Introduction
The relationship of the United States and People’s Republic of China (China) is arguably one of the most important in this century. The ability of the United States and China to maintain a cooperative relationship will shape, to a large extent, outcomes on key global issues such as the stability and growth of the global economy, resource scarcity, climate change, and the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Since President Nixon’s policy of constructive engagement over four decades ago, the strategic partnership of the two has grown to an extent unimaginable back in 1972. The alignment of strategic interests between the two has led to policies of undeniable mutual benefit to date—on one hand, China’s access to world markets has allowed its economy to grow at impressive rates; on the other hand, this growth has helped to sustain US spending and thus, its maintenance of global hegemony.1 In recent years, however, sharp disagreements have surfaced on numerous fronts, and the United States has sought to maintain dominance in the partnership. One of the mechanisms that have facilitated this, we argue, is the construction of China via long-standing Orientalist tropes that, at once flexible and durable, are easily mobilized and adapted for strategic political ends. As formulated by foremost scholar Edward Said (2014), depictions of the 「Orient」 have served as ideological tools aiding empires since the late 18th century—first the British and French, subsequently, the United States. The role of knowledge production in the colonial project, which Said termed 「Orientalism,」 has relied primarily on producing images of the 「Orient」 in dualistic terms that serve to affirm Western cultural superiority—for example, in depicting the 「Orient」 as backward, the West becomes civilized; in casting the former as superstitious, the latter becomes scientific; in describing the former as irrational, the latter becomes rational; in representing the former as archaic, the latter becomes modern; in fashioning the former as evil, the latter becomes good; in painting a picture of the former as violent, the latter becomes peaceful. The affirmation of Western superiority and concomitantly, the cultural and moral inferiority of the 「Orient,」 have served to justify Western expansion and global control over lands, peoples, and resources.
Western construction of the cultural and moral inferiority of China has had a long history and includes an array of portrayals that can be read in light of specific European and US colonial aims. These include images of China as exotic and immoral in the 1700s, as a cunning and diabolical 「Yellow Peril」 in the late 1800s, as a freedom-loving and democracy-loving 「China Mystique」 during World War II, and as an ideological, economic, and military 「Red Peril」 during the Cold War (Kim, 2010; Leong, 2005). Since the end of the Cold War and the definitive establishment of US global hegemony, China has vacillated in the US imaginary between the latter two positions, viewed at times as a little brother following imperfectly the path toward modernity, at times imperiling the world order (Kim, 2010; Vukovich, 2012). This ambiguity continues to occur through the present day and, in light of China’s rise as a global power since the late 1990s, China is increasingly portrayed, not necessarily an enemy, but always a potential one. This construction of China as a potential enemy Other reflects the relationship of mutual interdependence carefully cultivated by many US administrations at the same time that it functions to justify the paternalistic monitoring and policing of China to ensure that China never overtakes the United States on the world stage. With this frame in mind, we examine the recapitulation of Orientalist tropes in the post-Cold War context, focusing, in particular, on representations and language used in US news media and political rhetoric.
We examine three highly charged economic and security issue areas where the othering of China is perceptible: (1) China’s currency valuation, (2) cyber intrusions that target commercial and military information, and (3) maritime territorial and exclusive economic zone (EEZ) disputes. We focus on three tropes that emerged in our analysis of each of these areas: China as cheat, thief, and lawless bully, respectively. Each trope can be situated in relation to Orientalism, and thereby, we argue, recapitulates (or attempts to recapitulate) US dominance. As these Orientalist tropes are likely to detract from the ability of the US public to make fair assessments of US China policy, we also counter these Orientalist depictions with a more nuanced picture of China’s policies and actions, in the process demonstrating how one might come to better understand these specific issue areas in the US–China bilateral relationship. Before doing so, we turn to a brief discussion of our data sources and methods.
Sources and methods
Our study draws not only on the theoretical framework of Orientalism but also on the literature that demonstrates the role of images in US policy-making—both to articulate and to generate support for US foreign policy. Most notably, US foreign policy expert Oliver Turner has shown that 「American images of China are inextricable from the formulation and enactment of Washington’s foreign policies toward China,」 a significant contribution to literatures that provide only materialist accounts of US China policy (2014). For instance, US involvement in the Opium War with China was ostensibly incompatible with its anti-Imperialist identity, which makes a solely materialist account of the policy choice inadequate. Turner argues that policy consensus could only have been reached by a certain representation of China—China was backward and anachronistic, and her people were in need of Western intervention—which helped to justify an Imperialist war (Turner, 2014). Indeed, we follow in the wake of numerous Critical International Relations scholars who, drawing on insights gained through Edward Said’s work on Orientalism, have established the role that othering plays in shaping and justifying US domestic and foreign policies (Buzan & Wæver, 2003; de Buitrago, 2012; Steuter & Wills, 2010; Turner, 2014).
Our analysis focuses on two key sites of US national discourse on China—the news media and political rhetoric (or strategic communicative action that could be taken by a range of actors, including political leaders and pundits, in order to persuade the public on a given political issue) culled from publicly circulated official documents and reported statements from various online media sources. Public statements made by political leaders and official documents were chosen because the political rhetoric employed there shapes public opinion of China, US–China relations and US China policy. The news media was also chosen as a primary site for discourse analysis because it constitutes an important means through which the US public garners information and ideas about US foreign policy. Political rhetoric and news media texts were examined to establish the presence of Orientalist themes identified in the literature, particularly as delineated by Asian American Studies scholars Jodi Kim (2010) and Karen Leong (2005).
We identified Orientalist themes through a preliminary perusal of publicly available official policy documents, statistics, analyses, and recommendations from political and economic think tanks and published academic articles. By triangulating data gathered from these various sources, we identified prominent Orientalist themes within the issue areas of China’s national currency valuation, cyber activities, and maritime disputes in the East China Sea and South China Sea; these characterizations were China as cheat, thief, and lawless bully, respectively. Each theme was a manifestation, we theorize, of the construction of China as potential enemy, drawing on older discourses of China as the Red Peril, and at times even the Yellow Peril, as well as newer discourses of the 「sleeping giant」—a post–Cold War version of the 「little brother」 who threatens to overtake his elder. Our analysis (in subsequent sections) describes in more detail the way that each trope manifests the discourse of Orientalism.
News media texts were selected using progressive theoretical sampling (Altheide, 1996). For our initial search, we selected key terms2 that we thought would best identify our themes (noted above) and adjusted accordingly to collect all relevant texts containing Orientalist discourse. The starting point chosen for the initial news media search was 1990, since China’s geopolitical and geoeconomic significance rose significantly with the fall of the Soviet Union. However, many of the significant Orientalist themes emerged well after 1990, as is described in each of the three thematic sections to follow. ProQuest Newsstand, a robust database, was used, and we limited our search to news venues that were of high impact in terms of public circulation (the top five most widely circulated newspapers in the United States are The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USA Today, and Los Angeles Times, and a focus on these elite newspapers has been a well-established method to identify influential public narratives (see, for example, Merskin, 2004; Steuter & Wills, 2010). In each of the three issue areas, our search yielded approximately 1000 articles; theoretical saturation (Strauss & Corbin, 1990: 188) was reached after examination of approximately 100 articles in each area. Representative texts containing prominent Orientalist themes (ones that emerged with sufficient frequency in these news venues) were then selected for interpretive textual analysis. Political rhetoric within the last 5 years was examined, and we focused particularly on key moments in the electoral cycle, as our preliminary perusal had demonstrated that the polarizing debates of presidential campaigns provided the most fertile conditions for Orientalist tropes on China to emerge. Here, we present representative official statements that cast China in an Orientalist vein.
China as cheat: currency squabbles
The merchandise trade deficit that the US maintains with China—which grew to a total of US$365.7 billion in 2015 before falling to US$308.9 billion in 2017—has been a long-standing issue of concern for the United States (United States Census Bureau, 2016, 2017). The trade deficit is often attributed to unfair trade practices and the artificial undervaluation of China’s currency. The United States has registered numerous trade disputes with China over the years via the World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement mechanism with success. Up to 2010, China has, moreover, kept its national currency undervalued to drive exports. This dimension of US–China trade relations is of interest here because China has, since 2005, adopted a more flexible exchange rate regime and gradually revalued the yuan—not least because of political pressure from the United States. Indeed, in May 2015, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) stated that the Chinese yuan was no longer undervalued (The Wall Street Journal, 2015). The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) estimated that the yuan had, in fact, been most recently overvalued about 32% compared to its trading partners, and the most expensive among 60 countries (Forbes, 2015).
US political rhetoric has so far been out of step with these changes and has failed to explain the reasons for which previous motivations to undervalue the yuan no longer hold. In a charged exchange between candidate Mitt Romney and President Obama in the 2012 presidential debate, for example, the former accused the latter for failing to call out China as cheat: 「China has been a currency manipulator for years and years and years … and the president has a regular opportunity to label them as a currency manipulator, but refuses to do so」 (Paletta & Davis, 2012a). Romney went on to build on this image of China to shore up his credentials: 「On day one, I will label China a currency manipulator, which will allow me as president to be able to put in place, if necessary, tariffs where I believe that they are taking unfair advantage of our manufacturers」 (Paletta & Davis, 2012b). At the time, the yuan had already increased by 11% since 2008.
The trope of China as cheat can be read in light of historical constructions of China as the Yellow Peril, a notion that continues to shape depictions of the Chinese as cunning, sneaky, and immoral in US political rhetoric today. These stereotypes emerged in the late 1880s to fuel anti-Chinese sentiment, when United Statesians responded to the influx of Chinese labor and settlement as a threat to White wages, White social dominance, and family structure. These depictions helped to justify harsh immigration laws barring Chinese settlement. In the current context, depictions of China reinvoke this older Orientalist trope to paint not only a similarly suspicious figure but also a tenuous economic partner with the potential to turn into the Red Peril that refuses to abide by the rules of the capitalist market.
This was again perceptible when the yuan was devalued by 2.3% to bring it more in line with a market-determined rate in the Fall of 2015 (US Treasury, Oct 2015). That markets and politicians are sensitized to the slightest downward movement in China’s currency value was underlined by the agitation with which Congressional representatives reacted to the devaluation of the yuan. The US Treasury, which played a key role in pressuring China for a market-determined currency, was cautious in its initial response; however, Congressional critics such as Senator Charles Schumer (NY-D) went on the record saying that this move was indicative of China’s attempt to 「double down」 on currency manipulation and that the yuan 「should be barred from consideration as a global reserve currency by the IMF」 unless China 「stops artificially devaluing」 it. Indeed, he is quoted as saying that 「China has rigged the rules」 for years in 「play[ing] games with its currency」 (Bradsher, 2015). Furthermore, Republican Senator Rob Portman said that the devaluation was yet another 「harsh reminder」 that China 「refuses to play by the rules」 (Portman, 2015). Republican Senator Lindsey Graham joined the chorus by stating that 「today’s provocative act by the Chinese government to lower the value of the yuan is just the latest in a long history of cheating」 (Graham, 2015).
The timing of the 2015 devaluation of the yuan did palpably advantage China at a time when exports were slowing, but there remains a discrepancy between the depiction of China as cheat and the complex economic reality of today. As growth rates slow and capital outflow takes place, undervaluing the yuan is no longer in China’s best interest. In the longer term, China is also likely to avoid a policy of undervaluation as it attempts to rebalance the economy toward domestic-driven growth, as a stronger Chinese yuan increases the purchasing power of its population. Importantly, its (now successful) bid to have the IMF recognize the yuan as an official reserve currency on par with the US Dollar, Euro, British Pound, and Japanese Yen constrains significant devaluations. In this regard, pro-business newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal have gone some way in providing the counterweight to the image of China as currency manipulator through more objective economic analysis. Yet, conclusions such as 「China likely isn’t regressing」 suggests that only tentative conclusions are drawn about China’s ability to conform to fair rules of play (「China’s Currency Policies Win Cautious Praise Abroad,」 2015). While some journalists have underlined the economic interdependence between the United States and China (Mallaby, 2005; 「Paulson’s China Victory」 2006) and pointed out that China has become a 「punching bag」 since the 2012 partisan presidential electoral politics (Paletta & Davis, 2012a), space has also been given to presidential hopefuls to perpetuate the image of China as cheat by framing the yuan’s recent downward slide as 「foreign currency cheating」 (Trump, 2016).
The long-standing Orientalist narrative of China’s cheating behavior, its destabilizing effect on the global rules of the liberal trade regime and the negative impact on US corporate interests and job security, remains easy to invoke after being the predominant theme in US public discourse on US–China economic relations. This narrative helps to bridge the gap between reality and fiction and turns an economic partner into an enemy. Enemy-making in the economic realm is particularly problematic, moreover, because polls indicate that the US public tends to pay significant attention to the economic relationship with China precisely because it most directly affects them. Gallup’s 2014 annual world affairs poll indicated that more Americans perceive China as an economic threat than a military one, unsurprising since China’s impact on the US job market feels more immediate to Americans than military developments in Asia (see Figure 1).