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Framing the South China Sea in U.S. Indo-Pacific Discourse
QIN Kai
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DOI:10.17265/2328-2134/2026.04.002
Nanjing University, Nanjing, China
This article examines how U.S. official discourse constructed the strategic meaning of the South China Sea within the Indo-Pacific framework between 2017 and 2024. Drawing on a purposive corpus of seven publicly available texts—four contextual strategy documents and three issue-specific documents—the article employs qualitative framing analysis combining deductive and inductive coding. The initial coding scheme comprised four theoretically informed, non-mutually exclusive frames: legal order, freedom of navigation, security threat, and alliance deterrence; an emergent code allowed interpretations not captured by these categories to be identified. The analysis identifies a cumulative pattern of frame layering rather than replacement, although the frames’ relative prominence changed. Legal-order and freedom-of-navigation frames remained foundational, while references to coercion, alliance commitments, partner capacity-building, and integrated deterrence became more prominent. This layering positioned the South China Sea not only as a dispute over maritime access and legal rules, but also as a test of regional order, alliance credibility, and resistance to coercion amid U.S.-China strategic competition. The principal shift therefore lay not in the abandonment of established legal and navigational frames, but in their incorporation into a more security-oriented, alliance-based strategic narrative. As an analysis of public strategic communication, the article does not infer a direct causal relationship between official discourse and policy outcomes.
South China Sea, U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy, official discourse, strategic narratives, framing analysis, integrated deterrence
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