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The Journal of the Royal Institute of Thailand Volume II - 2010 Public Opinion and the Limit of China’s “Peaceful Rise” 38 Bijian, 2005: 14-19). Since then, the concept of “Peaceful Rise”, used interchangeably with “peaceful development”, has became key phrase in many speeches on foreign policy by China’s leaders and diplomats. In the interview with Chinese writer Ye Xiaoshen on September 10, 2004, Zheng Bijian revealed that the concept of “Peaceful Rise” is in fact an antidote to the so-called “China Threat Theory” which has been popular in the West since the early 1990s. The theory, he said, “is that if China moves ahead and becomes stronger, it will vie for resources and seek expansion”. Zheng’s immediate reaction was that a reply was needed and he should respond “based on the facts and basic experience of China’s development” (Zheng Bijian, 2005: 56). In this article, the author argues that, although the Chinese leader has chosen to strive for a peaceful rise, its discourse has been challenged by the rise of public opinion in the globalized world. Facilitated by the Internet and a more commercialized publishing industry, public opinion in China has been more diverse and sometimes become a limit to official foreign policy orthodoxy including the concept of “Peaceful Rise”. The Role of Public Opinion in Chinese Foreign Policy Public opinion has played an important role in the making of Chinese foreign policy since 1978. Entering the reform era, the state has diminished its control over society and citizens have enjoyed considerably more latitude to speak their minds in private and public, as long as they respect the “Four Cardinal Principles” laid down by supreme leader Deng Xiaoping in 1978; i.e. Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, the socialist road, the people’s democratic dictatorship, and the supremacy of the CCP (Shambaugh, 2000: 184). In other words, the “public sphere” developed in post-Mao China. Although the media are still under the control of the government and the CCP, they have been encouraged to be more commercialized in order to reduce the state’s financial burden. Advertisements are permitted and publishers tend to publish news, articles, and opinions on public issues whose contents are more interesting and different from official orthodoxy, in order to attract readers and make profits. Therefore, media like People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the CCP, attracts fewer readers. Liu Dabao, a senior researcher of People’s Daily’s research office told Thai researchers in October 2003 that its sales decreased from 7 or 8 million issues per day in the Maoist era to 2 million issues per day after Deng’s institution of reform (Utamachan and Utamachan, 2006: 94-95). As Qing Cao (2007) argues, “the growing partially deregulated market forces, though under tight control,