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Narrations of the “China Threat:” An analysis of the discursive roots of US-Western China perception from the beginning of the twenty-first century until the Trump presidency

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Abstract

This article examines the discursive roots of current attitudes towards the People’s Republic of China (PR-China; PRC) in the United States of America’s (US-America; USA) public sphere. Through a discourse analysis employing a wide range of twenty-first century bestsellers, the development of discursive “China” is traced from the beginning of the new millennium until today. The article finds two dominant modes of writing the “other” in popular US-American PR-China literature. In contradictory discourses, PR-China is seen as a “Communist Evil Empire” in the one mode, and it is seen as an “Orientalist Wilderness” in the other. Both modes are driven by pre-established patterns of sense-making and stay ignorant to a large degree of the PRC as a thing in and by itself, the article concludes.

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Notes

  1. The title here should not be misread as a reference to the Chinese Dream (中国梦) campaign, which came much later.

  2. As a matter of fact, the first edition of The Coming Collapse of China was published already in 2001.

  3. To avoid confusions, let me explicitly make clear at this point that this is not the same McGregor who wrote the earlier mentioned book The Party.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, School of Humanities, Xiamen University, 422 Siming South Road, Siming Qu, Xiamen Shi, 361005, Fujian Sheng, China

    Jan-Boje Frauen

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Correspondence to Jan-Boje Frauen.

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Frauen, JB. Narrations of the “China Threat:” An analysis of the discursive roots of US-Western China perception from the beginning of the twenty-first century until the Trump presidency. Int. Commun. Chin. Cult 8, 363–389 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40636-021-00229-x

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