For hundreds of years, China has been seen or felt externally by its neighbours and the world at large to be either a benign power or an aggressive hegemon, eliciting a mixture of hope, fear, awe and contempt.

While Napoleon once described China from afar as "a sleeping lion", Europeans who came into contact with it later described it as "the sick man of Asia". However, since the early 1990s onward, China has been loved and feared as a "a rising dragon".

Internally, China has been vacillating between peace and order and war and chaos, giving examples of how to - as well as how not to - run a nation.

What is this giant's future? What promises does it hold? What problems and obstacles will it encounter? Does China pose a threat to its neighbours and the world?

What are China's perceptions of the West and the United States? How have these perceptions come about? Do the Chinese love or hate westernisation or westernised modernisation?

Is there a similarity between the Chinese and Muslims' struggles between traditions on one hand, and modernity on the other?

Malaysiakini

conducted an email interview on these issues with Singapore-based Prof Wang Gungwu, an eminent scholar of the history, politics and cultures of China and Southeast Asia. His responses are produced in a two-part report.

Wang, the director of the East Asian Institute of the National University of Singapore as well as chairperson of its Institute of South East Asian Studies (ISEAS), is no stranger to students of Southeast Asian and Chinese studies.

Born in Surabaya in Indonesia (then Dutch East Indies), he first attended the National Central University in Nanjing and later obtained a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) and Master's degrees from the University of Malaya in Singapore. He then pursued his Ph.D. at the University of London in 1957.

Later, he taught history at the University of Malaya, Australian National University and University of Hong Kong. He also spent time at All Souls College at Oxford and the University of Hawaii.

He has also been a leading member of many academic institutions and intellectual groups in Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, the US and China. He has written several books and monographs in Chinese and English.

Ammunition for hawks

Malaysiakini: China now seems to be strong and powerful economically, politically and militarily but there are also contrarian experts on China. Gordon Chang, for example, has written a book entitled 'The Coming Collapse of China'. In your views, what are the actual strengths and weaknesses of China now and in the future?

Wang : The strengths and weaknesses are huge and it is hard to be certain that the strengths will overcome the weaknesses. I do not, however, share Gordon Chang's dire - and alarmist - predictions (wonderful for selling books!), but believe that China will find a way of softening some of the blows that its financial weaknesses will bring. The results will be less dramatic and that would be good for China. But the leaders in Beijing will have to take great care to listen to the demands of the increasingly troubled peasantry in the countryside and the unemployed in the cities.

In the 1950s, 1960s and even 1970s, China's foreign policy was, or was perceived to be, revolutionary and anti-status quo in that it promoted world revolution across state borders. But since the 1980s, it has made a complete change by adopting conservative and discreet approaches in managing international and inter-state relations. What are the reasons ?

Deng Xiaoping rightly decided that China could not afford to be poor much longer. In order to increase national wealth, China would need a peaceful environment for an indefinite period of time.

There are so many people to provide for. And the more successful the economy gets, the higher the expectations. It becomes increasingly clear that the stronger the economy, and therefore also China's defences, the more beneficial it is for China to support any international system that would guarantee the conditions for China to go on seeking to prosper.

If China does not feel threatened by the hawks in the US government (and the proxies they hope to find in Taiwan and elsewhere), I believe that it will be even more content to let the current system help to ensure the favourable conditions China needs for the country's future development.

China always feels itself to be encircled by Western and 'anti-China' powers not only in the Asia-Pacific region, but also in other regions like Central Asia and the Middle East as well as Mongolia. Can the feeling be justified, or is it just a sense of paranoia or delusion of persecution resulting from its obsession with historical memories and imageries of being attacked and invaded from all directions?

From their past experiences, the Chinese leaders are justified to feel that they could easily be threatened from these directions. They are trying to make themselves less vulnerable, but while they try to do that, they are often described as seeking to be expansionist and thus of becoming a threat to China's neighbours. Whether the US and other powers can make the Chinese leaders believe that their intentions on China are truly benign and well-intentioned is far from reassuring.

Powerful countries like the US today do not realise how domineering they sound, and how that gives ammunition to the hawks in the PLA (People's Liberation Army) in China against their more reasonable leaders. It is simply not credible to suggest that the US is always benign and peaceful while the Chinese are aggressive and dangerous. There is much contrary evidence of late that would support an opposite view.

The strategic relations between Southeast Asian nations and polities on one hand and China on the other can be traced back to pre-colonial time when, for example, the Sultanate of Malacca used Ming China as a check and balance against Siam while China used the former to ensure general security in its southern flank. Geopolitics does not seem to have changed much. Has it?

This is a thoughtful comparison between past and present. The analogies may be appropriate up to a point, but the world has changed a lot since the 15 th century when the Chinese sensed no real danger to their civilisation from the sea. They were taught a lesson about maritime threats from 1840s to the 1940s, and have been taught more lessons since the 1990s about even more

superior kinds of warfare (notably weaponry and high-tech systems).

No country, region, or pairs of regions, can ignore the reach of globalised geopolitics. That may be one of the good reasons why the Chinese have learnt to appreciate how valuable the present international system could be to themselves - even while the system itself is being weakened by the fact of absolute superiority of the world's only superpower.

Tomorrow

: Prof Wang Gungwu explores unity and diversity of China.