Almost 50 per cent Americans view China as more of a threat than an ally, according to the poll by BBC.

It says that in South Korea and India people were also more inclined to see China as a threat, although in Britain and Brazil - a key trading partner - more people viewed China as an ally than a threat.

Overall, most people see the Chinese people as ‘friendly’ and ‘modern’ - only in South Korea did a majority disagree.

"May be one of the most surprising things in the poll is that even though China as a country has been isolated from the outside world for such a long time, majorities in Britain, the US and India still see the Chinese as 'friendly' and over half in the US and Britain think that the Chinese are like them," says Sam Mountford, research director of GlobeScan which carried out the poll.

Interestingly, in every country polled, younger people were more likely than those over 35 to see China as an ally rather than a threat.

The poll, held ahead of the August 8-24 Olympics where Beijing has promised to stage the ‘greatest show on Earth’ on Friday, commissioned by the BBC's Newsnight - and conducted in the United States, Britain, Brazil, India and South Korea - finds some wariness of China's new global dominance.

The survey revealed widespread concern over China's human rights record, which Beijing promised to improve when it made its bid for the Games. The poll showed that 65 per cent of people in the US and Britain, and more than half of those Brazilians surveyed, see the Chinese people as ‘oppressed’

Interestingly though, the figure was only 40 per cent in India and a larger number of Indians thought the Chinese were ‘free’ than ‘oppressed’.

"There's still a strong perception in the West that the Chinese are oppressed," says Mountford. "The protests we've seen about China's human rights record ahead of the Olympics will only have increased that sense."

Meanwhile, the survey found that most Chinese people are happy with the way their country was progressing and the mood in the world's most populous country appears confident and proudly nationalistic, the BBC said.

The Beijing games have, after all, been billed as the ‘coming out party’ for the world's rising superpower, it noted.

With China now thought to be the world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, a significant proportion of people blame it for global warming although - perhaps surprisingly – a majority of respondents in both Britain and the US did not think China was responsible.

"There's not much evidence here of a desire to blame China for the big global problems we're currently faced with like rising energy prices or food prices," says Mountford.

"And it's surprising that despite all the concern about the growth in China's carbon emissions, it's people in the other big emerging economies like Brazil or India that are more likely to blame China for climate change."

China now has the world's fastest growing economy. It is estimated to have increased by 54 per cent since the last Olympic Games in Athens in 2004.

But, despite the ubiquity of Chinese consumer goods around the world, in no country where the poll was conducted did a majority believe that Chinese economic growth had improved their own standard of living.