Abstract
This article uses a new dataset of Chinese student attitudes to foreign affairs to analyse how perceptions of the United States, Russia, Japan and North and South Korea affect respondent perceptions of international friendship with these states. Employing a mediation analysis we find that perceptions of national trustworthiness above all other images is the crucial factor in explaining cross-national friendship. These findings suggest that trust-building measures would be a fruitful avenue for both reducing the likelihood of conflict in the region and fostering cooperative international interactions.
Highlights
University students are one of the most active and vocal sectors of society on foreign policy issues in China
When we build a model that combines direct and indirect effects on friendship we see that trust and peacefulness are the key factors behind friendship, with the exception of the Russian friendship image, which is driven by trust and power
We find that the respondents on average perceive that the United States and Japan are China’s enemies and that North Korea is less of a friend to China than Russia, which they perceive to be China’s closest friend
Summary
We conduct a mediation analysis to show that the image of national trustworthiness has the greatest influence on student perceptions of international friendship and that this is pronounced when the foreign state in question is more generally perceived to be an enemy of China, such as Japan or the United States. Perceptions of a foreign state being peaceful, powerful or similar to China appear to have a much smaller direct effect on perceptions of friendship.
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