ABSTRACT
In the West, China’s rise is often perceived as a threat to the Western alliance, and negative views have been expressed by the US, Britain, Germany, Italy and Australia in the last couple of years. Modern anti-Chinese sentiment is clearly the result of fears of China’s rise as a global power, and Donald Trump has generated a fierce anti-Chinese stance during his 2016 campaign by suggesting that China is ‘raping’ the US through free trade. In face of rapid modernization and the growth of the market, this narrative requires Chinese cultural resources that provide a coherence to emphasize the stability of ancient Confucian values and their continued relevance both as a source of coherence and national identity with undeniable Chinese characteristics. In the modern era, the central narrative of Chinese history has been that of the Chinese people as masters of the nation, possessed of a spirit of struggle, unstintingly seeking out their own independent path to modernity.
