浪潮与锚链:中美海上竞争的战略场域与话语分野OACHSSCD

Amid intensifying interactions between China and the United States in key waters such as the South China Sea and the East China Sea,competition increasingly unfolds across three interlinked arenas:material power,international norms,and official discourse.This article develops a strategic-analytic framework encompassing the material,normative,and discursive fields,and advances the argument that China-U.S.interaction is characterized by structural asymmetry.The United States leverages its advantages in the material field and amplifies rule interpretation and alliance mobilization through securitizing narratives.China,by contrast,anchors its strategy in sovereignty-based normative principles and a discourse of historical justice,preserving normative legitimacy while counterbalancing external pressure and steadily advancing near-seas material capabilities.To test this framework,the study constructs a bilingual corpus of official maritime strategy texts from both countries spanning 2021-2025 and applies computational political science methods—including structural topic modeling,sentiment analysis,and diachronic word embedding.The empirical results reveal a clear divergence in discursive themes,mapping respectively onto a Mahanian conception of global commons control and a Corbettian strategic culture of regional denial.In discursive practice,the U.S.securitizing rhetoric escalates over time,whereas Chinese narratives place greater emphasis on legitimacy and exhibit higher stability.A deeper consequence of this competition is discursive decoupling around key strategic concepts:notions such as"stability,""freedom of navigation,"and"international law"have undergone semantic differentiation,thereby intensifying the"security dilemma"across the material and normative fields and heightening the risk of strategic misperception.