ABSTRACT
For some time since the end of the Cold War, two often contradictory selfimages of a great power and a developing country constantly tested China’s foreign-policy makers.1 While they cherished a rising power status and wanted to play a role accordingly, China kept a low profile in international affairs and played down its pretense to being a global power because of its concern that “the existing gap between China and the developed countries, and the U.S.A. in particular, is enormous in terms of national wealth, standard of living, education, and science and technology.”2 In this case, although China’s great power aspiration sparked anxieties and hot debate in almost all world capitals, the topic remained delicate in China’s media at least until a 12-part TV series with an explicit title, The Rise of Great Powers, was broadcast twice by China’s Central Television during the last two months of 2006. The series looks closely at the ascendance of nine great powers – including Britain, Germany, Japan, and the U.S.A. – and the lessons that China can draw from their rise. The message is that “China is on the verge of the same historic rise.”3 Whether or not the broadcast signaled that the dual-identity syndrome of great power versus poor country finally diminished along with the rapid growth of China’s national power, it was interpreted as meaning that Chinese people were encouraged “to discuss what it means to be a major world power” and the Chinese leadership “has largely stopped denying that China intends to become one soon.”4 This observation was supported by a 2006 Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the Asia Society survey, which found that 87 percent of Chinese respondents thought that China should take a greater role in world affairs. Most Chinese believed that China’s global influence would match that of the U.S.A. within a decade.5 Consequently, a Western reporter observed that although the Chinese leaders still coyly insist that China is merely a developing country, “a growing number of Chinese scholars and commentators are discarding the old bashfulness and beginning to talk openly of China’s rising power.”6
