Writing Sino-US relations

: the productive and performative power of identity constructions

Abstract

As arguably the most complex and vital bilateral relations, Sino-US relations have attracted immense academic interest to explain and predict the relations’ directions. Drawing upon mainstream International Relations theories, existing literature features various causal factors including material capabilities to account for conflicts and cooperation. Yet, causal explanations often suffer from linearity, staticity, determinism, and causal ambiguity. More critically, they are incomplete as, despite their complicity in meaning controlling, they overlook the ‘how possible’ perspective centring on the discursive and representational dynamic that underlies meaning and political possibility production. Addressing this overlooked dynamic, this thesis takes cues from the poststructuralist discourse analytical approach and draws especially upon the Foucauldian understanding of discourse and power and Hansenian conceptualisation of identity. It reconceptualises Sino-US relations as evolving representational practices and the discursive, contingent, and mutually responsive constructs. And it investigates the discursive identity constructions, not as causal factors opposed to material capabilities, but as productively establishing truths, attaching meanings to the material, performatively delimiting possible foreign policies, and driving the proceeding of Sino-US relations. The thesis conducts a discourse analysis of primarily American and Chinese official texts made during the George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations to explore the constitutive identities. Through analysing nomination, predication, argumentation, and intensification, it finds that the US Self as a superior and indispensable power, the Chinese Self as a responsible resurgent major power, a developing country, and a victim of US imperialism and hegemonism have been constantly invoked and reproduced to produce truths and political possibility in American and Chinese texts respectively. The discursive context between China and the US changed from featuring an unstable Sino-US we-ness to mutual Otherness. And the US identity inertia played a significant role in eroding the constructed we-ness and substantiating the current antagonistic atmosphere.

Date of Award	27 Sept 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Torsten Michel (Supervisor) & Yongjin Zhang (Supervisor)