Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Thus we present the following plan The United States Federal Government can do
their plan, end of all trafficking, processing, and sale of Chinese political prisoners
organs within china, only after substantially increase its engagement with China by
publically calling for an end to human rights abuses and requiring affiliate
corporations to improve working and living.
The development of the atomic bomb not only presented to the world for the first time the
prospect of total annihilation, but also, paradoxically, led to a renewed emphasis on the "nuclear
family," complete with its personal bomb shelter. The conclusion of World War II (with the dropping of
the only two atomic bombs ever used in war) led to the recognition that world wars were now
suicidal to the entire species and to the formation of the United Nations with
the primary goal of preventing such wars. n2 Prevention, of course, must be
based on the recognition that all humans are fundamentally the same ,
rather than on an emphasis on our differences. In the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis,
the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war, President John F. Kennedy, in
an address to the former Soviet Union, underscored the necessity for recognizing
similarities for our survival: [L]et us not be blind to our differences, but let us
also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those
differences can be resolved . . . . For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link
is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our
children's future. And we are all mortal. n3 That we are all fundamentally the same, all human, all with the
same dignity and rights, is at the core of the most important document to come out of World War II, the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the two treaties that followed it (together known as the
capable, in exactly the same ways, of feeling pain, hunger, [*153] and a hundred kinds of deprivation.
Consequently, people nowhere routinely concede that those with enough power to do so ought to be able to kill,
The development of the concept of "crimes against humanity" was a milestone for universalizing human rights
in that it recognized that there were certain actions, such as slavery and genocide, that implicated the welfare
of the entire species and therefore merited universal condemnation. n6 Nuclear weapons were immediately
seen as a technology that required international control, as extreme genetic manipulations like cloning and
inheritable genetic alterations have come to be seen today. In fact, cloning and inheritable genetic alterations
can be seen as crimes against humanity of a unique sort: they are techniques that can alter the essence of
humanity itself (and thus threaten to change the foundation of human rights) by taking human evolution into
our own hands and directing it toward the development of a new species, sometimes termed the "posthuman."
n7 It may be that species-altering techniques, like cloning and inheritable genetic modifications, could provide
benefits to the human species in extraordinary circumstances. For example, asexual genetic replication could
potentially save humans from extinction if all humans were rendered sterile by some catastrophic event. But no
such necessity currently exists or is on the horizon.
1nc
a. Framework: How we imagine and represent China matters
because it reveals and affects the knowledge we produce in
debate. Before we can debate the best policy towards China,
we must examine our epistemological position.
Turner 14 [Oliver Turner, Hallsworth Research Fellow at the University of
Manchester, PhD from the University of Manchester, April 2014, American Images
of China: Identity, Power, Policy, pp 23-30]
do matter (see Chapters 5 and 6). What is important, however, is not simply the
emergence of those capabilities, but that China which so many people (rightly or
wrongly) consider potentially dangerous now possesses them. Like China, India has a
large standing army, nuclear weapons, an increasing defence budget and so on, but
it is rarely perceived as a threat to the United States. The UKs 500 nuclear
weapons are considered less threatening to American interests than North Koreas
(unsophisticated and unreliable) five. 59 Unavoidably, then, identity also matters.
Discourses and imagery define, to varying extents, what China is and how it
must be approached, regardless of its intentions or observable behaviour . Discourse and
imagery: constructing the reality of China American images of China are understood here to be
the products of discourse about that land and its people. Michel Foucault described
discourse as the general domain of all statements, representing either a group of individual statements, or a
for example, is overtly visual rather than discursive, yet, like that of the world around us, its meaning will always be
interpreted and articulated through language. For the purposes of this analysis American images and
representations of China are considered synonymous. This is an assumption reinforced by Szalay et al., who argue
that images are selective, often affect-laden representations of reality. 61 Peter Hays Gries explains that
simply massacre in Beijing (Time, 12 June, 1989). The New York Times reported, Crackdown in Beijing; Troops
attack and crush Beijing Protest; Thousands fight back, scores are killed (New York Times, 4 June, 1989). Unlike in
the past, the Chinese were no longer so brazenly identified as uncivilised or inferior but that imagery can prove
both stable and enduring and that Uncivilised China remained a powerful, naturalised construction was firmly
evidenced by the events of 1989 and American reactions towards it.
caused revulsion for Americans not only because of the deaths that occurred, but
because the episode did not end as they had hoped (Madsen, 1998: ch.1). Illusions of an
impending free China had appeared but the American understanding of freedom, of
the mutually-reinforcing liberalisation of the economic and political, was not shared
by the Chinese protesters (Madsen, 1998: ch.5). Indeed, some confessed not to even know exactly what
they wanted (Madsen, 1998: 17). The demands for political reform were particularly
misrepresented since the protesters understanding of democracy diverged
significantly from those of Americans. The majority of student participants were
demanding an end to corruption and economic inequality rather than the
establishment of Western-style democratic elections. The movement, then, was
interpreted through the values of American identity so that discourse remained
tightly controlled and regulated. Confirmation of China as an uncivilised other in
relation to the superior and law-abiding West soon followed as Washington lobbied the
Richard Madsen,
worlds leading multilateral economic organisations for a withdrawal of support. Weapons sales to the PRC were
banned and high level military exchanges were postponed. Another round of sanctions later followed in which
Sanctions
against Beijing were legitimised on the basis that China had once again failed to
conform to the superior standards of Western civilisation . As Suettinger puts it, the West
recoiled in horror and disgust, expelling it from the company of modern civilized
nations (Suettinger, 2003: 1). The movement, then, was interpreted through the values of
American identity so that discourse remained tightly controlled and regulated. Confirmation of China as an
uncivilised other in relation to the superior and law-abiding West soon followed as
lending to China by international financial institutions and official diplomatic exchanges both ceased.
Washington lobbied the worlds leading multilateral economic organisations for a withdrawal of support. Weapons
sales to the PRC were banned and high level military exchanges were postponed. Another round of sanctions later
followed in which lending to China by international financial institutions and official diplomatic exchanges both
ceased.
Sanctions against Beijing were legitimised on the basis that China had once
again failed to conform to the superior standards of Western civilisation . As Suettinger
puts it, the West recoiled in horror and disgust, expelling it from the company of modern civilized nations
(Suettinger, 2003: 1).
For many centuries, China has been a fixture in the Western imagination. In the
words of Jonathan Spence (1999: xi): The sharpness of the feelings aroused by China in the West, the
reiterated attempts to describe and analyze the country and its people , the apparently
unending receptivity of Westerners to news from China, all testify to the levels of
fascination the country has generated. Imageries of China as either the Yellow
Peril or the Red Menace have been an integral part of Western obsessions and
anxieties about China (Pan, 2012). The discourse on the rise of China has informed,
and been informed by, these imageries . Few would deny that the Anglo-American discourse on the
rise of China is a fast-moving one. Claims such as the coming conflict with America (Bernstein and
Munro, 1997) and the coming collapse of China (Chang, 2001), made only a decade or so ago, now seem light
years removed from the present. Ezra Vogel's contemplation of living with China in a non-confrontational USChina
relationship (Vogel, 1997) is a far cry from Bergsten's proposed partnership of equals or a Group of Two (G2) in
managing global economic affairs a decade later (Bergsten, 2008). Gerald Segal's (1999) poignant question does
China matter? has become no more than rhetorical now. Yet the rise of China continues to
be a source of anxiety for a variety of reasons. Those who view the power
transition as a zero-sum game are concerned that China's rise is synonymous with
American decline. China has built up its soft power, Joseph Nye (2005) asserts, at the expense of the
United States. China is also said to have mounted a charm offensive worldwide through its diplomatic, trade and
cultural initiatives (Kurlantzick, 2007). In an endorsement of Kurlantzick's book, Orville Schell claimed that Chinese
soft power has begun to transform the world balance of power in a way that makes it essential for Americans to
recalibrate their presumption of US pre-eminence.2 While some argue that China is increasingly becoming a status
quo power, others are convinced that China continues to follow Deng's grand strategy of hiding its capacity and
Barry Buzan (2010: 18), China is no more than a reformist revisionist. Aaron Friedberg (2011) goes much further
and claims that China has engaged in a contest for supremacy with the United States in the struggle for mastery
of Asia, whereas Peter Navarro (2008) predicts the coming China wars not because China possesses weapons
of mass destruction, but because of its invention of the weapons of mass production. At the same time, Robert
Zoellick (2005) argues that the China of today is simply not the Soviet Union of the late 1940s and that China
does not believe that its future depends on overturning the fundamental order of
the international system. This is at odds with the conviction of offensive realists such as John
Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt that China, the rising power, and the United States, the hegemonic power, are
Offensive realists may indeed support their proposition by pointing out that China has increased its military
spending at a double-digit rate annually in the last two decades and has a military budget second only to that of the
United States. China's successful attempts at testing its anti-satellite and anti-ballistic missiles technology in 2007
and 2009 can be cited as clear evidence of China's strategic and purposeful challenge to American dominance in
(Lampton, 2010; The Wall Street Journal, 2013). Stephen Walt counsels at the same time that there is no need for
panic about China's phenomenal rise since China has a long way to go before it becomes a true peer competitor
contingent than either the power or interdependence positions allow. Legro argues that the key is to understand
and to seek to shape, if possible, core ideas held by the Chinese leadership and the way they inform China's
strategic foreign policy goals. For democratic peace theorists, such a proposition is obviously
problematic. If China remains authoritarian and its policy-making processes continue to be opaque, its strategic
intentions are likely to be shrouded in secrecy. For them, nothing short of fundamental democratic change in China
would solve the problem, simply because a
According to Paul Krugman (2010): Most of the world's large economies are stuck in a liquidity trap deeply
depressed, but unable to generate a recovery by cutting interest rates because the relevant rates are already near
zero. China, by engineering an unwarranted trade surplus, is in effect imposing an anti-stimulus on these
economies, which they cannot offset. Krugman proposes what he calls a turn to hardball policy towards China
(ibid.). Even an increase or decrease in China's purchase of US Treasury bonds causes serious concerns. In
July 2010, the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) in Beijing had to go out of its way to publicly rule
out the so-called nuclear option of dumping its vast holdings of US Treasury bonds for political purposes (China
There are also acute concerns about the dark side of China's relentless
pursuit of high-speed economic growth, from environmental degradation to
climate change. Even before it overtook the US as the largest emitter of CO2 in
2007, China was regarded as the worst polluter. China was accused of having either wrecked or
Daily, 2010).
hijacked the Copenhagen climate deal (Lynas, 2009; Vidal, 2009). Together with India, China is said to have
sabotaged the UN climate summit at Copenhagen (Rapp et al., 2010). Furthermore, China's forays into Africa raise
serious concerns about its global ambition beyond securing sufficient energy and resources for rapid economic
development. Its presence in Africa is seen as having significant impact on the development path of the continent
and policy decisions of other powers involved (Alden and Hughes, 2009; Taylor, 2007). As erstwhile pariah state,
China is now said to be in pursuit of the pariah through its energy security strategy, which shapes its relationship
nevertheless a real shift to be discerned in the dominant Anglo-American discourse on the rise of China compared
to that of a decade ago. The difference is that there is now an underlying consensus that this time the rise of China
is for real and it is highly likely to continue, which urgently requires an effective and rigorous response, particularly
China must reassure the rest of the world that its development and growing global role will not come at the
expense of security and well-being of others, reflects not only the deep-seated mutual strategic mistrust between
China and the US, but it is also indicative of the ongoing frustration on the part of the US in trying to read China's
what China wants: bargaining with Beijing (Nathan, 2011); will China's rise lead to war? (Glaser, 2011); and will
China's rise lead to a new normative order? (Kinzelbach, 2012). That these questions are being asked and debated
China managed to rise so rapidly? How could we have got China so wrong in the recent past? These questions take
us beyond concerns expressed about an indeterminate transition of power, strategic uncertainties and the impact of
the rise of China on the future world order. It suggests that prior to being a problem, the rise of China is first and
foremost a puzzle. If we adopt a twenty-year perspective, it is humbling to observe how seriously we have
2. Their use of a traditional IR perspective props up a UScentric approach to knowledge production that ensures China
remains academically isolated, discrete, controllable, and
difference. This is inseparable from the militaristic objective
that views China as a threat or an opportunity to be exploited.
Chow 6 (Rey is a cultural critic, specializing in 20th-century Chinese fiction and
film and postcolonial theory. Educated in Hong Kong and the United States, she has
taught at several major American universities, including Brown University, 2006,
The Age of the World Target Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative
Work, Duke University Press DURHAM AND LONDON 2006) FB
under the modest and apparently innocuous agendas of fact gathering and
documentation, the "scientific" and "objective" production of knowledge
during peacetime about the various special "areas" became the
institutional practice that substantiated and elaborated the militaristic
conception of the world as target.52 In other words, despite the claims about the
apolitical and disinterested nature of the pursuits of higher learning, activities
undertaken under the rubric of area studies, such as language training,
historiography, anthropology, economics, political science, and so forth, are fully
inscribed in the politics and ideology of war . To that extent, the disciplining, research,
and development of so-called academic information are part and parcel of a
strategic logic. And yet, if the production of knowledge (with its vocabulary of aims and goals, research, data
Often
analysis, experimentation, and verification) in fact shares the same scientific and military premises as war-if, for
instance, the ability to translate a difficult language can be regarded as equivalent to the ability to break military
codes53-is it a surprise that it is doomed to fail in its avowed attempts to "know" the other cultures ?
Can
"knowledge" that is derived from the same kinds of bases as war put an end to the
violence of warfare, or is such knowledge not simply warfare's accomplice, destined
to destroy rather than preserve the forms of lives at which it aims its focus? As
long as knowledge is produced in this self-referential manner, as a circuit
of targeting or getting the other that ultimately consolidates the
omnipotence and omnipresence of the sovereign "self"/"eye" -the "I" -that
is the United States, the other will have no choice but remain just that a
target whose existence justifies only one thing, its destruction by the
bomber. As long as the focus of our study of Asia remains the United States , and as
long as this focus is not accompanied by knowledge of what is happening elsewhere at other times as well as at the
present, such
virtual worlding that was unleashed by the dropping of the atomic bombs , with the
United States always occupying the position of the bomber, and other cultures always
viewed as the military and information target fields . In this manner, events whose historicity
does not fall into the epistemically closed orbit of the atomic bomber-such as the Chinese reactions to the war from
a primarily anti-Japanese point of view that I alluded to at the beginning of this chapter-will never receive the
investment in the study of other languages and other cultures, area studies missed the opportunity, so aptly
provided by Said's criticism of Orientalism, to become the site where a genuinely alternative form of knowledge
production might have been possible_ Although, as Harootunian writes, "Said's book represented an important
intellectual challenge to the mission of area studies which, if accepted, would have reshaped area studies and freed
it from its own reliance on the Cold War and the necessities of the national security state,"56 the challenge was too
fundamentally disruptive to the administrative and instrumentalist agendas so firmly routinized in area studies to
be accepted by its practitioners. As a result, Said's attempt to link an incipient neocolonial discourse to the history
of area studies was almost immediately belittled, dismissed, and ignored, and his critique, for all its relevance to
area studies' future orientation, simply "migrated to English studies to transform the study of literature into a fullscale preoccupation with identity and its construction."57 A long-term outcome of all this, Harootunian suggests,
has been the consolidation of a type of postcolonial studies that, instead of fully developing the comparative,
interdisciplinary, and multicultural potential that is embedded theoretically in area studies, tends to specialize in
the deconstruction of the nature of language, in the amalgamation of poststructuralist theory largely with AngloAmerican literary studies, and in the investigation mostly of former British colonial cultures rather than a substantial
range of colonial and semicolonial histories from different parts of the world.58 On its part, having voluntarily failed
to heed Said's call, area studies can only remain "locked in its own enclaves ofknowledge"59 based on the
reproduction of institutional and organizational structures with claims to normativity, while being defensively
guarded against the innovations of poststructuralist theory that have radicalized North American humanistic and
incompetent leadership, should bombing not be the technique of choice for correcting the United States itself? And
so, in spite of all the suspicions of racist conspiracy quickly raised about "foreigners "
Neither the progressive flow of history nor the pacific tendencies of an international society of republican states will
save us.
The violent ontologies I have described here in fact dominate the conceptual
and policy frameworks of modern republican states and have come, against everything Kant hoped for,
to stand in for progress, modernity and reason. Indeed what Heidegger argues, I think with some credibility, is that
the enframing world view has come to stand in for being itself. Enframing, argues Heidegger, 'does not simply
endanger man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is...it drives out every other possibility of
revealing...the rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a
more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.'87 What I take from Heidegger's
argument -- one that I have sought to extend by analysing the militaristic power of modern ontologies of political
give the chain of reasoning which builds one structure of truth on another until a course of action, however violent
creates both
discursive constraints -- available choices may simply not be seen as credible or legitimate -- and
material constraints that derive from the mutually reinforcing cascade of discourses
and events which then preordain militarism and violence as necessary policy responses, however
ineffective, dysfunctional or chaotic. The force of my own and Heidegger's analysis does, admittedly,
or dangerous, becomes preordained through that reasoning's very operation and existence. It
tend towards a deterministic fatalism. On my part this is quite deliberate; it is important to allow this possible
conclusion to weigh on us. Large sections of modern societies -- especially parts of the media, political leaderships
institutions -- are utterly trapped within the Clausewitzian paradigm, within the
instrumental utilitarianism of 'enframing' and the stark ontology of the friend and enemy. They are
and national security
certainly tremendously aggressive and energetic in continually stating and reinstating its force.
Friedrich Nietzsche to explore the process of forgetting orthodox IR theory. This is not to essentialize Nietzsche or
render him heroic but to employ his work as a steppingstone, a source to provoke thought before it, too, has to be
Nietzsche ended up with this position by dealing with a set of methodological dilemmas similar to those I am trying
suppose that one only needs to point out this origin and this misty shroud of
delusion in order to destroy the world that counts for real, so-called "reality ."
Nietzsche's skepticism toward grounding critique in an investigation of the origins of things is important. It is one of
the reasons why some consider his work as the conceptual turning point from modernity to postmodernity.
Nietzsche's own words may explain best the importance of forgetting for a critique of orthodox IR: Why is it that this
when
investigators of knowledge sought out the origin of things they always believed they
would discover something of incalculable significance for all later action and
judgment, that they always presupposed, indeed, that the salvation of man must
depend on insight into the origins of things , but. . . The more insight we possess into
an origin the less significant does the origin appear: while what is nearest to us,
what is around us and in us, gradually begins to display colors and beauties and
enigmas and riches of significance of which earlier mankind had not an inkling . By
thought comes back to me again and again and in ever more varied colours? - that formerly,
observing why Nietzsche ended up with this position, I will explore the "riches of significance" that could emerge
once we liberate IR theory from the compulsion to link the search for peace with exploring the origins of present
rather than substance. Yet, the manner in which we approach, think, conceptualize, and formulate IR has a
significant impact on how it is practiced.
Framework:
we arent promoting fiat so to specifically implement a
theoretical affirmative. This is about having an affirmative
that follows the resolution to allow in depth clash, fiat is a
mechanism that comes with the resolution, not what we are
specifically promoting.
Imagine that you are visiting a Central American country and you happen upon a village square where a n
army captain is about to order his men to shoot two peasants lined up against a
wall. When you ask the reason, you are told someone in this village shot at the captain's men last night. When
you object to the killing of possibly innocent people, you are told that civil wars do not permit moral niceties. Just to
the ultimate egoism of fastidious self-righteousness in which the purity of the self is more important than the lives
absolutist approaches to integrity become self-contradictory in a world of nuclear weapons? "Do what is right
though the world should perish" was a difficult principle even when Kant expounded it in the eighteenth century,
their
situations that makes it both more necessary and more desirable for them to adopt
a more credible form of utilitarianism. Consider, first the argument from necessity. Public
officials are obliged to make their choices under uncertainty, and uncertainty of a very
with that larger argument, I must therefore say what it is that is so special about public officials and
special sort at that. All choices-public and private alike- are made under some degree of uncertainty, of course. But
conduct. Knowing aggregates and averages, they can proceed to calculate the utility payoffs from adopting each
policy-makers are relatively blunt. They can influence general tendencies, making rather more people
behave in certain sorts of ways rather more often. But perfect compliance is unrealistic. And (building on the