Do The Chinese Believe China Is A Superpower?

BEIJING - Reading the most frequently emailed article list on The New York Times website is instructive these days.

For days, China has ranked in the top three most popularly searched terms on the site.

Last weekend, four of the newspaper’s top ten most emailed articles were about China: the ongoing controversy over extreme Chinese parenting; a U.S. solar company’s decision to shut down its main operations in Massachusetts; an op-ed about the strength of Chinese education and the importance of Confucianism; and the opportunities for American architects to design and build, unfettered, in China.

Other Western media coverage of China has verged on hysteria: ranging from an entire Glenn Beck program last week devoted to the country (“Their kids are passing us!”  “They’re grabbing more and more oil!”) to a bewildering piece in Foreign Policy magazine about not just the rise of China but the rise of the Han Chinese.

No wonder a poll last week found that nearly half of Americans surveyed say China is the world’s top economic power.

And just what do the Chinese make of all this talk?

"What superpower?"Well, we know there’s a large population in China that believes their country is a superpower and that, frankly, it’s about time.  These hardcore nationalists can be found in Chinese Internet chat rooms, holding court on the “American conspiracy theory”:

“[Extreme nationalists] hold high the ‘patriotic’ banner, talk about hundreds of years of national humiliation, claim that the U.S.-led Western alliance is still ‘trying to push China to death,’ and regard the exchange rate, foreign debt purchase, trade deficit, climate change, Central Asian anti-terrorism campaigns and the neighboring countries’ worries against China as burdens.  They insist ‘China can say no,’ and that the ‘China model’ will be popular all over the world.”

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