China's rise has been discussed in various ways, but only recently has scholarship started to examine it in relation to overseas Chinese, as politicians and commentators outside China, as well as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) itself and some scholars on “smart power” have come to realize their importance as political messengers of China. This paper analyses interview results with second-generation Chinese immigrants in Australia in tertiary education to examine how they are “telling the China story”. The results reveal this cohort's complex attitudes towards China's rise. On the one hand, they are proud of China's rise, especially in economic terms, and their socio-cultural attachment to it. On the other, they critically evaluate political and social issues in China, and are aware of their marginal position in Chinese society. These findings argue against the oversimplistic approach that regards Chinese immigrants as a homogenous group acting as political messengers of the CCP.

China's involvement in the world and its economic modernization are expected to lead to its democratization and adherence to the liberal international order. However, after several decades of development, the authoritarian system remains resilient, and China's foreign policy appears to be more assertive. The limited nature of scholarship on the public opinion in a rising power has prevented a better understanding of China's domestic changes and foreign policy. This study seeks to unveil the micro-foundations of the unexpected trajectory of China's rise by investigating the public's national and international orientations using nationwide representative survey data. The results show that international orientations had a very limited effect on Chinese popular attitudes toward domestic politics and foreign relations, while national orientations strengthened public support for the authoritarian system and China's assertive foreign policy. Intergenerational variations existed in public opinion in China, with the Xi generation showing a different pattern of political values than the preceding generations.

Current anti-Chinese sentiment in the international community has emerged from a knowledge-production background that entails the material fact of China's rising power and ideational factors tied to how the rising China phenomenon is interpreted. The ideational factors can be divided into two groups. One analyses China according to established Western IR theories that describe the country in terms of either threat or opportunity, thereby rendering China as part of an established universal ontology. A second group approaches China's experiences in a more sympathetic light, but still conceptualizes China's rise according to fixed categories such as “nation-state.” This paper argues that both of these groups are guilty of creating self-fulfilling prophecies – that is, they consistently theorize China in opposition to the West owing to the rational epistemology upon which they built their knowledge or perceptions of China. This epistemology conflicts with the efforts of Chinese IR scholars to evaluate China's rise in a relational manner.