The extreme transformation from energy self-sufficient to energy dependent development that China has experienced over the past three decades has received substantial international attention. China's global search for energy resources has become a particularly sensitive issue in Sino-American relations. While, in general, China's rapid and powerful rise is triggering complex responses in the US, ranging from admiration and support to fear and antagonism, when it comes to energy security concerns, China is perceived in the US primarily, if not exclusively, as a threat to its national interests. Campion's informative and timely book addresses this subject, providing valuable insights into how the reading of China's development as a threat has been constructed and institutionalized in US foreign policy in the context of energy security.
Campion bases his analysis on a poststructuralist assumption that national identity and foreign policy represent two intertwined and interconnected discourses that mediate material realities of relations between states in the international system. In the introductory chapter, he explains that his main goal is to show “how contemporary Sino-American relations have been both affected and represented by relations between certain China threat perceptions and particular conventional approaches to energy security which are prevalent within the US” (p. 3). Consequently, Campion focuses on the constitutive and productive role of discourse in the formation of the recent US foreign policy towards China rather than on causal explanations and predictions. Drawing on poststructuralist advances in critical discourse analysis, he examines a significant collection of texts, including official statements and reports of governmental institutions and policy-making agencies, articles and editorials from print media, and reports of non-government national and international organizations. The intertextual study of a broad set of sources allows him to uncover the discourses that achieve a dominant status in US foreign policy towards China and differentiate them from the subordinate discourses that are marginalized or even silenced.
The first part of the book examines the evolution of Western perceptions of China and explains how the China threat discourse has become the dominant discourse through which the US reads its relations with China. Campion starts with a survey of the early European positive representations of China and then demonstrates how over the 18th and 19th centuries a set of new discourses that infantilized and feminized China gradually replaced the discourses that advanced a favourable image. Further, he turns to a detailed analysis of the contemporary American China threat discourse that emerged in the 20th century “from the West's newfound inability to effectively control China as it has traditionally been able to do” (p. 40). Identifying the main building blocks of this discourse, Campion highlights racialization and dehumanization of the Chinese through the “yellow peril” rhetoric, construction of China as Other through the bipolar ideological division based on the Cold War rhetoric of the “red menace,” and anxiety over economic success and military growth of contemporary China. He concludes that “the once unfeasible fears of the Yellow Peril and the Red Menace have transmuted into a discourse where China may realistically threaten the West because of its enhanced capabilities” (p. 58).
The second part of the book is devoted to the discussion of different readings of energy security in the US. It offers a comprehensive but not overly detailed picture of ongoing debates over the meaning of energy security and its international dimensions. Campion argues that the dominant reading of energy security in the US emphasizes relative gains concerns, prioritizes short- and medium-term security challenges, and mainly focuses on the acquisition of non-renewable energy resources with a particular emphasis on oil. In the context of Sino-American relations, already sensitive and controversial elements of this dominant reading of energy security are magnified by the China threat discourse. In the final substantive chapter, Campion illustrates how the two discourses are tied together through a very thorough and convincing case study of the China National Offshore Oil Corporation's failed bid for the American oil company Unocal in 2005.
Overall, Campion demonstrates that Sino-American relations are inherently neither zero-sum nor positive-sum games and should be approached as a product of complex, dynamic and interdependent social processes. Using critical discourse analysis, Campion adds much-needed depth and detail to the existing research on China's rise and energy security. His book can be recommended not only to all those interested in Chinese studies but also to advanced students of international relations, inasmuch as it offers useful policy analysis insights and demonstrates that poststructuralist approaches to international relations can (and should) go beyond purely theoretical endeavours.
