The United States and the Macrosecuritisation of the "China Threat"

The so-called “China Threat” theory suggests that a rising China is a threatening one, especially challenging US international leadership. However, despite significant literature examining the extent to which a rising China constitutes a security threat, very few analyses examine whether China has been represented or “constructed” as a threat. Has China been constructed as a threat by the US government itself? If it has done so, how has the rest of the international community responded to such US depictions? In order to determine the extent to which the US has represented a rising China as a threat to international security, and whether this has succeeded in the relevant audiences, this dissertation adopts a discursive approach novel to the extant literature. It does this through the Copenhagen School’s securitisation theory, which sees security as constructed when the label of “security” is applied. More specifically, through integrating the positive contributions to the study by the three key debates of securitisation theory since its introduction, as well as accounting for the macro-scale of China’s rise, this dissertation develops a post-Copenhagen macrosecuritisation theory that is more appropriate to the research questions. In examining US representations and practices using this post-Copenhagen macrosecuritisation theory, this thesis finds that from 2006-2016, the time period of this study, the US has overall consistently represented China’s rise as a security risk to the Asia-Pacific across the military, political, economic and environmental sectors, but not as a threat. Moreover, within the audience states of Indonesia and Singapore, such US representations have only been partially accepted. In clarifying these arguments, this thesis both contributes to the conceptual literature on securitisation and addresses a relative absence of the application of discursive frameworks to the question of the “China threat”.