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Ideologization of US Congress Foreign Policy Discourse on China under Trump
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Ideologization of US Congress Foreign Policy Discourse on China under Trump
Annotation
PII
S268667300019536-9-
Publication type
Article
Status
Published
Authors
Vadim Kozlov 
ORCID: 0000-0002-6874-3965
Occupation: research fellow
Affiliation:
Institute of American and Canadian Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences
National Research University “Higher School of Economics”
Address: Russian Federation, Moscow
Andras Bajak
ORCID: 0000-0003-4043-253X
Affiliation: National Research University “Higher School of Economics”
Address: Russian Federation, Moscow
Edition
Issue 3
Pages
112-126
Abstract

Political discourse is an integral part of socio-political relations, forms and defines a complex linguistic unit, knowledge and actions. Trump’s vehement anti-China rhetoric manifestly shifted the limits of China’s representation in US foreign policy discourse in general. However, the causal relationship between Trump’s agency and China’s representations is not investigated since there are a multitude of factors at play. Rather, in present study the focus is on how those changes in the Congressional discourse occurred that bred multiple legislations and, as it is argued later, institutionalized a particular antagonistic policy stance towards China. A testimony of this is that, contrary to many projections, Biden’s 2021-22 foreign policy agenda follows this discursive framework. The quantitative content analysis identified the main focal points and the pivotal value-laden concepts of the discursive change in Congressional repre-sentations of China. The analysis further pointed out that the key tendency is the ideologization of Congressional discourse on China. Although China was criticized in Congress during former administrations as an unfair or uncivilized player or actor, now this criticism manifests in antagonistic Cold war binaries, with the centrality of ‘freedom’ and Communist China being the main threat to it. The analysis concludes that the emerging ideological framework reconstruct the meaning of the competition between the US and China in Manichean terms of antithetical values and zero-sum game, which has unprecedented since the end of Cold war.

Keywords
United States, China, human rights, discourse, foreign policy
Received
05.11.2021
Date of publication
06.04.2022
Number of purchasers
12
Views
1104
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0.0 (0 votes)
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References

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