We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.-The Talmud China and its relationship with the United States has long been a fascinating subject of study in the mainstream U.S. international relations community. This is reflected, for example, in the current heated debates over whether China is primarily a strategic threat to or a market bonanza for the United States and whether contain ment or engagement is the best way to deal with it. 1 While U.S. China scholars argue fiercely over "what China pre cisely is," their debates have been underpinned by some common ground, especially in terms of a positivist epistemology. Firstly, they believe that China is ultimately a knowable object, whose reality can be, and ought to be, empirically revealed by scientific means. For example, after expressing his dissatisfaction with often con flicting Western perceptions of China, David M. Lampton, former president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, sug gests that "it is time to step back and look at where China is today, where it might be going, and what consequences that direction will hold for the rest of the world." 2 Like many other China scholars, Lampton views his object of study as essentially "something we can stand back from and observe with clinical detachment." 3 Secondly, associated with the first assumption, it is commonly believed that China scholars merely serve as "disinterested observers"

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The relationship between Chinese soft power and Chinese media has been a focus of a growing body of literature. Challenging a resource-based conception of soft power and a transmission view of communication that inform much of the debate, this article adopts a discursive approach to soft power and media communication. It argues that their relationship is not just a matter of resource transmission, but one of discursive construction, which begs the questions of what mediated discursive practices are at play in soft power construction and how. Addressing these oft-neglected questions, we identify a typology of three soft-power discursive practices: charm offensive, Othering offensive, and defensive denial. Focusing on the little-understood practice of Othering offensive, we illustrate its presence in Chinese media through a critical discourse analysis of China Daily’s framing of Donald Trump and the United States, and argue that the Othering offensive in Chinese media that portrays Trump’s America as a dysfunctional and declining Other serves to construct a Chinese self as more responsible, dynamic, and attractive. Adding a missing discursive dimension to the study of soft power and the media, this study has both scholarly and practical implications for analysing a nation’s soft power strategy.

China's rise, like the demise of the Soviet Union, is one of the defining events in the contemporary world. Yet, while the unexpected Soviet collapse and the end of the Cold War sparked the ‘Third Debate’ in International Relations (IR) theory, it is puzzling that the rise of China has yet to generate a comparable process of shell-shock and soul-searching among IR theorists. Just as the end of the Cold War is more than simply the end of a bipolar power struggle per se, so too China's rise is much more than the familiar ascendancy of another great power. Rather, it is also a complex, evolving and possibly border-traversing and paradigm-shattering phenomenon in global life that, on the one hand, requires fresh and innovative theorizing in and beyond IR and, on the other hand, potentially offers new insights for us to rethink world politics more broadly. This article introduces this Special Issue that seeks to tentatively respond to this theoretical, epistemological and ontological challenge. It draws attention to the blind spot in IR theorizing on China, and calls for deeper engagement between IR theory and China's rise that goes beyond mere ‘theory-testing’ within the existing perimeters of mainstream IR.

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Soft power and hard power are conceptualised in International Relations as empirically and normatively dichotomous, and practically opposite – one intangible, attractive, and legitimate, the other tangible, coercive, and less legitimate. This article critiques this binary conceptualisation, arguing that it is discursively constructed with and for the construction of Self and Other. It further demonstrates that practices commonly labelled and understood as soft power and hard power are closely interconnected. Best understood as ‘representational force’ and ‘physical force’ respectively, soft and hard power intertwine through the operation of productive and disciplinary forms of power. We illustrate this argument by analysing the Sino-Japanese dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. Both governments exercise representational force in constructing their respective versions of events and Self/Other. The soft/hard power binary itself plays a performative role as the Self is typically associated with soft power and the Other with hard power. The operation of productive power, moreover, privileges the attractiveness of the former and the repellence of the latter, and disciplinary power physically enforces these distinctions on subjects in both states. Finally, reinforced Self/Other distinctions legitimise preparations for violence against the Other on both sides, thus exposing how fundamentally entangled soft and hard power are in practice.

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