China in the US Imaginary: Tibet, the Olympics, and the 2008 Earthquake Kent A. Ono & Joy Yang Jiao Recent US media coverage of Beijing as the site of the Olympic Games, Tibet, the devastating earthquake in Sichuan province, the incredible pace of China’s modernization, and human rights (among other less prominent themes) offers an opportunity for communication scholars to map the discursive position of China in the US imaginary. A discursive power struggle exists between a time-worn orientalist image of China as a museum piece*an ‘‘ancient civilization’’ and Cold War enemy* and a China under authoritarian rule but quickly becoming a modern, quasi- capitalist powerhouse with tremendous economic traction, a massive population, and a future that threatens aging and slow-to-change western-style superpowers. Based on our review of 89 articles about China published in the New York Times over the past year, we provide a glimpse into this epic Manichean dualism between two competing images of old and new China that reveals an underlying identity crisis in which ‘‘old China’’ perpetually figures anachronistically (especially within discourse about the ‘‘new China’’), and media narratives seemingly repress the United States’ falling status within a rapidly globalizing world. 1 We make three assumptions about the strategic positioning of China and the United States within such discourses of global power: First, the media’s construction of China is perspectival and reflexively facilitates a particular political and cultural self-construction of US America. Second, because of global change, discourse similarly perpetually shifts. Third, while ever-shifting, the discourse remains strongly yoked to history, politics, and culture. These three assumptions lead us to suggest that the position of China within the US imaginary is conditioned on both what we might call historical Sinoptics and changing fields of context. Kent A. Ono is Professor of Communications and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His written and edited work includes Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California’s Proposition 187 (with John M. Sloop, 2002), Asian American Studies after Critical Mass (2005), A Companion to Asian American Studies (2005), and Asian Americans and the Media (with Vincent Pham, 2008). Joy Yang Jiao is a graduate student of English at Miami University. Her research field covers rhetoric, intercultural communication, and media studies. Correspondence to: Kent A. Ono, Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 810 South Wright Street, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. E-mail: kaono@illinois.edu ISSN 1479-1420 (print)/ISSN 1479-4233 (online) # 2008 National Communication Association DOI: 10.1080/14791420802416168 Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies Vol. 5, No. 4, December 2008, pp. 406410