International Security Discourse

文化话语研究文化话语研究 2022-09-30

摘要

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 ‘untrust- worthiness’ of China are born, not out of presentations of facts or evidence, but out of particular rhetorical renderings of Western binary thinking and pre- sumptions 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.

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Background and aims

Of all the issues surrounding China’s ascendancy, its military is probably the one aspect that has engendered the most serious controversies and gravest concerns from the international media, governments (including ministries of defence) and the scholarly community.1 The matter calls for even more attention now that the USA, as well as its alliance, is engaging in a so-called strategy of ‘re-balancing Asia’ or ‘Asia pivot’.

In this article we want to look at the international perceptions and understanding of China’s national defence by the relevant academic, intellectual and scientiﬁc community. Speciﬁcally we would like to take up the international academic discourse on the Chinese military (development) and, where appropriate, the proposed response to it, and to analyse and assess the ways in which knowledge of Chinese national defence is achieved, produced and justiﬁed. The questions that concern us are as follows. What kind of armed force is the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the eyes of the international defence academe? What is its perceived position or relationship vis-à-vis the rest of Asia, the Asia-Paciﬁc and the US-led military alliance in particular? What is the latter’s understanding of the strategic intentions of the Chinese military, the purposes of its continued development and, more broadly, the objectives of China’s self-proclaimed ‘peaceful rise’? More fundamentally how are the research conclusions, supporting evidence or reasons, and patterns of argumentation constructed? What ways of thinking, what concepts, assumptions or taken-for-granted knowledge sustain, are embodied in, or are conveyed through these persuasive constructions? What are the possible local and global strategic and security consequences of these ways of thinking and speaking/writing? Could there be culturally ‘other’ patterns or forms of seeing, understanding and interpreting China, its security arrangements and strategies and their relationship to the region and the rest of the world? If so, what new understandings of Chinese national defence would result?

In answer to such large questions, we would like to take up a piece of published research and pay particular attention to the images, identities, conditions, intentions, plans, movements, and so on of the Chinese national security and defence system as described, narrated, inferred, implied, interpreted, predicted, conﬁrmed or veriﬁed by the academic writer. The article is taken from a collection of some 60 research papers and reports found on the internet; these are mostly international journal publications and institutional working publications, except for a few reports prepared for government hearings.2 This body of data was prepared for a larger project on defence discourse studies. The present attempt should be considered a case study in the sense that it is designed primarily to identify and evaluate some particular kinds of thought and talk that render possible and present the nature and identity of Chinese national defence; however, the paper under scrutiny is not untypical, given the present author’s prior readings of this body of data.

Questions of defence and security have already been examined from the point of view of discourse and communication.3 While the role of language and rhetoric have been highlighted, the imagined divide between ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ power remains; more often than not linguistic and communication theory is borrowed and applied to the question of the military. A proper cross-disciplinary, integrated theory of defence and discourse is still lacking.

In this article we will take a Cultural Discourse Studies (CDS) perspective on security and defence.4 That is, we shall understand these in terms of ‘discourse’ – the communicative event or activity (or series thereof) in which people use linguistic and other symbols through particular channels to accomplish practical social tasks in speciﬁc historical and (inter)cultural settings. In this view security and defence cannot exist or take place independently of communication; discourse is, in other words, a particular perspective on security and defence and/or a special way of looking at them.

As an integral part of discourse, rhetoric is understood as textual strategies for particular communicative purposes, such as description, narration, explanation, argumentation, warning or proposing.5 In the present perspective rhetoric will be seen in cultural and ethical terms.6 This means that the forms of rhetorical writing will be scrutinised and critiqued from an intercultural and cultural–political perspective.

Our study will show that, in the article under discussion, ‘hostility’, ‘dangers’, ‘threats’, ‘untrustworthiness’ and similar descriptions of Chinese national defence are born out of rhetorical renderings of binary thinking, of the stereotype of USA-as-guarantor-of-world-security and of the a-cultural and ahistorical presumption of power-as-hegemony. In other words, notions of China as a ‘regional threat’, ‘hostile East Asian power’ and ‘untrustworthy’, as well as the counter-strategies proposed against China, do not have any real, substantive, concrete evidence or reason; they are made possible, actual and real by culturally particular and peculiar ways of talking and thinking. Our culturally and historically alternative, ie Chinese, approach would reveal new possibilities of seeing and speaking of international security relations in general and of China’s national defence in particular. A holistic and harmony-oriented approach would compel one to see the commonality, interconnections and shared responsibility between ‘would-be-enemies’; historical interrogations of precepts of the USA-as-provider-of-world-peace (in terms of, say, the US-led wars on Iraq and Afghanistan) or Chinese-power-as-hegemony would force one to look for opportunities for dialogue, cooperation and transformation.

It is hoped that our discursive, rhetorical approach to international research on China’s military and defence will shed light on the origins, nature and human consequences of Western knowledge and scientiﬁc construction of the ‘hostility’, ‘dangers’, ‘threats’ and the like inferred from China’s rise and military might. It is also hoped that the cultural critique of this approach will open up dialogue and debate on new possibilities for understanding power, international relations and global security strategies, whether in Asia or further aﬁeld.

More broadly the study of defence and security from a cultural-discursive vantage point can and should be an integral part of defence and security research, not just because strategic intentions, plans and objectives are often interpreted on the basis of the discourse of defence and security. Our own research ﬁndings suggest that international hostility, security risks, mistrust and consequently proposals of strategies have a fundamental, decisive discursive nature – even at the rational, academic and scientiﬁc level. Thus defence discourse studies can contribute not only to the science of security and military strategy but also to the understanding of international war and peace more generally.

Below we shall ﬁrst sketch out a cultural, discursive and rhetorical notion of national security and defence and a relevant approach to it. Then an explanation of the data collection and analytic and appraisal apparatus will be given. Following this, we will zoom in on the academic paper mentioned above and offer an analytic interpretation of the author’s various representations of China’s military power, followed by a synthetic assessment of these representations. In conclusion, we shall make suggestions for the theory and practice of defence discourse on China in particular and the world in general.

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National defence discourse as cultural rhetoric

Defence discourse and its systematic study are relative new ﬁelds in international scholarship; so far work is sporadic or otherwise carried out largely ‘unconsciously’ and thus inexplicitly and unsystematically outside of discourse and communication disciplines. In this study we shall only attempt at a brief and necessarily partial deﬁnition and conceptualisation of defence discourse and the approach to it.

To start with, we shall proceed from a notion of discourse from the viewpoint of CDS,7 where it is understood as a communicative event or activity, in which people use linguistic and other symbolic means through particular mediational channels to accomplish practical tasks with particular purposes and effects in speciﬁc historical and (inter)cultural settings. It is emphatically cultural in nature in the sense that the basic concepts, values and strategies involved in a discursive event or activity may be different across communities of peoples and that such discourses of different communities have unequal power relations between them, as with, say, the Western discourses and the non-Western ones, despite their interconnections and commonality, as well as their internal diversities.

By ‘defence discourse’ we mean forms of communication regarding such topics as national security and defence, sovereignty, territory, military strategies and tactics, military diplomacy and trade; defence discourse can take place in the settings of the armed forces, government, the media, academia and even literature, and in times of war and peace; in addition, it reﬂects particular concepts, information, understandings, feelings, attitudes, memories and patterns of thought regarding those topics.

Given such a notion, it will not be difﬁcult to imagine that defence discourse is not culturally neutral but rather culturally differentiated and competing, say between the American-dominated West and the Rest. Chinese national defence discourse, for one, has its own cultural tradition and is not on a par with that of the US military alliance. On the other hand, it may share characteristics with the discourses of members of the developing world, as a result of common history and socioeconomic conditions and objectives.

From a CDS point of view rhetoric is part of discourse. Speciﬁcally it is understood as the textual strategies that fulﬁl communicative functions, eg description, narration, explanation, argumentation, warning, proposing. Further, like discourse in general, it is cultural in nature and so should be subject to moral critique.8 That is, rhetorical discourse should not just be rational and persuasive, but above all morally right according to a given cultural–political framework. In the present case we hold up as the standard of critique the cultural–political principles of mutual respect, and common human–cultural harmony and prosperity.

Here it may be noted that rhetoric in (defence) academic discourse can be a most favourable vantage point, because it is the primary means that fulﬁls communicative functions and because it is one of the most direct and salient forms of discourse available and accessible to the relevant reading community.

All in all it should be realised and emphasised that defence cannot be separated from discourse; the two must be understood dialectically. Defence cannot exist, take place or be sustained independently of people communicating about it. A right and effective defence discourse can prevent or win wars; by the same token it can achieve, maintain and protect peace. Thus there can be no complete and adequate defence studies without a proper form of defence discourse studies.

Methodologically we need, then, to be multidisciplinary, historically conscious, culturally and inter-culturally minded; we must also be attentive to all relevant categories of a defence discourse event or activity and their interconnections. For the present study of academic rhetoric in international defence discourse this means, in particular, that we need to treat the piece under study as a whole, and take note of the interrelations between the features examined; we need to make use of any relevant historical and cultural knowledge; we need to apply the adopted cultural–political stances. Naturally we shall also draw upon any useful concepts, techniques, and procedures available in the existing literature.

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Data collection, analysis and assessment

In this paper we examine a research article entitled: ‘Australia’s 2015 Defence White Paper: Seeking Strategic Opportunities in Southeast Asia to help Manage China’s Peaceful Rise’, published in Contemporary Southeast Asia.9 The author is afﬁliated to the University of Sydney and the journal, with the subtitle A Journal of International & Strategic Affairs, belongs to the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies stationed in Singapore. The article, as a whole, is expressly designed to offer arguments and suggestions for drafting Australia’s new defence white paper for 2015.

This publication was taken from a collection of some 60, internationally available, research papers and reports on China’s national defence, published since 2010, which were prepared for a larger project on scholarly defence discourse. From the author’s prior readings of this body of collected literature, it may be said that the article under investigation is not unrepresentative in terms of perspectives, attitudes and standpoints. But it should be emphasised that the present paper is a case study designed primarily to reveal the nature and possible patterns of Western military-science knowledge (production) about Chinese national defence and, where appropriate, to deconstruct ways of manufacturing mistrust, division and hostility.

In studying this text, we are particularly interested in the images, traits, identities, intentions, and so on of the Chinese armed forces, as well as in the Australia–America alliance’s counter-measures, as being rhetorically constructed by the author. These issues were chosen as central concerns of this paper because, as stated at the outset, our broader objective is to understand the content, nature and basis of international, albeit in fact largely Western, defence scholarship on the Chinese military. But since research articles will have to draw on concrete and particular rhetorical means to render those artefacts transparent, our analysis and corresponding appraisal will actually focus on the rhetorical constructions.

From the point of view of CDS investigations should be made of the various relevant analytic categories of the discourse event in question, such as the writer/reader, the channels of communication, the purpose and effect, and the historical and intercultural relations. But in the present case the published text is the most direct and important part thereof so far as the reader is concerned and our current aim is to identify the author’s textual constructions of Chinese national defence, although our textual interpretation will have to refer to the other categories from time to time.

Our analysis and assessment will take place at two, interrelated levels. At the ﬁrst level we shall be looking at how the author names, describes, narrates, explains, argues for, compares or contrasts aspects or features of Chinese national defence, as well as counter-measures, strategies and rationales that the author proffers for Australia. Understanding such rhetorical activities and their tools will shed light on the nature, basis and purposes of the author’s scientiﬁc observations or conclusions on the Chinese military.

At the next level we shall make a synthesis of the abovementioned individual analyses in terms of interconnections between the features examined, overall representations of China’s national defence, but above all the moral quality of the rhetorical renderings. This means that we shall go beyond the text under discussion and bring to bear our cultural–political stance and relevant historical and (inter)cultural perspectives. For example, the author’s presuppositions in the rhetorical process may be interrogated from certain factual, ethical or cultural viewpoints.

It should be noted, too, that the present study is more of a qualitative one, focusing on the kinds and nature of rhetorical construction of China’s national defence as manifested in an academic journal article. But this is also intended as an illustration of the larger body of recent international data collected on the topic of Chinese military development. As has already been mentioned, the article under examination is typical in its opinions and arguments and the present study will make references to this background.

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China’s ‘dangers’, ‘threats’ and ‘animosity’ as rhetorical constructions

In the following our investigation will be conducted around the themes of China as ‘the Other’, a ‘threat’, a ‘potential hegemon’, ‘enemy’ or ‘rival’, ‘untrustworthy’, etc. What will be particularly interesting for us are the kinds of rhetorical strategies mobilised to make these representations available and accountable and, at a deeper level, the ways of thinking, underlying conceptions or assumptions,etc that undergird or guide those strategies. Parenthetically, although each rhetorical construction may involve more than one strategy, for the sake of exposition such strategies will be categorised under different headings below; the actual linguistic tools used are indicated by bold type in the examples shown.

How the enemy is created?

One central and recurring theme in the article under study is that China is a potential enemy of the US-led world-security order. The quality and status of the ‘enemy’, China, are rendered present and real through a variety of particular rhetorical renderings. One way of doing this is to construct China, and hence its military might, as different from and outside of the ‘US-led Western alliance system’ or the ‘US-led order of regional/international security’ so that the former is made deviant or ‘Othered’ and potentially dangerous. Here it should be realised that just distinguishing China’s military from the US system is not sufﬁcient to make the former a hostile or deviant adversary; it is important to note that underlying the separation is a deeper and somewhat implicit assumption, namely, that the USA, and so the US-dominated security system, formulated as positive and prosecurity, are the guarantor of world peace and order. In other words, it is this particular kind of binary, oppositional way of writing which favourably presents the USA and its alliance as peace-and-order-prone – the provider of the human security order – but which excludes China and, further, renders it as opposed to that order, thus as an enemy of regional and world security. The following two extracts illustrate this rhetorical construction.

[Example 1] the ﬁrst reason why China looms large is because it is the ﬁrst Great Power in East Asia to rise outside the US-led Western alliance system since the World War Two. It is also the ﬁrst time in the post-war period that a major economic and trading power in the region has emerged outside the American-led security order. (p 401)

[Example 2] Whereas adventurism by Japan and South Korea is likely to be restrained given those countries [sic] reliance on America as a security provider…China is not subject to either of these two constraining factors. (p 402)

A different rhetoric to make China ‘hostile’ is to wilfully refute the intentions of what China says and to reframe it in such a way that it should read as intentionally challenging or opposing US interests, as the next two examples illustrate.

[Example 3] It is in this context [‘Beijing will be more willing to challenge aspects of a contemporary albeit still evolving regional and strategic order it did not have a signiﬁcant role in creating’] that Beijing’s criticisms of the preservation and strengthening of American alliances in the region…as evidence of an obsolete and provocative ‘Cold War mentality’ directed against China should be understood. (p 401)

[Example 4] Chinese criticisms of existing alliances as exhibiting a ‘Cold War mentality’ and a factor for instability are largely attempts at gradually diluting the regional appetite for hosting US military assets in the region. (p 410)

There is an even more remarkable logic displayed in the scholarly piece whereby the hostility of China is created:

[Example 5] This [‘Chinese military doctrine’] is...designed to deny US forces the capacity to acquire and/or maintain sea-control over the so-called First Island Chain which surrounds China’s maritime periphery and stretches […] As the Pentagon observes: ‘China has developed measures to deter and counter third- party intervention, particularly by the United States...China’s A2/AD focus appears orientated toward restricting or controlling access to China’s periphery’. (p 403)

In this account the US armed forces become the incarnation of international law and order and so anything in their way is the enemy of said law and order. Here China’s action, ‘designed’ to control access to or prevent intervention in its territorial periphery, is made noteworthy (notice the quote from Pentagon) and moreover named as reactive and hostile: notice the verbs ‘deny’, ‘deter’ and ‘counter’. The rhetorical construction of China’s ‘hostility’ is remarkable because it concerns the latter’s efforts at guarding its own periphery, on the one hand, and, on the other, the USA’s intervention from across the Paciﬁc Ocean.

How is the China threat made real?

A second closely related and recurring theme related to China is that the country is a serious and growing security hazard in the region of Southeast Asia, threatening and dangerous. The author has variable ways of rendering this tangible and real. One strategy is to ﬂatly deny or reject China’s trustworthiness as a peaceful country:

[Example 6] while the economic and diplomatic integration of China into the region is a promising foundation for China’s self-described ‘peaceful rise’, it is unclear whether Beijing will remain a contented free-rider within a region hitherto characterized by American pre-eminence, as did Japan, South Korea who remain American allies. (p 401)

Here China’s self-expression is placed within quotation marks and labelled ‘self-described’. Immediately afterwards doubt is expressed over China’s peacefulness (where again a demarcation is made between China and the US alliance, as in Examples 1 and 2).

Another way of rendering China dangerous is to use vague and general expressions suggestive of danger and aggression; the advantage is that this avoids accountability on the part of the user. Consider the term ‘assertiveness’ below in relation to the rest of the quote:

[Example 7] helping to ensure greater strategic stability in Asia by putting constraints on Chinese assertiveness and encourage its peaceful rise (abstract, p 395)

Just like the phrase ‘looms large’ in Example 1 and the word ‘adventurism’ in Example 2, the term ‘assertiveness’, too, vaguely implicates aggressiveness and danger yet without being responsible for any unfounded accusations.

In addition to employing expressions suggestive of danger, the author makes use of inferences about the psychological make-up and potentiality of Chinese national defence as a way of showing the security hazard that it poses.

[Example 8] Whereas these other countries, including Japan, do not have the capacity or inclination to challenge America’s naval pre-eminence in the region, China appears to have the ambition and potential means to do so. (p 402)

Here, since he is writing on a psychological and potential state, the scholar uses ‘appears’, making the observation of China’s threat more acceptable, yet without having to take responsibility for it.

In the following we shall see yet another rhetorical strategy of making China ‘loom large’, namely, stating that the country is a threat to stability because its military is rising or, alternatively, because it is a great power:

[Example 9] In other words, China’s military rise remains the primary source of instability and threat to the Asia Paciﬁc and Australia may need to participate in US-led military operations against the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) no matter how remote that possibility might be. (p 400).

[Example 10] Canberra’s attention is appropriately directed towards its three largest trading partners in Asia – China, Japan and South Korea…while the structural cause of potential region-wide instability is primarily driven by China’s re-emergence as a Great Power. (p 396)

Here the author’s statements are of course based on the implicit assumption that any great power will become hegemonic (regardless of its history and culture); otherwise they do not make sense. The threat is rendered more ominous by capitalisations of ‘great power’; see also the capitalised ‘Great Power’ in Example 1. Precisely because of the existence of this underlying precept, or rather stereotype, the author makes a point of emphasising the power difference between China and the other claimants over the South China Sea as a way of demonstrating the ‘dangers’ of China:

[Example 10] China’s insistence on bilateral negotiations with much less powerful claimants presumably allows it to use all tools of statecraft, seduction and possibly intimidation available only to a much larger power. (p 410)

Because the said stereotype is taken to be universally true, as may be observed, the author goes further to contrast the military expenditures of China and Singapore (as well as Thailand), since the effect can be expected to be even more dramatic:

[Example 11] When this region is taken as a whole, China is responsible for 32.5 per cent of military spending, followed by Japan at 18.9 and South Korea at 9.2 per cent. If one considers that the most powerful Southeast Asian countries such as Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand accounted for 3.1, 2.5 and 1.7 percent of regional spending respectively, Chinese military dominance over the region in budgetary terms is clear. (pp 401–402)

As if that was not enough, modern world history could be tampered with through scholarship, too: the following text at least implies that China ought to see itself as a defeated power in World War II, like Japan.

[Example 12] Unlike post-war Japan, China does not see itself as a ‘defeated’ power, rising from the ashes of a regional and global war, but one seeking to repair what it sees as its century and a half of humiliation and subjugation by foreign powers. This leads to the uncomfortable prospect that Beijing will be more willing to challenge aspects of a contemporary albeit still evolving regional and strategic order it did not have a signiﬁcant role in creating. (p 401)

Rewriting World War II history for China, as the author does, makes ‘the uncomfortable prospect’ possible.

How is the Western hegemony established?

Representing the Other is self-reﬂexive. But this text under discussion also explicitly constructs the Self. Having portrayed China as the enemy of the US-led security order, dangerous and untrustworthy, on the one side, the author positions Australia, and the US-led alliance system as a whole, as the Big Brother over the former, which is reﬂected in the repeated use of the term ‘manage’ or its lexical variants:

[Example 13] Australia’s 2015 Defense White Paper: Seeking strategic opportunities in Southeast Asia to help manage China’s peaceful rise (title)

[Example 14] why managing China is the key variable when it comes to strategic stability in the region (abstract, p 395)

The term ‘manage(ment)’, which is usually associated with business operations, implies arrangement, administration and control. But from the rest of the text it may be seen that the word is used to avoid association with China’s criticism of a ‘cold-war mentality’, which the author has tried to neutralise. The real meaning can be clearly seen from the author’s own proposal for the ‘management’ of a foreign sovereign state:

[Example 15] The key is to pursue asymmetric strategies [italics original] that can help manage China’s rise. (p 409)

How are counter-strategies rendered?

Now that the author has made China the ‘enemy’ of the US–Western security system, it is hardly surprising to see what kind of strategic measures he is going to propose:

[Example 16] In summary, the Chinese strategy seeks to simplify [italics original] the region...As a counter-strategy, it is in Australia’s overriding interest and within its capacity to complicate [italics original] matters for China. (p 411)

[Example 17] In seeking to engender caution and restraint from Beijing, it would be in Canberra’s interest to complicate the strategic calculation for China. (p 412)

Despite his attempts to defuse or neutralise China’s criticism of the ‘cold-war mentality’, the author devises and proposes precisely such counter-strategies of confrontation and containment through semantic contrasts. This confrontational strategy is redeﬁned and re-described in order to indicate a clearer quality of its hostile militancy:

[Example 18] Doing so [‘to actively aid and encourage the rise of friendly, democratic and stable states in Southeast Asia’] would improve Australia’s standing with Southeast Asian states, complicate Beijing’s attempts to neutralize as many countries as possible...and thereby provide Australia further strategic and diplomatic buffers and depth against a hostile East Asian power. (p 413)

Other military and war-like phrases, such as those used below, add further ammunition to the strategies proposed:

[Example 19] Australian strategic planners should also realize that Canberra has an abiding interest in ensuring that China is not in a position to challenge or erode key pillars of the existing US-led alliance system...This will help the regional ‘strategic holding pattern’ to persist by encouraging potential ‘swing states’ to hold the line and not change their strategic trajectory towards China. (p 411)

Alternative rhetoric

Before we move on to the next stage of a general, critical appraisal of the rhetorical constructions, it ought to be mentioned that the article under study, typical as it is in opinion, attitude and argument regarding Chinese national security, does not fully represent the rest of the data found. Let us pause for a moment and look at some other article examples (remembering that they represent a small minority, however).

[Example 20] It [author’s paper] concludes that the White Paper marked a departure from the Howard government’s policy of deemphasizing differences in Canberra’s dialogue with Beijing and, by reafﬁrming commitment to the alliance with the United States (US), delineated the limits of Australia’s partnership with China. However, its poorly substantiated predictions regarding the rise of China’s power, the US economic and military decline and Beijing’s geostrategic objectives raise doubts about the Rudd government’s capacity to formulate a coherent vision for the future of Australia’s relations with China. (Tubilewicz, 2010)10

[Example 21] This article analyses the arguments by Chinese realists, ‘wordlists’, and procedural constructivists showing how Chinese scholars creatively revive pre-modern Chinese political theory in attempts to provide new ways in which International Relations scholars might view the world, or: ‘all-under-heaven’. I argue that these contributions will progressively challenge conventional theories of International Relations… (Schneider, 2014)11.

[Example 22] China’s rising proﬁle as a global economic and geopolitical actor has been matched with a parallel improvement in its relationship with its Southeast Asian neighbors. Many Chinese scholars see this improvement as a testament to the efﬁcacy of a Chinese geopolitical strategy which combines economic diplomacy launched during the late 1990s, with an on-going diplomatic ‘charm offensive’. To them, it is this geopolitical strategy which has made it possible for both China and its ASEAN neighbours to move away from antagonism and confrontation towards economic partnership, mutual cooperation and good-neighbourly relations. From this perspective, CAFTA, initiated by China within the framework of ASEAN plus, has not only created the world’s largest free trade area that represents the world’s most energetic and fastest growing economy, it has also made it possible for China to leverage itself internationally. For most Chinese scholars, CAFTA seems to have ensured that while China claims its due place on the global stage by virtue of its wealth, power, modernization of its military might and its cultural expiation, its neighbours do not construe its ‘peaceful rise’ as a threat. (Khan and Yu, 2013)12

Clearly, in the academe of security and defence, not everyone takes for granted a binary way of thinking or a conventional theory of international relations; not everyone accepts existing estimates and predictions of China’s power; not everyone favours a confrontational view of and approach to China; and not everyone refuses to listen to the voices of culturally Other, in this case Chinese, scholarship. Authors and articles such as those exempliﬁed here do point to possibilities of new ways of thinking (eg ‘all-under-heaven’), new understandings of the Chinese rise and objectives (eg ‘matched with a parallel improvement in its relationship with its Southeast Asian neighbors’, ‘its neighbours do not construe its “peaceful rise” as a threat’) and new ways of engaging with China (eg ‘to formulate a coherent vision for the future of Australia’s relations with China’, ‘to move away from antagonism and confrontation towards economic partnership, mutual cooperation and good-neighbourly relations’).

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A synthesis of analysis and assessment

Along with such illustrious and critical thinkers, let us now take a step back and reconsider the rhetorical constructions that we have examined so far. We need to ask questions about the cultural–political ethics of rhetoric, the rationality of rational discourse, the intellectual, cultural and human consequences of the adopted pattern of thinking, and knowledge of the history and culture of the nation whose defence and security we purport to study.

In other words, we must assess the various rhetorical representations of Chinese military might from a cultural, inter-cultural and, by implication, cultural–political, stance. Accordingly, a set of observations or interrogations may be made. First, proceeding with a Chinese holistic (‘all-under-heaven’) world-view, and beyond binary thinking and talking, we will be able to see and speak of commonality, connections and interdependence between China and the rest of the world, including the US superpower. From this perspective, too, cooperation and shared responsibility will also become possible. Second, if the USA and the US-led alliance were supposed to be the guarantor of world peace, security and stability, how many wars have they waged and how many sovereign states have they overthrown in just one and half decades? Indeed, has the American-globalised world become a safer place today? Third, China has had periods of ascendancy throughout history but has it ever demonstrated a parallel or subsequent outbound or overseas aggression, like those witnessed in modern colonial and imperialist history? Fourth, is there a proper knowledge of the thousand-year-long Confucian tradition and culture of China, which holds ren (benevolence), he (harmony), and ‘never do to others what you would not like them to do to you’ as the fundamental principles of being and behaving?

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Conclusion

In this article we began with the question of international military scholarship on China’s national security and defence, given global concerns over the rising power of the People’s Republic. Speciﬁcally we were interested in the kinds of scientiﬁc answers on the identity, condition and intentions of the Chinese armed forces and our central objective was to understand the ways that knowledge of the Chinese military is constructed.

We proceeded from the notion that rhetoric in discourse plays a central role in the construction and communication of knowledge and that discourse in general and rhetoric in particular are culturally and therefore morally oriented. Consequently to study rhetorical discourse is to identify the textual organisations whereby knowledge is (re-)produced and rendered authoritative, and further to subject them to cultural and inter-cultural critique. In effect, this means that one should reveal the cultural assumptions embodied therein, assess the rational and moral basis of knowledge constructions and come up with new questions and alternative ways of construction.

We have based our research on a recent international academic journal article written by an Australian scholar regarding the Chinese military (rise) and Australia’s response, against the background of some 60 research papers and reports on China’s national security and defence published since 2010. Taking a CDS perspective, we showed that representations of China’s national defence as a potential enemy of the American security system, as threatening, dangerous and untrustworthy, were rendered possible by the author’s use of a diversity of rhetorical devices and arrangements. In other words, removing such rhetorical deployments would take away the ‘security hazards’ simultaneously. More seriously we revealed that the author’s rhetoric, as an embodiment of particular cultural ways of thinking, of world-views, concepts and values, on the one side, and of particular organisations of the world, on the other side, consciously or inadvertently carries with it binary thinking, the notions of the USA as provider of human security and power-as-hegemony, as well as ignorance of Chinese history and culture. We have shown that it is such patterns and forms of thinking that reproduce the images of China as a ‘potential enemy’ of the US-led alliance, as ‘dangerous’, ‘threatening’ and ‘untrustworthy’.

We pointed out, however, that the article under study does not represent the whole collection of the data materials in perspective, standpoint or assumptions. There are cases of favouring the Chinese world-view, listening to their voices, recognising improved regional relations as a result of China’s ascendancy, as well as exposing the poor grounds for confrontation with China.

Then we went further to reassess the rhetorical constructions of China by taking an intercultural and cultural–critical perspective. It was argued that a Chinese dialectic way of thinking would compel one to see the commonality, interconnections and shared responsibility between China and the rest of the world, including the US-led West in general and its military alliance in particular. It was also suggested that recent world history contradicts the notion of the USA as guardian of human peace and security and refutes the idea that an alliance with it will lead to freedom from war and aggression. In addition, a knowledge of Chinese history and culture shows that China’s rise will not necessarily lead to hegemony. So the ‘dangers’ and ‘threats’ of China created by the Australian author are not necessary or natural; new ways of thinking about and understanding China and international relations more broadly ought to be adopted to overcome the burden of a cold-war mentality and to construct new national and international strategies, not again of division, deception and confrontation, but of mutual respect, cooperation and shared responsibility for world peace and stability.

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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.Græger, “Norway between NATO, the EU, and the US”; and Smolash, “Mark of Cain (ada).”

4/7.Shi-xu, A Cultural Approach to Discourse; Shi-xu, Chinese Discourse Studies; and Shi-xu, “Cultural Discourse Studies.”

5.Cavin, “Elise Boulding’s Rhetoric”; Ceccarelli, “Rhetorical Criticism”; and Hess, “Critical–Rhetorical Ethnography.”

6/8.Chase, “Constructing Ethics through Rhetoric”; and Ding, “Confucius’s Virtue-centered Rhetoric.”

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.

10.Tubilewicz, The 2009 Defence White Paper.

11.SCHNEIDER, Reconceptualising World Order.

12.Khan and Yu, Evolving China.

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文献

来源

Shixu (2015). China’s national defence in global security discourse: a cultural-rhetorical approach to military scholarship.

Third World Quarterly. 36(11), 2044-2058. (SSCI)

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