Table of Contents s430

1. Cold War Pedagogy/Threat Construction

Chengxin Pan—An extremely good 1NC and 2NC frontline that critiques the positing of China as a threat. This threat construction is a result of Cold War-based rhetoric and mind-sets. Applies to any argument with a China Scenario.
Tony Fang—Applies to any argument that relies on Cold War threat construction and ideas that culture is like an onion, with distinct layers. Says that culture is more like an ocean, with no boundaries and no limits and blurred distinctions.

2. Queer Atlantic

Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley—Amazing cards detailing the black struggle across the Middle Passage. She speaks of the “queer” bonds that they formed while crossing, and how it functioned as a way to resist the stripping of their identity on the slave ships. The last card is especially good on how not just queer black people can read this argument.

3. Agonism and Democracy

Joel Olson—To bring about real change, a fanatical approach of social change must be undertaken. This avoids the entrapments of “liberal democracy” and the status quo, and its attempts to stifle true change.

4. Speaking for Others/Personal Location/Personal Narratives

Shari Stone-Meditore—False claims of neutrality lead to the exclusion of marginalized groups of all types, by giving those in power (the judge, the majority) the right to distance themselves from their privilege without divorcing themselves from it. This leads to the exclusion of per formative affs with any amount of personal narrative or experience.
Josh Gregory and Kasim Alimahomed—Personal narratives and first-person perspective has a unique space in debate. It allows for the liberation of oppressed groups.
Violet Ketels—Morals must be placed above politics. When we distance personal experience and connection from our arguments, we doom humanity to destruction by disavowing ourselves from our arguments.
Andrea Smith—Confessions of personal privilege or social location where you function as the “oppressor” are bad because they function as manifestations of Western Colonialism and settler mentality.

5. Dark Mountain/Reconnection with Nature

Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine—These authors advocate for the uncivilization of writing. This involves breaking the illusion of normal and bringing about true social change.

Cold War Pedagogy/Threat Construction

Chengxin Pan

Author Qualifications

I am a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Deakin University. I was educated at Peking University (LL.B, LL.M) and the Australian National University (PhD, Political Science and International Relations). I have held visiting positions at the University of Melbourne, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Peking University. I am a member of the International Studies Association (ISA), Australian Institute of International Affairs, and have been on the editorial board of Series in International Relations Classics (World Affairs Press, Beijing). I have given invited talks and presentations at Adelaide, Asialink, CityU, Durham, HKU, Monash, PKU, Swedish Institute of International Affairs, and UQ.
My research focuses broadly on International Relations and China. One of my main research interests is in understanding Western representations of China in general and the 'rise of China' in particular. On this topic, my book entitled Knowledge, Desire and Power in Global Politics: Western Representations of China's Rise was published by Edward Elgar in 2012.
My current research is concerned with the understanding of China as a global construct, social constructions of Chinese power, and mutual responsiveness in the formation of China's international relations. My publications have appeared in Alternatives, The China Review, Journal of Chinese Political Science, Griffith Asia Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary China, The Pacific Review, Political Science as well as a number of edited volumes and Chinese academic journals. These publications cover a wide range of topics including Chinese politics, Chinese foreign policy, the Taiwan question, traditional Chinese thought on conflict resolution and responsible government, Chinese perspectives on the Asian Century, American representations of the China threat, Australia's debates on China and its China literacy, Australia-China relations, US-China relations, and EU-China relations.

(Found on His Linkedin Page)

1NC Frontline

CONSTRUCTING CHINA AS A THREAT IS NOT AN OBJECTIVE PRACTICE

As the relationship between the U.S. and China has proliferated in discussions over international relations, China has been labeled a KNOWABLE object. China scholars cling to this science as DISINTERESTED OBSERVERS, forging passive and neutral descriptions of reality. Rarely does this inquiry verge on self-reflexivity, begging the question of what the United States and how one seeks to AFFIRM it. Policy-makers, the so-called guardians of an INDESPENSABLE, SECURITY-CONSCIOUS nation, LEGEITIMIZE their own power politics through discourse on China, constituting a SELF FULFILLING prophesy.

Pan ‘4

Chengxin Pan is a professor of international and political studies at Deakin University, ““The ‘China Threat’ in American Self-Imagination: the Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics,” 1 June 2004, http://www.articlearchives.com/asia/northern-asia-china/796470-1.html

China and its relationship with the United States has long been a fascinating subject of study in the mainstream U.S. international relations community. This is reflected, for example, in the current heated debates over whether China is primarily a strategic threat to or a market bonanza for the United States and whether containment or engagement is the best way to deal with it. While U.S. China scholars argue fiercely over "what China precisely is," their debates have been underpinned by some common ground, especially in terms of a positivist epistemology. Firstly, they believe that China is ultimately a knowable object, whose reality can be, and ought to be, empirically revealed by scientific means. For example, after expressing his dissatisfaction with often conflicting Western perceptions of China, David M. Lampton, former president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, suggests that "it is time to step back and look at where China is today, where it might be going, and what consequences that direction will hold for the rest of the world." Like many other China scholars, Lampton views his object of study as essentially "something we can stand back from and observe with clinical detachment." Secondly, associated with the first assumption, it is commonly believed that China scholars merely serve as "disinterested observers" and that their studies of China are neutral, passive descriptions of reality. And thirdly, in pondering whether China poses a threat or offers an opportunity to the United States, they rarely raise the question of "what the United States is." That is, the meaning of the United States is believed to be certain and beyond doubt. I do not dismiss altogether the conventional ways of debating China. It is not the purpose of this article to venture my own "observation" of "where China is today," nor to join the "containment" versus "engagement" debate per se. Rather, I want to contribute to a novel dimension of the China debate by questioning the seemingly unproblematic assumptions shared by most China scholars in the mainstream IR community in the United States. To perform this task, I will focus attention on a particularly significant component of the China debate; namely, the "China threat" literature. More specifically, I want to argue that U.S. conceptions of China as a threatening other are always intrinsically linked to how U.S. policymakers/mainstream China specialists see themselves (as representatives of the indispensable, security-conscious nation, for example). As such, they are not value-free, objective descriptions of an independent, preexisting Chinese reality out there, but are better understood as a kind of normative, meaning-giving practice that often legitimates power politics in U.S.-China relations and helps transform the "China threat" into social reality. In other words, it is self-fulfilling in practice, and is always part of the "China threat" problem it purports merely to describe. In doing so, I seek to bring to the fore two interconnected themes of self/other constructions and of theory as practice inherent in the "China threat" literature—themes that have been overridden and rendered largely invisible by those common positivist assumptions.

THE “CHINA THREAT” IS NOT A MODERN SENTIMENT

The alarm of national security rings in response to China’s economic development, industrialization, and trade expansion- phenomena seen as a CHALLENGE to other countries. Trade imbalances and job losses in the U.S. are construed as small parts of a LARGER STRATEGY to undersell American competition. The emergence of a 'Greater China' is a WORST-CASE SCENARIO for American policy-makers in an era of persistent military conflict. Political distinctions also mark China as an IDEOLOGICAL OTHER. The affirmative has failed to connect their advocacy with previous debates in the international community over the Ming and early Qing dynasties and Chinese cultural hegemony.

Pan ‘4

That China constitutes a growing “threat” to the United States is arguably one of the most important ‘discoveries’ by U.S. IR scholars in the post-Cold War era. For many, this “threat” is obvious for a variety of reasons concerning economic, military, cultural, and political dimensions. First and foremost, much of today's alarm about the ‘rise of China’ resolves around the phenomenal development of the Chinese economy during the past twenty-ﬁve years: Its overall size has more than quadrupled since 1978. China expert Nicholas Lardy of the Brookings Institution suggested that ‘the pace of China's industrial development and trade expansion is unparalleled in modern economic history.’ He went on: "While this has led to unprecedented improvements in Chinese incomes and living standards, it also poses challenges for other countries.“ One such challenge is thought to be job losses in the United States. A recent study done for a U.S. congressional panel found that at least 760,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs have migrated to China since 1992.7 Associated with this economic boom is China’s growing trade surplus with the United States, which, according to Tim magazine journalists Richard Bernstein and Ross Munro, increased nearly tenfold from $3.5 billion in 1988 to roughly $33.8 billion in 1995. This trade imbalance, as they put it, is a function of a Chinese strategy to target certain industries and to undersell American competition via a system of subsidies and high tariffs. And that is why the deficit is harmful to the American economy and likely to become an area of ever greater conﬂict in bilateral relations in the future.‘ For many, also frightening is a prospect of the emergence of so- called ‘Greater China’ (a vast economic zone consisting of main-land China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan). As Harry Harding points out, ‘Although [Greater China] was originally intended in [a] benign economic sense, . . . in some quarters it evokes much more aggressive analogies, such as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere or Greater Germany." ~ in this context, some believe that China's economic challenge inevitably gives rise to a simultaneous military threat. As Denny Roy argues: ‘A stronger, wealthier China would have greater where-withal to increase its arsenal of nuclear-armed ICBMs and to increase their lethality through improvements in range, accuracy, and survivability. If China continues its rate of economic expansion, absolute growth in Chinese nuclear capabilities should be expected to increase. " Furthermore, U.S. Congressman Bob Schaflfer claimed that China's military buildup, already under way at an alarming rate, was aimed at the United States." In addition to what they see as a worrying economic and military expansion, many U.S. China scholars believe that there exist still other dimensions to the ‘China threat‘ problem, such as China's “Middle Kingdom" mentality, unresolved historical grievances, and an undemocratic government." Warren I. Cohen argues that “probably the most ethnocentric people in the world, the Chinese considered their realm the center of the universe, the Middle Kingdom, and regarded all cultural differences as signs of inferiority."" As a result, it is argued, the outside world has good reason to be concerned that “China will seek to reestablish in some form the political and cultural hegemony that it enjoyed in Asia during the Ming and early Qing dynasties?" At another level, from a “democratic peace” standpoint, a China under the rule of an authoritarian regime is predisposed to behave irresponsibly. As Bernstein and Munro put it: If the history of the last two hundred years is any guide, the more democratic countries become, the less likely they are to fight wars against each other. The more dictatorial they are, the more war prone they become. Indeed, if the current Beijing regime continues to engage in military adventurism—as it did in the Taiwan Strait in 1996—there will be a real chance of at least limited naval or air clashes with the United States." Subscribing to the same logic, Denny Roy asserts that ‘the establishment of a liberal democracy in China is extremely unlikely in the foreseeable future… Without democratization within, there is no basis for expecting more paciﬁc behavior without.' However, for other observers, even if China does become democratized, the threat may still remain. Postulating what he calls the “democratic paradox” phenomenon, Samuel Huntington suggests that democratization is as likely to encourage international conﬂict as it is to promote peace." Indeed, many China watchers believe that an increase in market freedom has already led to an upsurge in Chinese nationalism, the only thing that allegedly provides the glue to hold contemporary China together." It is argued that such nationalist sentiment, coupled with memories of its past humiliation and thwarted grandeur, will make China an increasingly dis- satisﬁed, revisionist power—hence, a threat to the international status quo.

WE MUST RECOGNIZE THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NATURE OF THE “CHINA THREAT”

The U.S. situates itself at the APEX of historical development, desperately clinging to natural law and universality. In 1917, Woodrow Wilson characterized America as the END OF HISTORY, envisioning a world in which other countries would fall down a slope towards absolute subservience. Current patterns of globalization, however, have prompted the emergence of DIVERSITY, CONTINGENCY, and UNPREDICTABILITY in international relations; SHAMING U.S. attempts to couch China as a definitive “other.”

AMERICA NEEDS A THREAT. The “other” is always built into the American self. Previous interaction with China reveals that it is not an EXTERNAL THREAT, but rather fills a ready-made category of the western consciousness. China cannot be conceptualized outside of perspective. Policy analysts will not let Beijing be successful as a city that REJECTS western neoliberalism as its reigning paradigm. This securitization turns the 1AC.