Neg China Reaction da 1NC

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Crisis Management Link

Literature that talks about crisis management with China is just as implicated in threat construction as literature that explicitly identifies China as an enemy—both justify US will to dominate the world

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(Chengxin, Political Science, Australian National U, “The ‘China Threat’ in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics”, Alternatives, June-July)

The discursive construction of the U.S. self and the "Chinese threat" argument are not innocent, descriptive accounts of some "independent" reality. Rather, they are always a clarion call for the practice of power politics. At the apex of this power-politics agenda is the politico-strategic question of "what is to be done" to make the United States secure from the (perceived) threats it faces. At a general level, as Benjamin Schwarz proposes, this requires an unhindered path to U.S. global hegemony that means not only that the United States must dominate wealthy and technologically sophisticated states in Europe and East Asia— America's "allies"—but also that it must deal with such nuisances as Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic and Kim Jong II, so that potential great powers need not acquire the means to deal with those problems themselves. And those powers that eschew American supervision—such as China—must be both engaged and contained. The upshot of "American leadership" is that the United States must spend nearly as much on national security as the rest of the world combined.6' This "neocontainment" policy has been echoed in the "China threat" literature. In a short yet decisive article titled "Why We Must Contain China," Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer insists that "containing China" and "undermining its ruthless dictatorship" constitute two essential components of "any rational policy toward a rising, threatening China." Not only is a policy other than containment considered irrational, but even a delay to implement it would be undesirable, as he urges that "containment of such a bully must begin early in its career." To this end, Krauthammer offers such "practical" options as strengthening regional alliances (with Vietnam, India, and Russia, as well as Japan) to box in China; standing by Chinese dissidents; denying Beijing the right to host the Olympics; and keeping China from joining the World Trade Organization on the terms it desires.^^ Containing China is of course not the only option arising from the "China threat" literature. More often than not, there is a subtle, business-style "crisis management" policy. For example, Bernstein and Munro shy away from the word containment, preferring to call their China policy management.^^ Yet, what remains unchanged in the management formula is a continued promotion of controlling China. For instance, a perusal of Bernstein and Munro's texts reveals that what they mean by management is no different than Krauthammer's explicit containment stance. TM By framing U.S.China relations as an issue of "crisis management," they leave little doubt of who is the "manager" and who is to be "managed." In a more straightforward manner, Betts and Christensen state that coercion and war must be part and parcel of the China management policy: In addressing the China challenge, the United States needs to think hard ahout three related questions: first, how to avoid crises and war through prudent, coercive diplomacy; second, how to manage crises and fight a war if the avoidance effort fails; third, how to end crises and terminate war at costs acceptable to the United States and its allies.^^ This is not to imply that the kind of perspectives outlined above will automatically be translated into actual China policy, but one does not have to be exceedingly perceptive to note that the "China threat" perspective does exert enormous influence on U.S. policy making on China. To illustrate this point, I want now to examine some specific implications of U.S. representations of the "China threat" for U.S.-China relations in relation to the 1995-1996 Taiwan Strait missile crisis and the "spy plane" incident of 2001.

Stereotyping China Link

Claiming that China will be dangerous because of geography, or economic destiny, or inevitable political clashes engages in the same type of threat construction as explicitly identifying China as a military threat. The common thread is the construction of a mysterious other that poses a threat to the international order.

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(Chengxin, Professor of Political Science at Australian National University, “The ‘China Threat’ in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics”, Alternatives, June-July)

=Likewise, with the goal of absolute security for the United States in mind, Richard Betts and Thomas Christensen argue: The truth is that China can pose a grave problem even if it does not become a military power on the American model, does not intend to commit aggression, integrates into a global economy, and liberalizes politically. Similarly, the United States could face a dangerous conflict over Taiwan even if it turns out that Beijing lacks the capacity to conquer the island. . . . This is true because of geography; because of America's reliance on alliances to project power; and because of China's capacity to harm U.S. forces, U.S. regional allies, and the American homeland, even while losing a war in the technical, military sense.*>' By now, it seems clear that neither China's capabilities nor intentions really matter. Rather, almost by its mere geographical existence, China has been qualified as an absolute strategic "other," a discursive construct from which it cannot escape. Because of this, "China" in U.S. IR discourse has been objectified and deprived of its own subjectivity and exists mainly in and/or the U.S. self. Little wonder that for many U.S. China specialists, China becomes merely a "national security concern" for the United States, with the "severe disproportion between the keen attention to China as a security concern and the intractable neglect of China's [own] security concerns in the current debate."^^ At this point, at issue here is no longer whether the "China threat" argument is true or false, but is rather its reflection of a shared positivist mentality among mainstream China experts that they know China better than do the Chinese themselves.^^ "We" alone can know for sure that they consider "us" their enemy and thus pose a menace to "us." Such an account of China, in many ways, strongly seems to resemble Orientalists' problematic distinction between the West and the Orient. Like orientalism, the U.S. construction of the Chinese "other" does not require that China acknowledge the validity of that dichotomous construction. Indeed, as Edward Said point out, "It is enough for 'us' to set up these distinctions in our own minds; [and] 'they' become 'they' accordingly. "64 It may be the case that there is nothing inherently wrong with perceiving others through one's own subjective lens. Yet, what is problematic with mainstream U.S. China watchers is that they refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the inherent fluidity of Chinese identity and subjectivity and try instead to fix its ambiguity as absolute difference from "us," a kind of certainty that denotes nothing but otherness and threats. As a result, it becomes difficult to find a legitimate space for alternative ways of understanding an inherently volatile, amorphous China^^ or to recognize that China's future trajectory in global politics is contingent essentially on how "we" in the United States and the West in general want to see it as well as on how the Chinese choose to shape it.^^ Indeed, discourses of "us" and "them" are always closely linked to how "we" as "what we are" deal with "them" as "what they are" in the practical realm.

Exaggerated threat perceptions are based on misunderstanding and simplistic projections of US values onto China. This demonization has rhetorical advantages for the arguer but is undermining our ability to have an effective foreign policy with China.

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(Stanley, Lecturer in Law and Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society, University of California ( Berkeley), "The Dragon As Demon: Images Of China On Capitol Hill" (March 4, 2004). Center for the Study of Law and Society Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program. JSP/Center for the Study of Law and Society Faculty Working Papers. Paper 18, http://repositories.cdlib.org/csls/fwp/18).

The arguments of members of Congress on abortion, religious freedom, and dissent are grounded in domestic issues of high “symbolic” significance to some Americans. Such arguments, however, are one-dimensional, and project American values and institutions onto a different society and culture without nuance or awareness of the difficulty of transplanting those values and institutions. As already noted, these critics of China give no hint that American leverage over China’s domestic policies might be extremely limited. Nor is there any evidence of recognition that considerable time would be required to realize any program of political reform undertaken in China. Free from doubt, adamant in their moralism, unrelenting in their emotional criticism, and insistent on expressing the most idealistic representation of American values, the members of Congress who form an anti-China coalition have a significant debating advantage over those members who favor engagement. The latter must look to a future in which, they hope, economic and political reform will grow in a China benefited by trade, foreign investment, and a peaceful international environment. That future is uncertain, but the critics who have been quoted here can express their beliefs and hopes buttressed by a moral certainty that pro-enagement members cannot affect. ... It is impossible to differentiate among the reasons underlying the demonizing of China by some in Congress, but some ignorance, willful or not, underlies the words of the demonizers. More than ignorance is involved, of course, and inquiry into the dynamics of Congressional participation in making China policy obviously must go behind the Congressional debate that forms the public record. Whatever other factors are at work, however, the rhetoric that dominates discussions of China by some members of Congress promises to continue to deform not only their personal perspectives, but the contribution that Congress makes to formulation of this country’s China policy. At the very least, administration policymakers are “diverted from other tasks…Much time is spent dealing with often exaggerated congressional assertions about negative features of the Chinese government’s behavior…The congressional critics are open to a wide range of Americans— some with partisan or other interests – who are prepared to highly in often graphic terms real or alleged policies and behaviors of the Chinese government in opposition to US interests.”41

Debates about the threat posed by China ignore that political descriptions do not just name threats but also create them—the silly assumption that their authors are objective ignores that reality is always socially constructed and ideology feeds the drive for US military expansion.

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(Chengxin, Professor of Political Science at Australian National University, “The ‘China Threat’ in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics”, Alternatives, June-July)

While U.S. China scholars argue fiercely over "what China precisely is," their debates have been underpinned by some common ground, especially in terms of a positivist epistemology. Firstly, they believe that China is ultimately a knowable object, whose reality can be, and ought to be, empirically revealed by scientific means. For example, after expressing his dissatisfaction with often conflicting Western perceptions of China, David M. Lampton, former president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, suggests that "it is time to step back and look at where China is today, where it might be going, and what consequences that direction will hold for the rest of the world."2 Like many other China scholars, Lampton views his object of study as essentially "something we can stand back from and observe with clinical detachment."^ Secondly, associated with the first assumption, it is commonly believed that China scholars merely serve as "disinterested observers" and that their studies of China are neutral, passive descriptions of reality. And thirdly, in pondering whether China poses a threat or offers an opportunity to the United States, they rarely raise the question of "what the United States is." That is, the meaning of the United States is believed to be certain and beyond doubt. I do not dismiss altogether the conventional ways of debating China. It is not the purpose of this article to venture my own "observation" of "where China is today," nor to join the "containment" versus "engagement" debate per se. Rather, I want to contribute to a novel dimension of the China debate by questioning the seemingly unproblematic assumptions shared by most China scholars in the mainstream IR community in the United States. To perform this task, I will focus attention on a particularly significant component of the China debate; namely, the "China threat" literature. More specifically, I want to argue that U.S. conceptions of China as a threatening other are always intrinsically linked to how U.S. policymakers/mainstream China specialists see themselves (as representatives of the indispensable, security-conscious nation, for example). As such, they are not value-free, objective descriptions of an independent, preexisting Chinese reality out there, but are better understood as a kind of normative, meaning-giving practice that often legitimates power politics in U.S.-China relations and helps transform the "China threat" into social reality. In other words, it is self-fulfilling in practice, and is always part of the "China threat" problem it purports merely to describe. In doing so, I seek to bring to the fore two interconnected themes of self/other constructions and of theory as practice inherent in the "China threat" literature—themes that have been overridden and rendered largely invisible by those common positivist assumptions. These themes are of course nothing new nor peculiar to the "China threat" literature. They have been identified elsewhere by critics of some conventional fields of study such as ethnography, anthropology, oriental studies, political science, and international relations.* Yet, so far, the China field in the West in general and the U.S. "China threat" literature in particular have shown remarkable resistance to systematic critical reflection on both their normative status as discursive practice and their enormous practical implications for international politics.^ It is in this context that this article seeks to make a contribution. I begin with a brief survey of the "China threat" argument in contemporary U.S. international relations literature, followed by an investigation of how this particular argument about China is a discursive construction of other, which is predicated on the predominant way in which the United States imagines itself as the universal, indispensable nation-state in constant need of absolute certainty and security. Continues… Similarly, when they claim that "China can pose a grave problem," Betts and Christensen are convinced that they are merely referring to "the truth."25 In the following sections, I want to question this "truth," and, more generally, question the objective, self-evidentiary attitudes that underpin it. In my view, the "China threat" literature is best understood as a particular kind of discursive practice that dichotomizes the West and China as self and other. In this sense, the "truism" that China presents a growing threat is not so much an objective reflection of contemporary global reality, per se, as it is a discursive construction of otherness that acts to bolster the hegemonic leadership of the United States in the post-Cold War world. Therefore, to have a better understanding of how the discursive construction of China as a "threat" takes place, it is now necessary to turn attention to a particularly dominant way of U.S. self-imagination.