Mars, Vénus, et Vulcain : l’image de la Chine dans les médias français sous l’ère Trump

Abstract

In a famous analogy, Robert Kagan opposed the United-States dedicated to the cult of Mars, manly god of wars, to Europe consecrating Venus, feminine goddess of pleasures. We would propose to extend this binary analogy by including China into it as representing Vulcan. Mars, Venus and Vulcan (Vulcan, god of braziers; China, factory of the world). How to understand the representational interactions between the United-States, Europe and China? In this triadic relation, from a European point of view, the United-States often served as a magnified image of itself (its bigger Self) while Chine served as a reversed image of itself (its remote Other). Moreover, the representational interactions between them has been regularly framed by a specific perspective bias: when Europe fails to recognize itself into the US, it tends to overlook its differences with China – a perspective bias that may have been reactivated by Trump’s election to US presidency.