China’s national defence in global security discourse: a cultural–rhetorical approach to military scholarship

China’s ascendancy in general and its military growth in particular have engendered mixed reactions the world over. This article takes up international academic discourse on China’s national defence and examines the ways in which recurring themes of China as a ‘regional threat’, ‘hostile East Asian power’, and as ‘untrustworthy’, as well as proposals of counter-strategies, are constructed in a case of an international journal publication. Proceeding from Cultural Discourse Studies (CDS), and especially the notion of rhetoric as morally oriented, the article shows that the ‘dangers’, ‘threats’ and ‘untrustworthiness’ of China are born, not out of presentations of facts or evidence, but out of particular rhetorical renderings of Western binary thinking and presumptions of ‘USA-as-guarantor-of-world-peace’ and ‘power-as-hegemony’. Further, it critiques from a CDS perspective the cultural bias and human consequences of these ways of thinking and speaking. The article ends with suggestions for culturally new ways of thinking and talking about the cultural Other and international relations more generally.