Political Orientation, Party Affiliation, and American Attitudes Towards China

Abstract

Little is known about how the political orientations and party affiliations of ordinary Americans impact their perceptions of China. Based on our surveys, we find that partisanship does indeed impact American views of China. Self-reported "conservatives" perceive significantly greater threat in China's rise, hold more negative views of the Chinese government, exhibit more prejudice towards the Chinese people, and advocate a much tougher U.S. China policy than self-reported "liberals" do. Republicans perceive significantly greater threat from China and advocate tougher China policies than Democrats do, but party affiliation has a lesser impact on prejudice scores. Regression analyses reveals that education, gender, and age each has an impact on American views of China, but that impact is negligible compared to partisanship.

Response to Morgan: On the Role of Status Threat and Material Interests in the 2016 Election

“…Opinions are also correlated with sociotropic economic evaluations, but as discussed below, these views are mainly a function of which party is in power rather than a function of personal economic concerns. As with these other issue opinions, attitudes toward China more closely align with ideology (Gries and Crowson 2010;Gries, Crowson, and Cai 2011). Regardless of where people are in the economic distribution, threat perceptions are driven by ideological differences and age.…”

God, guns, and ... China? - How ideology impacts American attitudes and policy preferences toward China

“…Attitudes toward China. Previous research (Gries and Crowson, 2010) has demonstrated that American attitudes toward the Chinese people are much more positive than attitudes toward the Chinese government. That research, however, has been limited to cognitive measures involving assessing positive and negative adjectives.…”

“…One recent paper (Gries and Crowson, 2010) has attempted to address some of the above-mentioned measurement-related problems by constructing new measures of China attitudes and policy preferences and deploying them in new surveys. The authors concluded that, on average, 'conservatives' are considerably more likely than 'liberals' to maintain negative views of the Chinese government, perceive China as a threat, and to advocate a tougher US policy of containment.…”

When Knowledge Is a Double‐Edged Sword: Contact, Media Exposure, and American China Policy Preferences

“…Previous scholarship has demonstrated that individual differences in identity and ideology have a major impact on American attitudes toward China. For instance, Americans higher in nationalism or cultural conservatism are on average more negative about China than their compatriots who are low on those traits (Gries & Crowson, 2010). Indeed, the powerful role of ideology in shaping American attitudes toward China may help explain how it is that Americans who know so little about China nonetheless have coherent attitudes toward China.…”