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.