Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase its economic and/or diplomatic engagement with the People’s Republic of China


China Securitization Kritik Vocabulary



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China Securitization Kritik

Vocabulary

Link: Something the aff has said in a card, cross-ex, or analytic that is flawed. Just like a DA link, it connects the negative argument to something the aff has done. In the case of the K, this is using security language.

Impact: The same as a DA—something very bad that happens because of the Aff’s actions. With the K, it’s a little different though because it makes a “root cause” argument that the ideas that the Aff has makes their own impacts happen.

Alternative: Think similar to a Counterplan text, but more about what happens in the debate round instead of a government actor doing it. The alternative is what we should do in the debate round to try to fix the problem laid out by the K. These are usually rethinking or rejecting bad ideas.

Securitization: Language intended to protect one country from another and usually a criticism of the country’s use of the military. The K argues that security language is bad because it is usually wrong. Think about a time you had an argument with someone and you said, “It’s all their fault!” That’s probably not fair, right? You probably did something. Similarly, when the US says that China is “coming for us”, “building weapons”, or “trying to attack the US” that’s making things too simple. Basically, saying bad things about a country or their military causes knee-jerk responses or war.

Representations: Language or how things are said. This is different from a policy because representations are the words we use, the text of the cards, and how we frame arguments. The K argues that the way we talk about things impacts how we act or see the world.

Epistemology: Epiteme=thought, ology=study ofthe study of how we think. How do you know what you know? Who told you to think that? Did you come up with that on your own? Generally speaking, this is a reflection on how we think and how we have come by knowledge. We do this all the time! For example, when you think about what study habits are most effective; you’re thinking about how you learn best. When you consider the honesty of a news source, you’re thinking about how you get your knowledge.

Ontology: The study of “being” or existence. Simply put, the main question is “Who are you?” That’s a really tough question that most adults don’t even know, so don’t stress if you’re not sure. When ontology is used in these cards, they are related to security. Basically, if your identity becomes tied up in fear, anger, and insecurity toward another race/country, then you are more likely to react with violence.

Cede the Political: “Cede” means to leave or give up and “the political” refers to voting and the government. Therefore, to cede the political means to give up on working through the government and trying to change it, but instead to try to work outside this political system.

Permutation (Perm): A Perm is arguing that the CP or Alternative can actually work with the plan together. A perm must include all of the plan and all or part of the CP/Alternative.

Severance: An argument against a perm. Severance is when the AFF does not include part of the plan in the permutation—they sever or remove part of the 1ac.

People’s Liberation Army (PLA): The Chinese armed forces. Basically the accumulation of all the Chinese military.


Chinese Communist Party (CCP): Main political party of China. They have large control over the entire country and believe in a strong government with control over the people and economy. Xi Jinping is the leader of the party.

1NC China Securitization Kritik Shell

  1. Link--The AFFs framing of China as a threat is unrealistic and is grounded in circular logic. Everything China does seems like a threat because they appear threatening and different already. In reality, these are just racist stereotypes.



Pan, 2004—School of International and Political Studies @ Deakin University (Chengxin, 2004, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political Vol. 29, No. 3, “The "China Threat" in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics,”
Having examined how the "China threat" literature is enabled by and serves the purpose of a particular U.S. self-construction, I want to turn now to the issue of how this literature represents a discursive construction of other, instead of an "objective" account of Chinese reality. This, I argue, has less to do with its portrayal of China as a threat per se than with its essentialization and totalization of China as an externally knowable object, independent of historically contingent contexts or dynamic international interactions. In this sense, the discursive construction of China as a threatening other cannot be detached from (neo)realism, a positivist.ahistorical framework of analysis within which global life is reduced to endless interstate rivalry for power and survival. As many critical IR scholars have noted, (neo) realism is not a transcendent description of global reality but is predicated on the modernist Western identity, which, in the quest for scientific certainty, has come to define itself essentially as the sovereign territorial nation-state. This realist self-identity of Western states leads to the constitution of anarchy as the sphere of insecurity, disorder, and war. In an anarchical system, as (neo) realists argue, "the gain of one side is often considered to be the loss of the other,"''5 and "All other states are potential threats."'•^ In order to survive in such a system, states inevitably pursue power or capability. In doing so, these realist claims represent what R. B. J. Walker calls "a specific historical articulation of relations of universality/particularity and self/Other."^^ The (neo) realist paradigm has dominated the U.S. IR discipline in general and the U.S. China studies field in particular. As Kurt Campbell notes, after the end of the Cold War, a whole new crop of China experts "are much more likely to have a background in strategic studies or international relations than China itself. ""^^ As a result, for those experts to know China is nothing more or less than to undertake a geopolitical analysis of it, often by asking only a few questions such as how China will "behave" in a strategic sense and how it may affect the regional or global balance of power, with a particular emphasis on China's military power or capabilities. As Thomas J. Christensen notes, "Although many have focused on intentions as well as capabilities, the most prevalent component of the [China threat] debate is the assessment of China's overall future military power compared with that of the United States and other East Asian regional powers."''^ Consequently, almost by default, China emerges as an absolute other and a threat thanks to this (neo) realist prism. The (neo) realist emphasis on survival and security in international relations dovetails perfectly with the U.S. self-imagination, because for the United States to define itself as the indispensable nation in a world of anarchy is often to demand absolute security. As James Chace and Caleb Carr note, "for over two centuries the aspiration toward an eventual condition of absolute security has been viewed as central to an effective American foreign policy."50 And this self-identification in turn leads to the definition of not only "tangible" foreign powers but global contingency and uncertainty per se as threats. For example, former U.S. President George H. W. Bush repeatedly said that "the enemy [of America] is unpredictability. The enemy is instability. "5' Similarly, arguing for the continuation of U.S. Cold War alliances, a high-ranking Pentagon official asked, "if we pull out, who knows what nervousness will result? "^2 Thus understood, by its very uncertain character, China would now automatically constitute a threat to the United States. For example, Bernstein and Munro believe that "China's political unpredictability, the always-present possibility that it will fall into a state of domestic disunion and factional fighting," constitutes a source of danger.s^ In like manner, Richard Betts and Thomas Christensen write: If the PLA [People's Liberation Army] remains second-rate, should the world breathe a sigh of relief? Not entirely. . . . Drawing China into the web of global interdependence may do more to encourage peace than war, but it cannot guarantee that the pursuit of heartfelt political interests will be blocked by a fear of economic consequences. . . . U.S. efforts to create a stable balance across the Taiwan Strait might deter the use of force under certain circumstances, but certainly not all.54 The upshot, therefore, is that since China displays no absolute certainty for peace, it must be, by definition, an uncertainty, and hence, a threat.

  1. Impact: These threats become self-fulfilling. The US threatens China and they threaten the US. Trust is broken and both countries learn to fear each other. Both militaries expand and war becomes inevitable.



Turner, 2013 Research Associate at the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester (Oliver, Review of International Studies, “‘Threatening’ China and US security: the international politics of identity,”
In addition, and just as they did throughout the mid-to-late nineteenth century and the early Cold War period, acts of US China policy continue to protect the identity from which the ‘threat’ is produced. This is most evident in the sustained commitment to the defence of Taiwan, by which China’s identity is affirmed as foreign to that of the United States and a threat to the core values of capitalism and democracy. This policy strategy constitutes a ‘neocontainment’ approach designed to manage and control China’s apparently threatening behaviour.117 Indeed, as Washington announced its intention in late 2011 to station an additional 2,500 American troops on the north coast of Australia, Beijing interpreted the move as part a wider policy of ‘hostile encirclement.118 To paraphrase Campbell, the presence of an opposing identity which challenges understandings about the self can be enough to produce assumptions of a threat.119 Today, China’s (particularly nondemocratic) identity continues to be dislocated from that of the United States, so that ‘almost by its mere geographical existence China has been qualified as an absolute strategic ‘‘other’’ [of the United States], a discursive construct from which it cannot escape’.120 Once again, these are the processes which explain how particular courses of American foreign policy are enabled, towards a particular type of manufactured China ‘threat’. During the mid-to-late nineteenth century and the early Cold War period China had the potential to endanger US security. However, in both cases the ‘threats’ perceived were products of American imaginations. For the most part they were produced with the intention of legitimising policy strategies which could protect the socially constructed (white and democratic-capitalist) American identity. Material forces, while not insignificant, were insufficient to explain both the extent to which China was perceived as a danger and the policy procedures implemented in response. Today’s China ‘threat’ does not yet pose a comparable crisis to American identity. However, assessments of material forces alone remain inadequate explanatory factors of the ‘dangers’ it is understood to present. China remains the subject of an American lens, interpreted by many as a threat through representations of its status as a necessarily dangerous foreign other. The modern day China ‘threat’ to the United States is not an unproblematic, neutrally verifiable phenomenon. It is an imagined construction of American design and the product of societal representations which, to a significant extent, have established the truth that a ‘rising’ China endangers US security. This is an increasingly acknowledged, but still relatively under-developed, concept within the literature.121 The purpose of this article has been to expose how ‘threats’ from China towards the United States have always been contingent upon subjective interpretation. The three case studies chosen represent those moments across the lifetime of Sino-US relations at which China has been perceived as most threatening to American security. The ‘threats’ emerged in highly contrasting eras. The nature of each was very different and they emerged from varying sources (broadly speaking, from immigration in the nineteenth century and from ‘great power’ rivalry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries). Yet in this way they most effectively demonstrate how China ‘threats’ have repeatedly existed as socially constructed phenomenon. Collectively they reveal the consistent centrality of understandings about the United States in perceptions of external danger. They demonstrate that, regardless of China’s ability to assert material force or of the manner in which it has been seen to impose itself upon the United States, the reality of danger can be manufactured and made real. China ‘threats’ have always been threats to American identity so that the individual sources of ‘danger’ – whether a nuclear capability or an influx of (relatively few) foreign immigrants – have never been the sole determining factors. As James Der Derian notes, danger can be ascribed to otherness wherever it may be found.122 During the mid-to-late nineteenth century and throughout the early Cold War, perceptions of China ‘threats’ provoked crises of American identity. The twenty-first-century China ‘threat’ is yet to be understood in this way but it remains inexplicable in simple material terms. As ever, the physical realities of China are important but they are interpreted in such a way to make them threatening, regardless of Beijing’s intentions.


  1. Alternative: The judge should vote for the negative team to question the flawed stereotypes about China. Only by seeing the country as a genuine partner and not a conflict-region with scary people can we produce real change.



Turner, 2013 Research Associate at the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester (Oliver, Review of International Studies, “‘Threatening’ China and US security: the international politics of identity,”
Most importantly, this article has shown how processes of representation have been complicit at every stage of the formulation, enactment, and justification of US China policy. Their primary purpose has been to dislocate China’s identity from that of the United States and introduce opportunities for action. Further, those policies themselves have reaffirmed the discourses of separation and difference which make China foreign from the United States, protecting American identity from the imagined threat. Ultimately, this analysis has sought to expose the inadequacy of approaches to the study of US China policy which privilege and centralise material forces to the extent that ideas are subordinated or even excluded. Joseph Nye argues that the China Threat Theory has the potential to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Based upon a crude hypothetical assumption that there exists a 50 per cent chance of China becoming aggressive and a 50 per cent chance of it not, Nye explains, to treat China as an enemy now effectively discounts 50 per cent of the future.123 In such way he emphasises the ideational constitution of material forces and the power of discourse to create selected truths about the world so that certain courses of action are enabled while others are precluded. Assessments such as those of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in March 2011 should therefore not only be considered misguided, but also potentially dangerous. For while they appear to represent authoritative statements of fact they actually rely upon subjective assumptions about China and the material capabilities he describes. In late 2010 President Obama informed Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao that ‘the American people [want] to continue to build a growing friendship and strong relationship between the peoples of China and the United States’.124 The hope, of course, is that a peaceful and cooperative future can be secured. Following the announcement that the Asia Pacific is to constitute the primary focus of Washington’s early twenty-first-century foreign policy strategy, American interpretations of China must be acknowledged as a central force within an increasingly pertinent relationship. The basis of their relations will always be fundamentally constituted by ideas and history informs us that particular American discourses of China have repeatedly served to construct vivid and sometimes regrettable realities about that country and its people. Crucially, it tells us that they have always been inextricable from the potentialities of US China policy. As Sino-US relations become increasingly consequential the intention must be for American representations of the PRC – and indeed Chinese representations of the United States – to become the focus of more concerted scholarly attention. Only in this way can the contours of those relations be more satisfactorily understood, so that the types of historical episodes explored in this analysis might somehow be avoided in the future.


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