Rising great powers have always been a central focus of world politics. One reason is that the emergence of a new powerful state implies uncertainty and may pose a threat to the world order, as the anxious discourse around China’s rise implies. More recent studies have begun to investigate the ideational attributes of rising powers. However, there lacks a systematic theorization of how great- power aspiration emerges, institutionalizes, and evolves. Motivated by this puzzle, I seek to broaden the analytical scope of rising great-power behavior by engaging with the notion of re-emergence which is a narrative about China’s great power aspiration. To achieve this aim, I developed a theoretical explanation for re-emerging narratives and argued that the aspiration of re-emergence is a result of temporal national identity construction. My empirical investigation shows that the aspiration of re-emergence is incidental for materially rising powers. Unlike China, re-emerging aspiration is absent in the state narratives of the US and Japan because they approached their national pasts and future in a forward-looking rather than backward-looking way. Realist IR scholars and historians are interested in the structural similarities and differences between the US, China, and Japan because they help us better predict state behavior and the future order in the Asia-Pacific. By systematically explaining the temporal identity constructions of China, the US, and Japan, my analysis incorporates historical insights into a structural explanation that complements the materialist arguments for rising powers. This study demonstrates how materially powerful states construct their national pasts and future matters because emphasizing the importance of a nation’s glorious past makes declining unacceptable, and thus, creates an enduring source of great power aspiration.