RESHC/2013/013

Against the backdrop of China's rise in the international arena, the "China Threat" theory has been getting increasingly popular in the Western discourse since the 1990s. There has been a number of existing researchers on the topic from various theoretical perspectives, which try to provide empirical descriptions of the "China Threat" discourses and to offer a range of explanations for its emergence. Most of these scholarly efforts adopt the more traditional IR approaches of positivism. This proposed research project, however, is planning to take an alternative perspective to the issue of the "China Threat" theory, by combining the "securitization theory" in the IR field with the poststructuralist discourse analysis. It argues that the "China Threat" theory is a process of securitization, enacted by the West, to constitute the rise of China as a security issue by the inter-subjective establishment of an existential threat with a saliency sufficient to have substantial political effects. The research aims to reveal how the "China Threat" theory is being constructed, but not focus on whether it is real or not. In other words, it is interpretative rather than explanatory. For analytical purpose, the research further identifies three specific models: the scientific theory model, the historical analogy model, and the political myth model, whereby the process of discursive construction of the "China Threat" theory is to be demonstrated.

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