Fiscal Orientalism: China Panic, the Indebted Citizen, and the Spectacle of National Debt

Abstract

This essay critically examines the proliferating media artifacts and political discourses that dramatize China's ownership of U.S. national debt in contemporary America. It argues that this new mode of representing China is best captured by the term "fiscal orientalism." Complementing techno-orientalism, a configuration prompted by Japan's (technological) rise in the 1980s, fiscal orientalism draws attention to the ideological work performed by a menacing "Chinese future." Fiscal-orientalist narratives, by conjoining the time of the Other with the time of debt, racialize the effects of neoliberal financialization and perpetuate a historically specific form of indebted citizenship.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.