Event Details

LUCC Research Seminar with Andrew Chubb and Gabriel Wallin on a new collaborative article on China's global image.

Public discussion on China’s international image commonly revolves around a divide between the developed and developing world’s attitudes toward China. Yet the drivers of any such divergence are little understood. Past research has found views of China correlate negatively with democracy and economic development, and positively with non-Western cultural backgrounds, but have such relationships been strengthening or weakening over time? Do the answers vary across different regions? This article offers unprecedented insight into these questions leveraging a unique dataset of more than 2600 survey results from across 159 countries over a 25-year sweep. The analysis yields three key insights. First, global views of China show a long-term declining trend over time, not only in aggregate but also in both the Global South and the Global North. Second, we find a strengthening correlation between democracy and negative views of China since 2015, suggesting ideological drivers of negative views of China, particularly in the developed world, are mainly a phenomenon of Xi Jinping’s more authoritarian “New Era” (新时代). Third, the COVID pandemic has exerted a profound and long-lasting, but highly uneven, impact on China’s image. In Latin America it resulted in a 20-point crash from which China’s image is yet to recover. In Africa, it had little impact, while China’s image in Southeast Asia received a positive bounce. In Europe and North America, meanwhile, the pandemic merely deepened an existing downward trend in citizens’ views of China.