Chinese people hold a much more favourable opinion of European countries than they do of the United States, an online survey has found. “Chinese views of European countries and the US diverge sharply, despite these countries being typically grouped together as ‘the West’ in mainstream English and Chinese discourses,” the researchers said. Xi Jinping calls on Germany to steer ‘healthy and stable’ China-EU ties The attempt to capture Chinese public opinion towards the US and Europe was designed and co-published by researchers from the National University of Singapore, Canada’s University of British Columbia and Rice University in the United States. “The Chinese viewed the US much more negatively than Europe,” authors Adam Liu, Xiaojun Li and Songying Fang said in a paper published in January by the peer-reviewed open access Journal of Current Chinese Affairs. The authors asked 2,083 Chinese respondents to choose from five options ranging from “very favourable” to “very unfavourable” and “don’t know” to describe their views towards the US and nine European countries: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Britain. An overwhelming majority had an “unfavourable” view of the US, with 43 per cent holding a “very unfavourable” perception. Only 23 per cent of respondents took a “very” or “somewhat” favourable view. Most participants responded positively towards all the European countries included, except for Britain, to which just 46 per cent responded positively. Germany was the most popular country in the survey, with 69 per cent holding favourable views and just 23 per cent – the lowest negative number in the results – saying they felt unfavourably towards it. The findings offer a counterpoint to the latest Pew survey results published in June, which found negative views of China at near or historic highs in many of the 19 countries it polls. Across the countries surveyed by Pew – ranging from the US and Britain to Japan and Malaysia – a median 79 per cent of respondents consider human rights policies as a serious problem. Beijing’s human rights policies drive unfavourable views of China, survey finds China’s relations with Western countries have in general been on a downward trajectory in the past few years for a various reasons – from tech competition to its stance on Russia’s war on Ukraine – and most prominently, US and EU sanctions over human rights abuses against the Uygur ethnic group in Xinjiang, an allegation China denies. The authors of the latest study noted that, compared to the Pew results, the Chinese people surveyed expressed a “much greater favourability towards European countries than the other way around” and “reciprocated American antipathy”. It was possible that Britain’s low popularity in China was “due to the fact the UK has been a close ally of the US in pressuring China on a number of contentious issues”, they said. These included British calls for independent investigations into the pandemic’s origin, criticism of Chinese policies in Hong Kong and Xinjiang as well as participation with the US in freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait, they said. A possible explanation for the difference in opinion among respondents towards the US and Europe could be the perception that European governments had adopted a more measured stance towards China, the authors said. The Chinese government’s approach of soft-pedalling European criticisms compared to the “long-standing disproportionate attention devoted to US-China relations by the Chinese media and public” could also be a factor, they said. In a September 2021 briefing paper, the European Parliamentary Research Service concluded that coverage of European Union affairs from 2012 to 2021 by Chinese state news agency Xinhua had been “neutral, rather than negative, and has not become more critical during the pandemic”. Chinese envoy admits Russia’s Ukraine war has hurt relations with EU The authors also referred to a survey published in 2021 by state-backed newspaper Global Times, which found that 41.7 per cent of young Chinese “look down on the West”. The newspaper’s assessment might not be warranted when attitudes towards individual countries were unpacked, they said. “Compared to the baseline group of respondents born in the 1960s or earlier … those born during or after the 1990s were indeed 11 per cent less likely to hold favourable views of the US,” the authors said. “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 authors used online surveying platform Qualtrics which uses a quota sampling strategy that targets pre-specified proportions of gender, age group and geographic location. EU and China leaders promise to keep talking amid ‘multiple crises’ Respondents were surveyed in two waves – between October 29 and November 3, 2020, before the last US presidential election, and the second after President Joe Biden’s inauguration, between January 25 and February 2, 2021. Around 60 per cent of those taking part had tertiary degrees and above, significantly higher than the Chinese general public. There were 240 million graduates with degrees over the past 10 years, China’s Ministry of Education said last year. The researchers noted that the respondents were also more likely to live in China’s coastal and urban areas. Are Chinese people falling out of love with the Western dream? In an interview with the Post, study co-author Liu said the background of the survey’s pool of respondents was consistent with other studies based on online samples in China. A recent study found such samples were representative of the nearly 1 billion people who form China’s online community, he said. “In the Chinese context, one could argue that netizens’ opinions matter even more for the government than those of the general population.”