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How the Public in the US, Latin America, and East Asia Sees an Emerging China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2015

John H. Aldrich  and
Jie Lu
John H. Aldrich
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Duke University, Durham, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
Jie Lu
Affiliation:
Department of Government, American University, Washington, DC, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

The People’s Republic of China’s dramatic transformation has not only benefited its people, but has also led it to become a major player in the world. Here we examine how deeply perceptions of China have penetrated into the public’s perceptions in a wide variety of nations around the world – the US, 11 nations in East Asia, and 22 in Latin America. We ask a series of questions: how much do people know? How do Americans evaluate China? And how do publics in East Asia and Latin America view China’s influence in their nations and around the world? We also examine some of the ways in which perceptions vary, both across nations and within nations, such as by partisanship. In addition, we report the results of an experiment using an advertisement the PRC ran in the US to assess how successful they were in shaping public opinion about China. We conclude that our studies, and those of others, provide a strong baseline for assessing the effect of an emerging superpower on citizens around the world.

Type
The Image of China in the West
Information
European Review , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , May 2015 , pp. 227 - 241
Copyright
© Academia Europaea 2015 

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References

Notes and References

1.For coverage of Hu Jintao’s call for development of China’s soft power around the world, see http://english.gov.cn/2007-10/15/content_776453.htm. At the website is written: ‘While charting ambitious goals of economic and social developments for the 1.3 billion people in the next five years and by 2020, Hu Jintao also stressed the need to enhance Chinese culture as the country’s “soft power” in his keynote speech to the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) on Monday.’ ‘Culture has become a more and more important source of national cohesion and creativity and a factor of growing significance in the competition in overall national strength,’ Hu said on behalf of the 16th CPC Central Committee.Google Scholar
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3.Societies included here were interviewed in 2005 or 2006. See ww.asianbarometer.org.Google Scholar
4.Consider two explanations about the relative lack of sophisticated capabilities in the public compared with political elites. One is that the public has a lesser stock of information in memory, so that new information is harder to process and make sense of. The other is simply that they are less interested in and involved in politics than the political elites and therefore pay less attention to political information. Our data are agnostic between the two.Google Scholar
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