An Image Emergency; The gap between how China sees itself and others see it is wide and dangerous.(Country overview)

Byline: Joshua Cooper Ramo

In the late spring of 2004, several dozen Chinese and international scholars gathered in Boao, a resort town on Hainan Island in the South China Sea. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss a new concept advanced by Zheng Bijian, a Chinese intellectual known for his connections with Chinese President Hu Jintao. Though Zheng's Chinese rivals carped among themselves about exactly how close the two were, his intellectual pedigree had unarguably deep roots: it stretched back to the late 1970s, when he had been part of a group of scholars who had traveled to the West at Deng Xiaoping's request. For most of the 1980s and 1990s, Zheng ...