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I am trying to help my girlfriend study english.
She was wondering why use "of" in the following sentence:
The Chinese self-image is still in so many ways, of a weak country.
Is it simply a more formal way of describing something which must be learned by rote, or is there a grammar rule I can explain to clarify it?
An image is not a country, which is what you say if you omit of:
The Chinese self-image is . . . a weak country.
We ordinarily say that we have an image (a picture) of something. In this case it's complicated by the use of self-image; the literal sense of the sentence is that
The Chinese image of themselves is [an image] of a weak country.
It would be more rational to say that
China's image of itself is [an image] of a weak country.
But this sort of conflation of the country and its people, like that of an organization and its members, is pretty standard.
"Of" indicates belonging. So in the example sentence given, the assumption is that weak countries have certain shared characteristics, and the Chinese self-image is then suggested to be from that class of shared characteristics.
