Of Risk and Threat: How the United States Perceives China’s Rise

Abstract

Abstract Whether and how China’s rise renders it a threat has been an enduring study. Such literature may be categorised into four traditions: rationalist, structuralist, culturalist, and poststructuralist. Although these highlight the objective and subjective elements of China and its rise as a security concern, there is a puzzling scarcity of analyses that investigate the extent to which the USA itself has discursively constructed China as a security issue. To examine systematically what the USA has made of China, therefore, this article applies discourse analysis to US official security discourse. It finds that, whereas the US government has constructed China as a threat to its own national security as regards cybersecurity and economic competition, it has represented China’s rise to the international community only as a collective risk across the military, political, and economic sectors. This practice has been largely consistent since 2005, in spite of China’s so-called “assertive” turn. The article thereby clarifies the state of US–China competition from the US perspective.