| 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 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. |
