The Construction Of National Threat:A Critical Study Of The American Defense Department’s Reports On China

China’s military and security developments have caused concerns to many powers in the international community,especially the world ’s single superpower,the USA.This fact is typically and prominently reflected in the US official military reports on China: the Annual Report to Congress: Military Power of the People’s Republic of China,which has been regularly published for the past eighteen years.Since this official policy publication has not only important implications for the US defense practice,but also a grave impact on the international perception of China,it will be useful to study how these military reports construct China.Although there have been sporadic studies of these reports,they are not sufficiently systematic and detailed especially with regard to the ways China is discursively constructed.According to Cultural Discourse Studies,discourse is social communicative practice in which people use linguistic and other symbolic means to accomplish practical tasks with particular purposes in a specific historical and cultural context.It is composed of a set of interrelated variables: speaking agents,act/text,media/mode,purposes/effects,history and culture.Functionally,discourse constructs r eality and exercises power.Crucially important,discourse is a cultural form of human communication which is distinguished and competing in relation to other discourses.National defense discourse is a subset of such a cultural discourse.Accordingly,the present paper takes the American military reports on China as an object of research and critically examines and evaluates the ways that China is constructed.Because the reports have a grave impact on domestic policy and international perception,it is the aim of the present thesis to find out whether and to what extent those reports are trustworthy.To that end,this research bases itself on the eighteen reports from 2000 to 2018(except 2001)as data,which have mainly collected from the official website of the US Department of Defense.Through rigorous analysis,a range of argumentatively problematic and faulty features in the reports are found which fundamentally and significantly undermine the acceptability and convincingness of those reports.First,the agents of the reports are doubtful in terms of their specialization.The creation and release of the reports are not limited to one government agen cy,but plural and complex interagency process.The final publication of the reports is the product of multi-party consultations and compromises based on interests within the White House,the Department of Defense and the Congress.In addition,the experts or advisors who make the initial drafts have different factions,various attitudes toward China’s issues.And the changing level of individual research capabilities,their educational backgrounds,life experiences,religious belief and political thought also have a profound and direct influence on the production of the reports.Second,the channels and sources of information are unreliable.The American researchers tend to interpret and analyze China’s military and security developments through second-hand information and public information,including military-related publications,websites and forums,rather than professional works,published statements and research findings in China.Third,the format and framework of the reports have been changeless and stagnated for eighteen years.They have formed a unified format and highly consistent topics in each stage,with only some slight sequence changes.Although the report has changed its name in 2010,there is no big difference between these two stages,just some modifications of the old ones for the current political interests which are more of inheritance than innovation.Fourthly,the US employs three diversified discursive strategies to render China is threatening and dangerous when constructing China ’s national defense.They are using vague words and exaggerated data to implicate the threatening,dangerous and fast-growing of China’s military power;applying its binary thinking to portray the US as the guarantor of the world and make China an enemy;using its stereotypes and own standards to rhetorically construct China’s military reality,expressing China is a threat to the world and denies its peaceful rise.It is hoped that this research will help better understand the nature and characteristics of the American military reports on China and provide critical thoughts on future international communication of military affairs.