Analysis

Journal of Current Chinese Affairs

Unpacking “the West”: 1–15

© The Author(s) 2023
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Divergence and Asymmetry sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/18681026221139301
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Towards Europe and the

United States

Adam Y. Liu1, Xiaojun Li2 ,

and Songying Fang3

Abstract
Recent public opinion polls conducted in Europe and the United States show increasingly
negative views of China. Does the Chinese public hold similar views of “the West”?
Conducting a two-wave survey in China, we found great divergence and asymmetries in
Chinese public perceptions. First, Chinese views of European countries and the US diverge
sharply, despite these countries being typically grouped together as “the West” in main-
stream English and Chinese discourses; the Chinese viewed the US much more negatively
than Europe. Second, whereas the Chinese reciprocated American antipathy, there was
an asymmetry in public perceptions between China and Europe, with the Chinese expres-
sing much greater favourability towards European countries than the other way around,
though the degree of favourability still varied by country. Analyses of respondent attributes
also yielded insights that both confirm and challenge some of the conventional wisdom
regarding age, education, and party membership in Chinese public opinion.

Manuscript received 21 December 2021; accepted 23 October 2022

Keywords
China–Europe relations, public opinion, nationalism, China–US relations

1
Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, Singapore
2
Department of Political Science, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
3
Department of Political Science, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA

Corresponding Author:
Xiaojun Li, Department of Political Science, The University of British Columbia, C425-1866 Main Mall,
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1, Canada.
Email: xiaojun.li@ubc.ca

Creative Commons CC BY: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use,
reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is
attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
2 Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 0(0)

Introduction
According to a recent survey of citizens in fourteen developed economies, conducted by
the Pew Research Center in October 2020, negative views of China in these countries
have reached historic highs (Silver et al., 2020). The survey results remained unchanged
eight months later (Silver et al., 2021). Many media outlets and policymakers have fre-
quently referenced these findings as evidence that China has a “global image problem”
(Buckley, 2020; Chandler and McGregor, 2020; Ching, 2020). What has not been
explored, however, is whether these negative feelings are mutual. If so, then there is
more than a mutual image problem: the space for governments to cooperate on such
pressing issues as global health and climate change will be narrowed; politicians on
both sides will have little incentive to engage in long-term cooperation to address
these issues, lest they be criticised domestically for appearing weak in front of an assert-
ive China or Western hegemony. Moreover, mutual animosity raises the concern of a
military conflict between China and the US with its allies (Lee, 2021; Tiezzi, 2022).
So how do Chinese citizens perceive the West? Surprisingly, there is little systematic
research on the question. In this analysis, we aim to address the gap by presenting find-
ings from a pair of new surveys in China, one conducted before the 2020 American presi-
dential election and the other right after Biden’s 2021 inauguration. Similar to the Pew
surveys and most other surveys on public opinion about foreign countries, we asked
Chinese respondents whether they held positive or negative views on the United States
(US) and nine European countries – Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the
Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom (UK).
We discovered surprising divergence and asymmetry in Chinese views towards the
West. While “the West” is frequently referred to as a block in both English and
Chinese media, in fact, there was considerable variation in Chinese attitudes towards
the countries in our survey. First, respondents’ views of the US were highly negative,
suggesting mutual deterioration of perceptions in the US and China. In sharp contrast,
the Chinese respondents had substantially more positive views of the European countries
in general. In particular, we found that compared to the older generation, young Chinese
were less likely to express positive feelings towards the US but more likely to express
positive views of all the European countries in the survey. In addition, the more nation-
alistic respondents and members of the Communist Party of China (CPC) viewed the US
less favourably, but this was not so for most of the European countries. Second, there
were asymmetries in public perceptions between China and Europe, with the Chinese
expressing much greater favourability towards European countries than the other way
around, though the degree of favourability still varied by country.
The rest of this analysis is organised into four sections. In the next section we review
the existing literature on why and how Chinese public opinion matters for foreign policy
and describes our survey research design. We then present the findings of the survey, first
regarding the overall pattern of favourability and then by respondent characteristics. We
conclude by summarising the findings and discussing their policy implications.
Liu et al. 3

Investigating Chinese Public Opinion About Western Countries

Policymakers and pundits alike have long used public opinion surveys to gauge attitudes
towards foreign countries and explore their sources and consequences. Most such surveys
have been conducted in democracies (Aldrich et al., 2006; Baum and Groeling, 2010;
Baum and Potter, 2008, 2015; Gelpi, 2017; Grieco et al., 2011; Kertzer and Zeitzoff,
2017; Milner and Tingley, 2016; Nincic and Russett, 1979; Semetko et al., 1992),
under the assumption that public opinion matters in countries where people can meaning-
fully vote (De Mesquita et al., 2003; Leeds, 1999, 2003; Oneal and Russett, 2001; Tomz
et al., 2020). Yet, this hardly means that leaders in authoritarian countries can afford to
ignore public sentiments when making consequential foreign policies. In fact, it has
long been recognised that authoritarian leaders are “highly conscious of public
opinion” (Pool, 1973: 463), and this has been particularly true for those that rely on
nationalism as a major source of legitimacy (Snyder, 2018).
China is a prime example of public opinion mattering for foreign policy-making in an
authoritarian state (Fang et al., 2022; Zhu, 2011). Beijing is constantly under domestic
pressure to defend Chinese interests globally (Bishop, 2020; Welch, 2012), and its dip-
lomats are keenly aware that their performances on the world stage are being watched by
the Chinese public (Welch, 2012; Zhu, 2020). While developing sophisticated censorship
technologies (Roberts, 2018), the Chinese government has also been proactive in
responding to and incorporating public opinion in decision-making. Just like their coun-
terparts in the West, Chinese leaders prefer making foreign policies that align with the
dominant preferences of the public rather than otherwise (Gries and Wang, 2021; Jia,
2019; Yang, 2011). The underlying logic of this responsiveness is not simply to
satisfy the nationalistic sentiments of domestic audiences, but also to provide the
public with a sense of participation in foreign policy-making, both of which strengthen
governing legitimacy (Fang et al., 2022). Congruence between public preferences and
foreign policy has the additional benefit of mobilising societal resources to achieve
foreign policy goals (Chubb, 2016).
This understanding has led to an emerging literature that explores mass preferences
about China’s foreign policy choices on specific issues ranging from trade and investment
to territorial disputes (Fang and Li, 2020; Li and Chen, 2021; Quek and Johnston, 2018;
Weiss and Dafoe, 2019). What is lacking, however, are studies on Chinese public opinion
about the outside world more broadly. The few relevant surveys have focused on Chinese
public opinion towards the US (Chen, 2003; Fang et al., 2022; Moore, 2021; Saunders,
2000; Shambaugh, 1993; Weiss, 2014), while little is known about Chinese attitudes
towards other nations, especially the European countries that are often grouped together
with the US as the “West.” This study takes a first step towards filling the gap.
Specifically, we conducted a two-wave survey in China, separated by the US presiden-
tial election, with the first completed between 29 October and 3 November 2020 and the
second between 25 January and 2 February 2021. In total, we recruited a sample of 2,083
Chinese adults from Qualtrics’ online opt-in panel using a quota sampling strategy that
targeted pre-specified proportions of gender, age group, and geographic location in the
4 Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 0(0)

latest census. Like many similar surveys that gauge public sentiments about foreign coun-
tries, our question was stated as the following: “What’s your view on the following set of
countries?” Respondents could choose from “very favourable,” “favourable,” “unfavour-
able,” “very unfavourable,” or “don’t know.”
In addition, we asked a battery of sociodemographic questions on gender, age, educa-
tion, CPC membership, geographical location, religion, ethnicity, and household registra-
tion status. We also asked questions that tapped into the respondents’ degree of
nationalism and their knowledge of the Chinese military. Online Appendix Tables A1
to A3 summarise all respondent attributes for our full sample and the sub-samples of
the two waves. We did not find discernible differences between the two waves in
either the sociodemographic variables or the outcome measures (Online Appendix
Table A4). We thus pool the data from both waves for subsequent analyses.

Main Findings
First, we look at aggregate responses to the key survey question without considering the
impact of personal attributes. Of the ten countries, the US is the only one that received
well over 70 per cent negative responses, as indicated by the first row in Figure 1.
This is surprising, because merely two years earlier, only 17 per cent of the Chinese
respondents reported having unfavourable feelings towards the US, according to a
study conducted by the Eurasia Group (Hannah, 2019). This meant that animosity
from the Chinese public expanded dramatically within two years.
The UK came next in terms of unfavourableness, with close to 50 per cent of our
respondents reporting negative feelings. This might be due to the fact that the UK has
been a close ally of the US in pressuring China on a number of contentious issues –
for example, calling for independent investigations into the pandemic’s origin, criticising
Chinese policies in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and joining the US in freedom of naviga-
tion operations in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. On the other hand, the
Chinese public viewed the continental European countries much more positively as a
whole compared with the US and the UK, with those holding favourable views close
to or more than twice as many as those with unfavourable views, despite many of
these countries having criticised China on similar issues.
Additionally, there are noticeable within-group variations. In particular, Germany
stands out as the country most favoured by the Chinese. The share of explicitly negative
views stood at only around 23 per cent, the lowest in the survey. More importantly, 69 per
cent of the respondents expressed either “very favourable” or “somewhat favourable”
views of Germany. What might explain this high level of favourability? Economic
exchanges remained the most crucial component of the Germany–China relationship
under the leadership of Angela Merkel. In 2021, for the sixth consecutive year, China
was Germany’s biggest trading partner, with €245.4 billion worth of goods traded
between the two in the year (Destati (Statistisches Bundesamt), 2022). While Germany
has been critical of China’s human rights record and has supported smaller European
countries in confronting Beijing (Zachová, 2017), it has maintained that it will not
Liu et al. 5

Figure 1. Chinese views of Western countries.

Source: Authors’ survey.

pick sides in the China–US strategic rivalry (Mai, 2021). This was widely reported in the
Chinese media and might have fostered additional positive feelings towards Germany
(Beijing Daily, 2021).
Figure 2 juxtaposes our findings with those from the 2021 Pew survey (Silver
et al., 2020, 2021), offering a comparison between the Chinese and Western
public views of each other. Such a comparison has not been made before in the
existing literature. The circles represent the percentage of negative Chinese views
on Western countries, and the triangles indicate the percentage of negative
Western views towards China. It is clear that negative feelings between the
Chinese and Americans are mutual, which reflects the highly publicised deteriorat-
ing bilateral relationship since the beginning of the trade war under the Trump
presidency (Fang et al., 2022). In contrast, Chinese respondents held much more
positive attitudes towards the European countries than the other way around. It is
also noteworthy that there are variations in the “perception gaps,” reflected in the
varying lengths of the lines connecting the circles and triangles. For example,
whereas a large negative perception gap exists between Sweden and China, the dif-
ference in the case of the UK is considerably smaller.
What explains the large perception gaps? First, Chinese public perceptions are more
likely based on information about Western governments’ stances and actions than
Western public viewpoints about China. There is simply more media attention on the
6 Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 0(0)

Figure 2. Negative perceptions between China and the West.

Note: Negative perceptions in percentage points combine responses of “strongly unfavourable” and “somewhat
unfavourable.” For Denmark, we use data from the 2020 survey as it was not included in the 2021 survey.
Source: Authors’ Survey and Pew Global Attitudes Survey.

former. Second, governments in general tend to be more strategic and measured than
ordinary citizens in expressing their positions publicly. This is because governments
have broader national interests to protect in foreign relations and have more information
than the public about foreign countries through direct interactions and official visits.
These two factors combined suggest that there is little reason for the Chinese public to
develop strongly negative perceptions of European countries.
Third, it may also be the case that China’s state media have soft-pedalled nega-
tive European public opinion towards China for various reasons, such as to maintain
a narrative that China is well-perceived by foreign countries or to avoid inciting
backlash from the Chinese public towards the European countries, which could con-
strain the government’s policy choices. Finally, the US has dominated the Chinese
public’s attention towards foreign nations for a long time, and such disproportionate
attention has turned negative and intensified in recent years, while the negative
views of the Chinese towards European countries have been less intense and
more diffuse.

Personal Attributes and Attitudes

Are Chinese attitudes towards Western countries driven by people’s personal attributes?
In the following analyses, we estimated a series of logistic regressions for every country
in the survey. The dependent variable is a binary measure constructed from the responses
to the favourability question, with one indicating “very favourable” or “somewhat favour-
able” and zero otherwise. We then focus on three respondent attributes as independent
variables that are commonly examined in the literature: age, nationalism, and CPC mem-
bership (Johnston, 2017; Wang et al., 2021).
Liu et al. 7

For age, we include four dummy variables – born in the 1960s or earlier, in the 1970s,
in the 1980s, and in the 1990s or later, with the first one omitted as the baseline category.
To measure nationalism, we use evaluations of five statements commonly used to tap
nationalism (e.g. I am proud to be Chinese) (Johnston, 2017; Weiss and Dafoe, 2019).
Respondents who agreed with all five statements are considered “nationalists.” CPC
membership is a dummy variable that equals one if the respondent is a current
member of the CPC and zero otherwise. Additionally, all the other demographic variables
were included as controls in the regression analyses.
Figure 3 presents the average marginal effects of the three personal attributes,
which are calculated as the average of changes in the predicted probabilities for
favourable responses as a result of the respondents having that attribute of interest
(born in the 1990s or later, nationalist, or CPC member). The bars represent 95 per
cent confidence intervals. Bars located below the horizontal lines indicate that a
given attribute is associated with less favourable views on the particular country,
compared to respondents without such an attribute. Similarly, if a bar is located
above the horizontal line, it means that the attribute has a positive impact on
respondents’ evaluation of that country, compared to respondents with no such
attribute.

Figure 3. Predicting Chinese attitudes from individual attributes.

Note: Variables included in the analyses are summarised in Online Appendix Table A1. Full results of the logistic
regression models for the two waves of samples, both combined and separately, can be found in Online
Appendix Table A5. Source: Authors’ Survey.
8 Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 0(0)

Age
One 2019 survey jointly conducted by China Youth Daily and the Communist Youth
League found that young Chinese are “no longer looking up to the West,” with well
over 90 per cent of them expressing pride in China’s accomplishments and confidence
in its future development (Zhou, 2019). More recently, a survey conducted by Global
Times, a state-run newspaper, showed that 41.7 per cent of young Chinese now “look
down on the West” (Yang et al., 2021). Anecdotal evidence from Chinese social
media seems to corroborate this impression, prompting some authors to state that
“many young Chinese citizens are not only angry about U.S. foreign policy – they are
also expressing growing disdain for the West’s most fundamental social and political
ideas” (Freymann and Wong, 2021).
Results from our survey suggest that such an assessment may not be warranted when
attitudes towards individual countries in “the West” are unpacked. Compared to the base-
line group of respondents born in the 1960s or earlier, the “post-90ers,” that is, those born
during or after the 1990s, were indeed 11 per cent less likely to hold favourable views of
the US. However, we find that the post-90ers held more favourable views of all the
European countries in our study, even the UK, which received by far the most negative
views among the European countries.
The greater antipathy towards the US by the post-90ers may be explained by how they
react differently to the concerns over US–China competition. In particular, much of the
lifespan of the post-90ers overlaps with the rise of China in the last twenty years as a
global economic and military power house, which gives them more confidence in the
ongoing US–China rivalry compared with the older generation. However, the fact that
they view the European countries more favourably suggests that there are important coun-
tervailing factors at play as well. Better living conditions, more advanced communication
technologies, and globalisation have provided the post-90ers with more opportunities to
experience the outside world – directly and indirectly – through travelling, studying, or
being exposed to much more information about foreign cultures and values than their
parents’ generation. European countries have long been viewed (along with the US) as
wealthier, more advanced socially and technologically, and rich in history and culture.
In the absence of a rivalry similar to that between the US and China, such enhanced
exposure to the outside world may have generated more positive views towards the
European countries among young Chinese.

Nationalism
Rising Chinese nationalism has received much attention from the outside world, and from
some within China, as a cause for concern (Wang, 2021). Ex-diplomats in China have
recently highlighted the need to prevent “extreme nationalism” from further tarnishing
China’s international image (Lo, 2020). The results in Figure 3 suggest that not all coun-
tries have become targets of such sentiments. Nationalists do not necessarily hold more
negative feelings towards all Western countries. As with our main finding, the
Liu et al. 9

heightened negative views from nationalistic respondents were directed towards the US,
but the difference is not especially large: they were 7 per cent less likely to express
favourable views towards the US. For the rest of the European countries in our study,
nationalism is not associated with more or less negative feelings, though respondents
were slightly less approving of France and Italy.

CPC Membership
Since taking office in 2012, President Xi has emphasised effective and comprehensive
control of the party over Chinese society, but first and foremost over its ninety-plus
million party members. More recently, flagship party magazines and newspapers have
warned against potential Western ideological influence (Li et al., 2018). Therefore, one
may expect CPC members to be more disapproving of the West, as they should be
more inclined than the general public to accept the party line.
Our survey findings, however, provide mixed support for this conjecture. Once again,
a divergence of views towards the US and Europe emerges: whereas party members are
about 7 per cent less likely to express favourability towards the US than non-party
members, no such difference exists for any of the European countries in the survey.
One plausible explanation is that, similar to the general public, the vast majority of ordin-
ary party members have received much less negative reporting about other European
countries compared with the US, due to the intense Chinese media focus on the US–
China rivalry.

Military Knowledge
Although we will not delve into all the other respondent attributes due to space con-
straints, an additional individual attribute is worth a brief discussion. We find that the
military knowledge of the respondent turns out to be a consistently significant factor
for all country analyses; those with better knowledge of China’s military development
– for example, being able to correctly name the most advanced type of Chinese destroyer
– hold more unfavourable views of all Western countries. These individuals are not
necessarily more nationalistic; the correlation between the measures of military knowl-
edge and nationalism is quite small (r = 0.05). A possible explanation is that those cog-
nisant of China’s military prowess are also more keenly aware of possible conflict
scenarios between China and the West, such as those over Taiwan and South China
Sea territorial disputes, and thus are more likely to view Western countries through the
lens of military rivalry.

Conclusion
Numerous public opinion surveys have investigated Western public attitudes towards
China. On the other hand, little research exists on the Chinese views of Western countries,
particularly of European countries. Because domestic politics can be an important driver
10 Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 0(0)

of a country’s foreign policies regardless of regime type, the missing half of the story, that
is, how the Chinese public views the outside world, is an important gap to be filled for
both theoretical and practical purposes.
This study presents the first set of evidence of Chinese views towards the West and
contrasts it with the results from surveys of Western public attitudes towards China.
The results reveal two interesting patterns that have not been identified in the existing
scholarship on China. First, we find that there is no single “West” in the eyes of the
Chinese public despite the frequent usage of the term in the news media everywhere;
Chinese public perceptions of the US and Europe diverge sharply. While the Chinese
public reciprocates American negative views of China, their views of the European coun-
tries are much more favourable, with variations across the set of European countries in
our study. Second, we find that there is a significant divide between how the Chinese
public views the European countries and how the European public views China; the
Chinese public hold much more positive views towards the European countries than
the other way around.
What could explain the divergence and asymmetry? We proposed several possible
explanations that can be investigated in future research, including the Chinese public
forming their perceptions from the reported stances of the European governments,
which tend to be more measured than those of their citizens, the possibility that the
Chinese government has soft-pedalled European criticisms of China, and long-standing
disproportionate attention devoted to the US–China relations by the Chinese media
and public.
Analyses of respondent attributes also yielded insights that challenge some of the con-
ventional and popular wisdom. For example, contrary to the common characterisation
that younger Chinese have become more antagonistic towards the West and even disdain-
ful of Western values (Freymann and Wong, 2021; Zhou, 2019), our findings suggest a
more complicated picture: while they are less likely to hold positive views of the US than
the older generation, young Chinese are in fact more likely to hold positive views of the
European countries.
Moreover, whereas many have warned that Chinese nationalism is rising to the extent
that it is now causing trouble for China’s international image (Lo, 2020; Wang, 2021), we
find that Chinese nationalists hold more negative feelings only towards the US, and their
opinions on the vast majority of the European countries in fact do not differ from those of
the less nationalistic. Finally, although one might expect that party members could
exhibit greater hostility towards Western countries given heightened ideological discip-
line under Xi, they turned out to be only showing a slightly greater negative attitude
towards the US.
It remains to be seen whether the more positive views held by the Chinese regarding
Europe will endure in the shadow of great power competition. If negative public percep-
tions of China persist in European countries, their governments may become more stri-
dent in their criticisms of China for domestic reasons. This could then set in motion a
feedback loop whereby Chinese public perceptions of the European countries deteriorate
as well, leading to the closing of the perception gaps. Much like what has transpired
Liu et al. 11

between the US and China, this could further narrow the scope of cooperation between
China and Europe. Nevertheless, for the time being, European countries may be able to
capitalise on their positive images in the eyes of the Chinese people to facilitate cooper-
ation with China on issues of mutual interest, such as climate change, and may play a
unique role in mediating tensions between the world’s two superpowers.

Acknowledgements
Parts of the paper in an earlier version were presented at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. We
thank seminar participants at Bocconi, an anonymous reviewer, and the editors of the Journal of
Current Chinese Affairs for helpful feedback. Donglai Luo provided excellent research assistance.
The National University of Singapore Institutional Review Board approved this project
(NUS-IRB-2020-76). The authors are listed in reverse alphabetical order; they view their contribu-
tions as equal.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article.

Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article: This work was supported by the faculty Start-Up Grant for Adam Y. Liu
provided by the National University of Singapore.

ORCID iD
Xiaojun Li https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4832-8278

Supplemental Material
Supplemental material for this article is available online.

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Author Biographies
Adam Y. Liu is an Assistant Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National
University of Singapore. His research interest includes the political foundations of markets in autoc-
racies; the economic effects of political tensions between nations; and the spatial organisation of
Liu et al. 15

coercive institutions in autocracies. His work has appeared or forthcoming in The China Journal,
International Interactions, Social Science Research, among others. He is the recipient of the 2020
BRICS Economic Research Award for his dissertation titled “Building Markets within
Authoritarian Institutions: The Political Economy of Banking Development in China”.

Xiaojun Li is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. His
recent books include Token Forces: How Tiny Troop Deployments became Ubiquitous in UN
Peacekeeping (Cambridge University Press 2022), Fragmenting Globalization: The Politics of
Preferential Trade Liberalization in China and the United States (University of Michigan Press
2021), and How China Sees the World: Insights from China’s International Relations Scholars
(Palgrave 2019). He holds a PhD in political science from Stanford University, is a former
fellow in the Princeton–Harvard China and the World Program, and has held visiting positions
at Harvard University, the East-West Center, and the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute as an inaugural
Wang Gungwu Fellow.

Songying Fang is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Rice University. Her research
focuses on the link between domestic politics and foreign policy. She has published in many
leading political science and international relations journals, including American Journal of
Political Science, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of
Politics, and British Journal of Political Science. She has also received fellowships from
the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University and the Hoover
Institution at Stanford University.