Is China rising at America’s expense? Anti-Americanism and pro-China sentiments in global public opinion

Introduction As China increases its economic power and influences in global politics, there is great interest in whether its rise is accompanied by a decline in America’s global power. While this is often assessed using “hard power” measurements, such as economic strengths, a comparison of the two powers’ “soft power” can also bring important insights. This chapter uses global public opinion survey to examine how citizens in 16 countries around the world perceive China’s economic and military rise, as well their overall amity toward China. Such perceptions are interpreted as China’s “soft power” in global politics. Within this context, we try to examine the relationship between public amity toward China and anti-Americanism in the world. We ask in this chapter, do pro-China sentiments go hand in hand with anti-Americanism around the world? Naturally, people arguing for a multipolar world system would like to see China and other emerging powers asserting more influence. But are these emerging powers increasing their influence at the expenses of the United States? In fact, one may expect that people who reject US dominance would more strongly embrace the rise of China. We examine the following questions in this chapter. Do stronger anti-American feelings correlate with favourable views about China’s rise? Conversely, are pro-American people more likely to have an unfavourable view of China? If so, how can we theoretically and empirically interpret such a correlation? In the next few sections, we first review recent discussions and findings on soft power as well as the dynamics between China’s rise and US dominance. Next, we explain the global public opinion survey data on which our analyses will be conducted. To take a closer look at the data, we will first introduce a four-category conception regarding the views of global citizens toward China’s rise and their attitudes toward the United States. Depending on whether an individual supports or opposes China’s rise in the military and economic dimensions, he or she will be categorized as either a “bandwagoner” (supporting both China’s economic and military rise), an “accomodationist” (supporting China’s economic rise but opposing its military rise), a “balancer” (opposing both China’s economic and military rise), or a “militant” (opposing China’s economic rise but supporting its military rise). We will then explain our dependent variables, i.e. an individual’s perceptions toward China’s economic rise, its military rise, and China overall. Our key explanatory variable will be a person’s attitudes toward the United States as a global power. We will bring in both binary logistic and multinomial logit models to examine the correlation between the attitudes toward the United States and attitudes toward China’s rise among the citizens of 16 countries in the world. We found that most people around the world have a positive attitude toward China’s economic rise, but not its military rise. Whether supporting China’s rise means rejecting the United States depends on an individual’s conception of what China is. If China is mainly perceived as an economic actor, the more pro-USA an individual is, the more likely that he will possess a positive perception of China’s rise. In contrast, if an individual mainly sees China as an increasing military power, then his or her pro-American sentiments will often mean disapproval of China’s rise. Most frequently, however, when it comes to the perception of China as a whole, those holding a positive view about China are also likely to be supportive of the United States.