This paper explores the factors that affect Taiwanese citizens’ resistance to closer relations with China. Elements in Taiwanese society have recently exhibited a strong sense of anxiety in the face of a rising China. Distinct from the past military confrontation between China and Taiwan, more recently, Taiwanese citizens have been subject to a strengthening of cross-Strait relations and interactions, which makes their rising resistance to China puzzling. To empirically and theoretically explain why Taiwanese are resistant to closer ties with the mainland, we discuss three potential sources: cultural alienation, democratic anxiety, and economic interest. We test the effects of these three attitudinal factors on Taiwanese resistance to Chinese tourists, students, and workers using the China Impact Survey 2012 data set. The findings suggest that democratic anxiety, economic interest, and cultural alienation are all strong predictors in accounting for the public’s resistance to Chinese tourists and students, while economic interest is the most powerful factor in Taiwanese attitudes toward policies regarding Chinese workers. The findings provide important policy implications for policy makers in dealing with cross-Strait relations.

This paper develops a two-dimensional concept of Sinophobia (恐中) to study Taiwanese attitudes toward mainland China as well as their sources and political consequences. Taiwanese skepticism toward China has grown in recent years, concomitant with increasing cross-Strait interactions and exchanges. This has been widely characterized as a “Sinophobia syndrome.” To investigate this phenomenon, we divide Sinophobia into two types—“group-difference-driven” and “risk-driven”—and investigate whether the two types exert different effects on individual preferences regarding policies involving China. Multivariate analyses show that a model that distinguishes between the two types of Sinophobia fits the data very well and that the risk-driven attitude influences decisions on issues related to China more strongly than does the group-difference-driven attitude. This finding suggests that although perceptions of group difference may prompt fears of China, it is not a powerful determinant of policy preferences. Additional analyses reveal that the risk-driven attitude also influences other policy-relevant attitudes and behavior, including voting in the 2012 presidential election.

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