While people living in countries that are members of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing agreement have similarly negative perceptions of Beijing, the extent to which they do so varies considerably, a new study by the Australian Institute of International Affairs (AIIA) has found.
It found that, compared to their counterparts in Australia, Canada, and the UK, Americans are the least worried about Beijing’s military power or its influence on democracy and, compared to their counterparts in Australia, Canada, and the UK, are less concerned about Chinese investment, have a less negative view of Beijing’s foreign policy, and view Chinese culture as more attractive.
The only people more sanguine about China are New Zealanders, who have only recently elected a more conservative government which regards Beijing with far greater suspicion than its predecessors.
The NZ government is now trying to win public support for joining Pillar Two of the AUKUS pact—covering technology sharing—while Australia and the UK have signed up to Pillar One, the development of nuclear-powered submarines.
But Australians mirror Americans’ attitudes to Beijing’s foreign policy: while giving it a net negative score, they are less concerned than residents of the UK and Canada.
Regarding overall feelings about the Chinese regime, New Zealand was the only country where the mean view reached the neutral mark, with Australia, the United States, the UK and Canada all having an average view that was more negative than positive.
But that negativity didn’t extend to Chinese people—different from the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—with inhabitants of four of the five countries essentially neutral and New Zealanders being notably positive.
Despite Australia, the United States, and New Zealand deciding to phase out Huawei products—with repeated warnings that Beijing is embedding spy equipment in hardware and using Trojan horses in software, and concerns about apps like TikTok—people in every country surveyed had a neutral or close-to-neutral view of Chinese technology, with New Zealand again the outlier with a far more positive outlook.
With China a major trading partner of all the Five Eyes nations—the single largest of both Australia and New Zealand—attitudes to trade were just under neutral. However, Chinese investment was viewed with more suspicion, as was Beijing’s influence on democracy and its military power.
Societal Differences
A closer look at the study’s results shows no notable differences in attitudes between genders, but those with a tertiary education tend to be slightly more positive toward Beijing than those who reached only a secondary or high school level.Younger respondents were more positive than older ones. And those living in large cities tended to think less negatively of Beijing than those living in smaller towns and regional areas.
The researchers found that, “Those self-identifying as being members of the highest socio-economic class have substantially more positive views of China than those self-identifying as belonging to other classes.”
“We also see important ethnic divisions, especially in the United States. While those self-identifying as White are negative towards China, others (Black, Latino, and Asian) are neutral. Similar findings also exist in other countries, although less pronounced.”
In addition, “first and second-generation Americans are substantially less negative about China than third-generation (or more) Americans, with a difference of about 17 percentage points.”
Political allegiance also played a role in Americans’ attitudes, with Democrats notably less negative than Independents or Republicans.
However, in the other four countries, there was little difference in views among those supporting different parties.
Unsurprisingly, social interaction was noted as being extremely influential in shaping attitudes. People who had never travelled to China are substantially more negative than all others.
Government Statements Influencing Public Views
Overall, the researchers found that public attitudes towards Beijing across the Five Eyes nations “are not only similar but are driven by broadly similar factors across the group, despite significant differences in the five countries’ size, geographic location, and international power.“[They] are strongly associated with China’s foreign policy image, as well as the issue of China’s threat to democracy. As political and security elites across the group share concerns about China’s interference in liberal democracies and increasingly assertive foreign policy, their publics’ views of China are also being affected by these issues.”
However, “The UK also stood out as the only country where general views of China were more influenced by attitudes to Chinese culture than by attitudes to China’s foreign policy, perhaps indicating that the British public currently thinks about China primarily in cultural rather than strategic terms,” the researchers said.
Overall, they concluded that the concerns raised by Five Eyes governments, such as Chinese Communist Party interference in democratic processes, are reflected in public attitudes.
“Scholars of the Anglosphere have previously discussed how collective participation in wars has helped forge a sense of shared identity among the group—could a common narrative of defending liberal democracy against an authoritarian threat from China now be playing a similar role in bringing the group closer together?” they asked, but warned of the possibility that any consensus towards Beijing could fragment internally along demographic lines.
