Winning hearts in Southeast Asia? News sentiment on China amidst the US–PRC trade war

Abstract

How did the trade rivalry between the United States and China impact China's foreign public image in the ASEAN press? In the context of Southeast Asia's mixed attitude toward China, this article argues that the trade war between China and the United States heightened negative sentiment on China, especially in states grappling with the latter as a security threat, but whose investment climate has been slower to respond to the restructuring of the global supply chain. Drawing from econometric analyses of news sentiment mined from a corpus of 75,619 online English news articles in all 10 Southeast Asian countries from January 2016 to March 2020, we find that the trade war induced negative news sentiment on China in the ASEAN press. However, foreign visits to and from China appear to have been favorably regarded and helped boost China's image in the region. The findings remind that there may be a need for China to rethink its carrot-and-stick strategy to win the hearts and minds of its ASEAN neighbors.