In the post-positivist meta-theoretical context, the article claims that the study of the primary Western representations of China is consistently neglected and treated superficially in the literature. The importance held by these representations for actually shaping decisions made by the West is also largely ignored. The article seeks to re-evaluate Western representations of China as »China as a threat« and »China as an opportunity«, which are inseparable from the Western scientific discourse on China. Focus is given in the article to inspecting enduring Western historical representations in international relations and the transmission of these ideas to modern times, in modern literature on China produced in the West. The key conclusion made is that such approaches build on the idea of the Other, which tell us that the West sees China in the context of Western industrialisation, Western universality, and generalised Western experiences transferred to the local context of the Chinese state. They successfully reduce the otherwise multifaceted Chinese society and state into a set of simplistic empirical examples that serve to generalise the Western view of China’s growth.
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