Identity and Foreign Policy: The U.S. Perception of China

Abstract

Social constructivism argues that in process of foreign policy making, as well as material factors and capabilities, ideational forces, and social structures such as identity and discourses constitute an important aspect and conceptualize material structures. Moreover, the identities of states, their subjective understandings, definitions of friends and foes are important. Therefore, based on the main research question of thesis “How has the United States constructed China as a direct threat to its hegemony after 2010 due to China’s economic and political rise?”, the main aim of this thesis is to find out the way in which the United States has perceived and constructed China as a direct threat due to China's rising global power in the post-2010 period. In this study, the Discourse-Historical Approach is applied to analysis of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s article issued in 2011 “America’s Pacific Century” which announced the essentials of the Asia Pivot policy initiated to balance China together with the first speech of Donald Trump after the COVID-19 pandemic at the United Nations General Assembly in 2020. On that regard, the identity of China in 2011 and 2020 is analyzed with the Discourse-Historical Approach arguing that the changing balance of power affects the United States construction of China identity as threat. In this context, this thesis argues that the United States constructs Chinese identity as a direct threat in accordance with China’s growing economic and political strength with using the Chinese threat construction in order to justify and legitimize its foreign policy choices. Keywords Identity, Social Constructivism, Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), American exceptionalism, U.S. foreign policy