China’s national defence in global security discourse: a cultural–rhetorical approach to military scholarship

Abstract

China’s ascendancy in general and its military growth in particular have engendered mixed reactions the world over. This article takes up international academic discourse on China’s national defence and examines the ways in which recurring themes of China as a ‘regional threat’, ‘hostile East Asian power’, and as ‘untrustworthy’, as well as proposals of counter-strategies, are constructed in a case of an international journal publication. Proceeding from Cultural Discourse Studies (CDS), and especially the notion of rhetoric as morally oriented, the article shows that the ‘dangers’, ‘threats’ and ‘untrustworthiness’ of China are born, not out of presentations of facts or evidence, but out of particular rhetorical renderings of Western binary thinking and presumptions of ‘USA-as-guarantor-of-world-peace’ and ‘power-as-hegemony’. Further, it critiques from a CDS perspective the cultural bias and human consequences of these ways of thinking and speaking. The article ends with suggestions for culturally new ways of thinking and talking about the cultural Other and international relations more generally.

随着中国国际地位逐渐提高，尤其是军事力量不断增长，整个世界对中国的态度发生了复杂多样的变化。本文通过对国际上关于中国国防的学术话语的个案研究，解析中国是如何被构造成”地区威胁”、”敌对的东亚势力”、”不可信赖的武装力量”等等。本文从文化话语研究的角度出发，并通过文化政治及道德的批评，指出西方国防学界描绘的中国”危险”、”威胁”、”不可信赖”的形象，并非基于某种事实或证据的呈现，而是源于西方特有的二元对立思维以及陈旧的观念预设，诸如”美国是世界和平的保障”、”国强必霸”。同时，本文从文化话语研究的视角揭露并批判了文化偏见以及在这种偏见可能给人类带来的后果。最后，文章就文化他者和国际关系等问题提出了新思维、新话语。

Keywords:

• academic discourse
• rhetoric
• ways of thinking
• US/Western-centrism
• Chinese culture

View correction statement:

Corrigendum

Acknowledgements

The present paper is a revised and expanded version of an earlier paper in Chinese published in Waiguo Yuwen Yanjiu (Foreign Language Studies, no 5, 2015). The author would like to thank the Guest Editor and two anonymous commentators’ for their incisive and constructive suggestions.

Notes

1. Brown, Struggling Giant; Chu, Chinese Whispers; Ng et al., “Media Discourse on Globalization in China”; and Shambaugh, China goes Global.

2. They were collected and filtered by the author’s some 30 undergraduate students after training on data collection for the present project.

3. However, there is usually a lack of cross-fertilisation from defence and security scholarship in theorising defence discourse. See Græger, “Norway between NATO, the EU, and the US”; and Smolash, “Mark of Cain (ada).”

4. This framework is described in various levels of detail in Shi-xu, A Cultural Approach to Discourse; Shi-xu, Chinese Discourse Studies; and Shi-xu, “Cultural Discourse Studies.”

5. Usually logic, rather than ethics, is taken to be the guiding principle for rhetoric. See, for example, Cavin, “Elise Boulding’s Rhetoric”; Ceccarelli, “Rhetorical Criticism”; and Hess, “Critical–Rhetorical Ethnography.”

6. Others who take morality seriously in argumentation include Chase, “Constructing Ethics through Rhetoric”; and Ding, “Confucius’s Virtue-centered Rhetoric.”

7. See note 4 above.

8. See note 6 above.

9. “Australia’s 2015 Defence White Paper: Seeking Strategic Opportunities in Southeast Asia to help Manage China’s Peaceful Rise.” Contemporary Southeast Asia 35, no. 3 (2013): 395–422. http://www.amazon.cn/gp/product/0230202926/ref=fs_rd_1/476-0695328-4211949.

10. Tubilewicz, The 2009 Defence White Paper.

11. SCHNEIDER, Reconceptualising World Order.

12. Khan and Yu, Evolving China.

Additional information

Funding

The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ministry of Education of China [Project code 11YJA740075].