MACMILLAN From 'Japan Problem' to 'China Threat'?: Rising Powers in US Economic Discourse (Global Political Sociology)

This book has four main objectives: to bring the thus far almost entirely neglected historical case of ‘the rise of Japan’ into the literature on power shifts in general and ‘the rise of China’ in particular; to propose a discourse-based conceptualization of identity for the study of economic policy that engages theoretical and methodological debates on how to overcome the dichotomy between ‘ideational’ (identity) and ‘material’ (economic) factors; to address the tendency to focus on the ‘radical Other’ in poststructuralist IR scholarship, by highlighting how heterogeneity disturbs exclusive and binary articulations of identity and difference; and to propose a method for putting political discourse theory (PDT) into practice in empirical research by drawing on rhetorical political analysis (RPA). US congressional debates on economic policy on Japan and China in 1985–2008 are analysed as examples of official US elite public discourse. The book shows that the ‘new era’ in US-Chinese relations that scholars and policymakers have been announcing since the beginning of the Trump presidency was long in the making, as it rests on longstanding discourses on the USA’s main economic competitor. Review 'Nymalm’s book convincingly shows that both the “China threat” today and the “Japan problem” of the 1980s in the US economic discourses are reflective of a problem closer to home: those countries’ perceived economic threats to the US cannot be fully understood unless we also examine their origins in the ways the US constructs itself through American exceptionalism and the liberal theory of history. Providing much-needed insight into ongoing US-China tensions, this sophisticated, historically grounded analysis makes a timely and thoughtprovoking contribution to the burgeoning literature on great power competition.’  ― Chengxin Pan, Associate Professor of International Relations, Deakin University, Australia ‘Nymalm insightfully challenges the usually bipolar discussions on identity and difference and operationalises poststructuralist discourse theory with rhetorical political analysis to connect US foreign policy discourse back to the rise of Japan and US-Chinese economic relations.’  ―  Emilia Palonen, Senior Lecturer, Department of Political and Economic Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland From the Back Cover This book has four main objectives: to bring the thus far almost entirely neglected historical case of ‘the rise of Japan’ into the literature on power shifts in general and ‘the rise of China’ in particular; to propose a discourse-based conceptualization of identity for the study of economic policy that engages theoretical and methodological debates on how to overcome the dichotomy between ‘ideational’ (identity) and ‘material’ (economic) factors; to address the tendency to focus on the ‘radical Other’ in poststructuralist IR scholarship, by highlighting how heterogeneity disturbs exclusive and binary articulations of identity and difference; and to propose a method for putting political discourse theory (PDT) into practice in empirical research by drawing on rhetorical political analysis (RPA). US congressional debates on economic policy on Japan and China in 1985–2008 are analysed as examples of official US elite public discourse. The book shows that the ‘new era’ in US-Chinese relations that scholars and policymakers have been announcing since the beginning of the Trump presidency was long in the making, as it rests on longstanding discourses on the USA’s main economic competitor. Nicola Nymalm is an Assistant Professor in War Studies at the Swedish Defence University and an Associate Research Fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs (UI) and the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA). Her previous work has appeared in journals such as International Political Sociology, International Studies Review, Journal of International Relations and