From CNOOC to Huawei: securitization, the China threat, and critical infrastructure

ABSTRACT This article uses critical discourse analysis to examine how China has been constructed as an existential threat by the United States. Specifically, it explores how US reactions to the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) in 2005 created precedent for similar reactions to Huawei a decade later. It uses these case studies to demonstrate how the interplay between the China threat and security discourses of critical infrastructure has worked to successfully securitize China within broader American discourse. These examinations demonstrate a deliberate and protracted securitization of China by US elites, and they support more critical approaches to securitization theory that emphasize cumulative and incremental aspects over a securitized/de-securitized binary. Discourse analysis of key texts allows the reader to uncover how security issues are socially constructed, and discursive examinations of CNOOC and Huawei illustrate how concerns about national security are now employed in everyday American political discourse so that the China Threat Discourse has become the primary reading of China by US observers.