Fire-breathing monster or supernatural symbol of harmony? When it comes to the dragon, East and West don’t see eye-to-eye.

Chinese culture mavens alarmed by the prevailing Western image of the dragon as a terrifying, fire-breathing monster are urging that their country seek a less intimidating national symbol, provoking a debate over the whole issue.

What to do? The latest brouhaha arose after a newspaper, the Shanghai Morning Post, cited a local professor, Wu Youfu, as saying that the dragon’s image in the West was too negative.

Wu was not immediately available for comment. But the report provoked a flurry of commentary.

“I saw some Western media used the word ‘dragon’ to describe terrorists. Also, in the Harry Potter films, dragons represent evil ogres,” Huang Ji, a professor at East China Normal University, said in a phone interview on Tuesday.

Huang proposes swapping the word “loong” for dragon, when translating the concept from Chinese. The standard Chinese word for the mythical Chinese creature known in the West as a dragon is “long,” pronounced with a hard “o” sound as in show.

“It’s a good idea to separate the image of the dragon and the Chinese ‘loong,”’ Huang says, who set up a website: www.loong.us to help educate foreigners about the issue.

He said China didn’t choose the dragon as a mascot for the 2008 Beijing Olympics largely because it didn’t want people to associate the event with a fire-breathing monster. Instead it created five cartoon mascots based on the panda, Tibetan antelope, fish, swallow and Olympic flame.

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