Shifting Distances, Shaping Threats: Symbolic Distance Regulation in a U.S. Industrial Advocacy Report on Chinese Electric Vehicles

This study examines how Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) are represented in On a Collision Course , a 2024 industrial advocacy report published by the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM). Drawing on proximization theory, distanciation, securitization theory, and Cognitive Linguistic Critical Discourse Studies, it employs symbolic distance regulation as an operational perspective to examine how threat, identity, and policy legitimacy are discursively organized. Based on a focused qualitative case study, the analysis identifies two connected discursive movements. First, spatial, temporal, and axiological proximization represents Chinese EVs as approaching, imminent, and value-incompatible threats to the U.S. auto industry and broader national economic interests, thereby supporting securitizing moves. Second, distanciation relocates the perceived threat within legal, administrative, and regulatory categories without removing the report’s earlier security-oriented framing. Chinese EVs are consequently represented as policy objects that can be governed through trade and industrial policy mechanisms. Metaphorical expressions and textually supported image schemas further contribute to the construction of threat and the legitimation of institutional responses. This bounded case illustrates how a non-state industrial advocacy report can frame economic competition as a security-relevant threat and render that perceived threat discursively governable through proposed institutional mechanisms.