National Defense Policy and Global Communication: Chinese National Military Strategy in a Cultural-Discursive Perspective

The Chinese defense policy has been under sustained interrogation for nearly three decades and "China threat theory" has become predominant in the scholarship.The crux of the questions here has been,"What is the real intention of China's military?" The present article proposes to take a cultural-discursive perspective on defense policies and scrutinizes China's discourse of national military strategy by comparing it with that of the United States.It is argued that,in stark contrast to its US counterpart,China's defense strategy is self-defensive in character,cooperative in international relations,transparent in principles of action,and stable through times,but shares with the US counterpart the same commitment to safeguarding international security and stability.The paper concludes by suggesting opening up a new field of national defense discourse studies with a view to further strengthening China's defense policy discourse system.