?Uncle Wen Says Hello?: Narrative and Metaphor in the Discourse of Sino-American Relations.

The U.S.-China relationship is among the most important relationships in the Asia-Pacific region and in international relations. This article examines the Wen Ho Lee espionage case of 1999 in the context of U.S.-China relations. While the case has received much attention in the public and academic spheres, it has not in International Relations (IR), despite its implications for US-China relations, American identity, and security practices involving high technology. I argue that the case came to mean what it did by recontextualizing Cold War narratives and metaphors. In addition, the Chinagate discourse drew on discourses of racial othering and atomic espionage. Using a broad range of materials including congressional reports and other governmental texts, media, political cartoons, and websites, I reconstruct the discourses and narratives that dominated the prosecution of Lee. I make the case for a discourse analytic approach to IR and then apply specific techniques borrowed from linguistics and literary theory, including discursive juxtaposition, narrative analysis and metaphor analysis, to delineate the lineage of racially charged understandings of the Chinese in America and their role in U.S. national security policy. Special attention is paid to the antecedent, dominant and counter-discourses involved in representations of China and the Chinese, and the political possibilities elided in the process of Chinagate?s achieving discursive hegemony are discussed. In the conclusion, I examine the implications of the discursive practices of Chinagate for US security policy, scientific communication, US-PRC relations, and for IR theory more broadly. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]