In the past few years, the mainland leadership has spent masses of energy and hundreds of billions of yuan annually to build up its soft power and raise its profile on the global stage, befitting its rising economic prowess.
The major state media outlets appear to have fat budgets for expanding their reach to audiences in Asia, Africa, Latin America and even the United States. On Friday, the central government hosted the Fifth Confucius Institute Conference in Beijing, bringing together more than 1,000 representatives from about 500 Confucius Institutes worldwide in an effort to find more ways to promote Chinese culture and language.
Sparing no expense to showcase its achievements and present its friendly side to the rest of the world, the mainland has staged the spectacular Olympic Games in Beijing, the World Expo in Shanghai and the Asian Games in Guangzhou.
Just as those efforts helped China win friendship and admiration from foreigners, it then committed acts that were incomprehensible and outrageous - and felt across the world, as in the jailing of melamine-milk campaigner Zhao Lianhai and Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo.
Mainland leaders may not have realised this as they fumed over the totally negative headlines in the overseas media: the international uproar over the way the two cases are being handled may risk cancelling out all the goodwill and admiration earned after spending so much energy and all those hundreds of billions of yuan.
Indeed, the recent developments have highlighted one of the great contradictions in China's way of dealing with foreign perceptions of itself. On the one hand, mainland leaders care deeply about what foreigners say about them and their policies, and secretly covet international praise. A small army of diplomats, journalists and national security agents sends a daily flood of cables to Zhongnanhai.
On the other hand, however, they are more than willing to go against prevailing international opinion by jailing a Zhao or Liu in the name of national security or stability. Then they react with paranoia to the international criticism by claiming to see ulterior motives in foreigners. This contraction hardly befits the mainland's status as a confident, rising power.