Despite the U.S. and China’s shared economic and political interests, distrust between the nations persists. How does the United States rhetorically navigate its relationship with China in the midst of continued distrust? This book pursues this question by rhetorically analyzing U.S. news and political discourse concerning the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the 2010 U.S. midterm elections, the 2012 U.S. presidential election, and the 2014-2015 Chinese cyber espionage controversy. It finds that memory frames of China as the yellow peril and the red menace have combined to construct China as a threatening red peril. Red peril characterizations revive and revise yellow peril tropes of China as a moral, political, economic and military threat by imbuing them with anti-communist ideology. Tracing the origins, functions, and implications of the red peril, this study illustrates how historical representations of the Chinese threat continue to limit understanding of U.S.-Sino relations by keeping the nations’ relationship mired in the past.

After three and a half decades of economic reforms, radical changes have occurred in all aspects of life in China. In an authoritarian society, these changes are mediated significantly through the power of language, carefully controlled by the political elites. Discourse, as a way of speaking and doing things, has become an indispensable instrument for the authority to manage a fluid, increasingly fragmented, but highly dynamic and yet fragile society. Written by an international team of leading scholars, this volume examines socio-political transformations of contemporary Chinese society through a systematic account, analysis and assessment of its salient discourses and their production, circulation, negotiation, and consequences. In particular, the volume focuses on the interplay of politics and media. The book’s intended readership is academics and students of Chinese studies, language and discourse, and media and communication studies.

While Americans are generally aware of China's ambitions as a global economic and military superpower, few understand just how deeply and assertively that country has already sought to influence American society. As the authors of this volume write, it is time for a wake-up call. In documenting the extent of Beijing's expanding influence operations inside the United States, they aim to raise awareness of China's efforts to penetrate and sway a range of American institutions: state and local governments, academic institutions, think tanks, media, and businesses. And they highlight other aspects of the propagandistic “discourse war” waged by the Chinese government and Communist Party leaders that are less expected and more alarming, such as their view of Chinese Americans as members of a worldwide Chinese diaspora that owes undefined allegiance to the so-called Motherland.Featuring ideas and policy proposals from leading China specialists, China's Influence and American Interests argues that a successful future relationship requires a rebalancing toward greater transparency, reciprocity, and fairness. Throughout, the authors also strongly state the importance of avoiding casting aspersions on Chinese and on Chinese Americans, who constitute a vital portion of American society. But if the United States is to fare well in this increasingly adversarial relationship with China, Americans must have a far better sense of that country's ambitions and methods than they do now.

It is widely recognised that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses the media to set the agenda for political discourse, propagate official policies, monitor public opinion, and rally regime support. State agencies in China control the full spectrum of media programming, either through ownership or the power to regulate. Political Communication in China examines the two factors which have contributed to the rapid development of media infrastructure in China: technology and commercialization. Economic development led to technological advancement, which in turn brought about the rapid modernization of all forms of communication, from ‘old’ media such as television to the Internet, cell phones, and satellite communications. This volume examines how these recent developments have affected the relationship between the CCP and the mass media as well as the implications of this evolving relationship for understanding Chinese citizens’ media use, political attitudes, and behaviour. The chapters in this book represent a diverse range of research methods, from surveys, content analysis, and field interviews to the manipulation of aggregate statistical data. The result is a lively debate which creates many opportunities for future research into the fundamental question of convergence between political and media regimes. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Political Communication.

Crises often leave people in vulnerable situations in which a moment in time can function as a turning point of a catastrophic situation for the better or worse. From another perspective, the concept of crisis signifies losing control of everyday privileges, such as that of a pandemic. Therefore, the interaction of rhetoric and sociolinguistics in times of crisis is inevitable. It is crucial to internalize how rhetoric, an effective skill from ancient times to make meaning of sociological breakthrough events, changed the course of events as well as the fate of humanity. Within the same context, research should focus on diverse disciplines to explore, investigate, and analyze the concept of “crisis” from global, sociolinguistic, and rhetorical perspectives. Rhetoric and Sociolinguistics in Times of Global Crisis explores and situates the concept of global crisis within rhetoric and sociolinguistics as well as other disciplines such as education, technology, society, language, and politics. The chapters included bridge the gap to initiate a discussion on understanding how rhetoric and sociolinguistics can create critical awareness for individuals, societies, and learning environments during times of crisis. While highlighting concepts such as rhetorical evolution, political rhetoric, digital writing, and communications, this book is a valuable reference tool for language teachers, writing experts, communications specialists, politicians and government officials, academicians, researchers, and students working and studying in fields that include rhetoric, education, linguistics, culture, media, political science, and communications.

For more than a century, no US adversary or coalition of adversaries - not Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or the Soviet Union - has ever reached sixty percent of US GDP. China is the sole exception, and it is fast emerging into a global superpower that could rival, if not eclipse, the United States. What does China want, does it have a grand strategy to achieve it, and what should the United States do about it? In The Long Game, Rush Doshi draws from a rich base of Chinese primary sources, including decades worth of party documents, leaked materials, memoirs by party leaders, and a careful analysis of China's conduct to provide a history of China's grand strategy since the end of the Cold War. Taking readers behind the Party's closed doors, he uncovers Beijing's long, methodical game to displace America from its hegemonic position in both the East Asia regional and global orders through three sequential "strategies of displacement." Beginning in the 1980s, China focused for two decades on "hiding capabilities and biding time." After the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, it became more assertive regionally, following a policy of "actively accomplishing something." Finally, in the aftermath populist elections of 2016, China shifted to an even more aggressive strategy for undermining US hegemony, adopting the phrase "great changes unseen in century." After charting how China's long game has evolved, Doshi offers a comprehensive yet asymmetric plan for an effective US response. Ironically, his proposed approach takes a page from Beijing's own strategic playbook to undermine China's ambitions and strengthen American order without competing dollar-for-dollar, ship-for-ship, or loan-for-loan.

This book has four main objectives: to bring the thus far almost entirely neglected historical case of ‘the rise of Japan’ into the literature on power shifts in general and ‘the rise of China’ in particular; to propose a discourse-based conceptualization of identity for the study of economic policy that engages theoretical and methodological debates on how to overcome the dichotomy between ‘ideational’ (identity) and ‘material’ (economic) factors; to address the tendency to focus on the ‘radical Other’ in poststructuralist IR scholarship, by highlighting how heterogeneity disturbs exclusive and binary articulations of identity and difference; and to propose a method for putting political discourse theory (PDT) into practice in empirical research by drawing on rhetorical political analysis (RPA). US congressional debates on economic policy on Japan and China in 1985–2008 are analysed as examples of official US elite public discourse. The book shows that the ‘new era’ in US-Chinese relations that scholars and policymakers have been announcing since the beginning of the Trump presidency was long in the making, as it rests on longstanding discourses on the USA’s main economic competitor.

This is the first comprehensive study by the world’s leading scholars about the political logic of the U.S.-China trade war that started during the Trump administration. The book is divided into three parts. The first part looks at changed leadership styles of the two countries in the last few years. It also examines the liberal international order since World War II in which the trade war emerged. It then explores the theoretical perspectives from both the United States and China that are related to the trade war. The second part is about the domestic factors that impacted on the trade war from China’s perspective. These factors include China’s institutional adaptation of the new international environment, the radicalization of the Chinese political discourse, and Big Power Diplomacy. The third part explores the U.S. domestic factors that impacted the trade war, such as the Trump administration’s different China policy in general, the role played by the U.S. Congress, business lobby, and the transition of foreign policy from a Wilsonian World Order to Jacksonian Nationalism.

To explore what extended competition between the United States and China might entail out to 2050, the authors of this report identified and characterized China’s grand strategy, analyzed its component national strategies (diplomacy, economics, science and technology, and military affairs), and assessed how successful China might be at implementing these over the next three decades.

What is it like to be a Westerner teaching political philosophy in an officially Marxist state? Why do Chinese sex workers sing karaoke with their customers? And why do some Communist Party cadres get promoted if they care for their elderly parents? In this entertaining and illuminating book, one of the few Westerners to teach at a Chinese university draws on his personal experiences to paint an unexpected portrait of a society undergoing faster and more sweeping changes than anywhere else on earth. With a storyteller's eye for detail, Daniel Bell observes the rituals, routines, and tensions of daily life in China. China's New Confucianism makes the case that as the nation retreats from communism, it is embracing a new Confucianism that offers a compelling alternative to Western liberalism. Bell provides an insider's account of Chinese culture and, along the way, debunks a variety of stereotypes. He presents the startling argument that Confucian social hierarchy can actually contribute to economic equality in China. He covers such diverse social topics as sex, sports, and the treatment of domestic workers. He considers the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, wondering whether Chinese overcompetitiveness might be tempered by Confucian civility. And he looks at education in China, showing the ways Confucianism impacts his role as a political theorist and teacher. By examining the challenges that arise as China adapts ancient values to contemporary society, China's New Confucianism enriches the dialogue of possibilities available to this rapidly evolving nation. In a new preface, Bell discusses the challenges of promoting Confucianism in China and the West.