Interests, Values, and Geopolitics: The Global Public Opinion on China

Abstract

The essay discusses the public opinion surveys on the rise of China in the United States, Asia and Latin America since 2010, conducted by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Duke University’s collaborative research team headed by the author. It examines the world public recognition of China’s growing influence, their attitudes toward China’s influence, and reactions to the ‘China Model’ and impressions of China’s political, economic, social, and cultural development. These assessments of China’s domestic issues or internal behavior show not only the amount of information and knowledge that the people in various countries know about China, but the intrinsic value judgments and ideological biases that influence their perceptions of China. The essay argues that the rise of China is a complicated phenomenon with a multifarious nature, including material dimensions, such as military power, economic development, and technological innovation, as well as ideational dimensions, such as perception, understanding, or prejudice. Public opinion, attitudes and perceptions of China’s rise are the outcome of dynamic interactions and assemblage of factors, a synergy of material interests, ideational and emotional reactions, and values, ideologies, principles, unraveling themselves against a highly volatile, precarious and contentious geopolitical backdrop, in which the interests of nation-states and individuals became all intertwined and inseparable.