ABSTRACT
The People’s Republic of China’s image – both within and outside China – is that of a ‘great power’ and as the PRC has become a major global economy, increasingly a debate has begun as to whether China is in fact an emerging ‘Superpower’. However, the difference between the PRC’s image of a great power and the leap to the status of a ‘Superpower’ has been problematic both for Beijing, and for theorists of Chinese foreign policy. Paradoxically, China has to date been largely unable to forcefully project itself onto the international scene – particularly outside of Asia. In order to rationalise this situation, a major feature of China’s informal national ideology – its self-perception vis-à-vis the rest of the world – is that China has somehow been ‘cheated’ of its place in the sun by the imperialists of the nineteenth century, and that this prevention of China assuming its ‘rightful place’ as a world power has continued, even to contemporary times.
