust the existing possibilities and
configurations of identities, there is always space for change.
287
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Creator Blanchard, Eric Michael (author)

Core Title Constituting United States-China relations: from the open door to the responsible stakeholder debate

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program International Relations

Publication Date 01/31/2011

Defense Date 05/13/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag China,China and UN Security Council,constructivism,discourse analysis,international relations theory,interpretivism,metaphor,narrative,OAI-PMH Harvest,open door,qualitative methods,responsible stakeholder,Security,Sino-American relations,threat,U.S. foreign policy,Wen Ho Lee

Place Name China (countries), USA (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Tickner, Judith Ann (committee chair), Lynch, Daniel C. (committee member), Rosen, Stanley (committee member)

Creator Email eblancha@usc.edu,eric.blanchard@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2442

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Rights Blanchard, Eric Michael

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