In one of their “Five Facts” pieces at RealClearPolicy one of the organization “No Label’s” facts is this: 82% of Americans hold an unfavorable opinion of China. I find that distressing in the extreme. China is a country of 1.4 billion people that occupies an area of nearly 4 million square miles.
I think that any American should hold an unfavorable opinion of the Chinese Communist Party. The only way it could be 82% is if more than 10% of Americans claimed to have no opinion or refused to answer.
But China is so vast and so varied that it is otherwise difficult to make a true generalization about the country. The very thought makes my blood boil.
And such a thing is terribly dangerous. The United States and Russia each have the ability to destroy the world many times over with nuclear weapons. China is not far behind and gaining fast. That’s a true generalization.
Personally, I’ve like nearly all of the Chinese people I’ve met. For one thing I’ve found them funny.
Funny and good family people. I have to wonder if this is left over from covid? Our godchildren are half Chinese so may be I am a bit biased.
Steve
I can only infer that the opinion is generally not based on personal experience but on what they’re being told.
A large swath, if not the majority, of Chinese people are not communists. Also there is a large contingency of Evangelical Christians in China, who are at odds with the Chinese elite. Consequently, much like the U.S., the masses don’t share the same political ideology as do their leaders. However it’s the Chinese establishment – the elites – who make policy and are the “face†of the country’s authoritarian model of governance which the WEF has eluded to would like to become the global model. That’s the genesis for the 82% unfavorable opinion of China.
That’s fewer than 1,000 people. Add their families and you’ve got, say, 10,000 people. That’s .0007% of the population—nothing on which to base an assessment of a whole country.
I think in a poll question about the favorability of the country, people answer regarding the country and not the people. So I would not assume that such a large number of people don’t like the Chinese people.
And as an American who has traveled extensively, I’ve met lots of people around the world who don’t like America but do like Americans.
Seems more like conflating a population and a government to me. What would one expect from a poll like that?
Well the MSM has been running extremely heavy anti-Chinese stories for years, probably since the Korean War, so it’s hardly unusual that 82% of Americans dislike China (and the Chinese). Notice how quickly the balloon incidents were exploited to defame China.
Propaganda works. We live in a fog of lies.