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Living with the Dragon: How the American Public Views the Rise of China
Living with the Dragon: How the American Public Views the Rise of China
Living with the Dragon: How the American Public Views the Rise of China
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Living with the Dragon: How the American Public Views the Rise of China

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It is widely believed that most Americans not only distrust but also despise China. Considering the country's violent political history, unprecedented economic rise, and growing military capabilities, China has become America's strongest market competitor and arguably the most challenging global threat to the United States.

Nevertheless, a full consideration of American opinion proves the opposite to be true. Carefully analyzing all available polls and surveys, Benjamin I. Page and Tao Xie find most Americans favor peaceful engagement with China. The public view has been surprisingly coherent and consistent, changing only in response to major events and new information.

While a majority of Americans are not happy that China's economy is projected to become as large as that of the United States, they are prepared to live with it. "Unfair" Chinese trade practices and their impact on American jobs and wages are a concern, along with the quality and safety of Chinese-made goods. However, Americans favor free trade with China, provided it is tempered with environmental and workplace protections. They also believe that the United States should "balance" Chinese power through alliances with neighboring countries, such as Japan. Yet they oppose military action to defend Taiwan. Page and Xie examine these opinions in relation to facts about China and in light of current U.S. debates on diplomacy and policy.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 25, 2010
ISBN9780231525497
Living with the Dragon: How the American Public Views the Rise of China
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Benjamin I. Page

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    Living with the Dragon - Benjamin I. Page

    CONTEMPORARY ASIAIN THE WORLD SERIES

    CONTEMPORARY ASIA IN THE WORLD

    David C. Kang and Victor D. Cha, Editors

    This series aims to address a gap in the public-policy and scholarly discussion of Asia. It seeks to promote books and studies that are on the cutting edge of their respective disciplines or in the promotion of multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary research but that are also accessible to a wider readership. The editors seek to showcase the best scholarly and public-policy arguments on Asia from any field, including politics, history, economics, and cultural studies.

    Beyond the Final Score: The Politics of Sport in Asia, Victor D. Cha, 2008

    The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online, Guobin Yang, 2009

    China and India: Prospects for Peace, Jonathan Holslag, 2010

    India, Pakistan, and the Bomb: Debating Nuclear Stability in South Asia, Šumit Ganguly and S. Paul Kapur, 2010

    HOW THE AMERICAN PUBLIC VIEWS

    THE RISE OF CHINA

    BENJAMIN I. PAGE TAO XIE

    Columbia University Press/New York

    Columbia University Press

    Publishers Since 1893

    New York Chichester, West Sussex

    cup.columbia.edu

    Copyright © 2010 Columbia University Press

    All rights reserved

    E-ISBN 978-0-231-52549-7

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Page, Benjamin I.

    Living with the dragon : how the American public views the rise of China /

    Benjamin I. Page and Tao Xie.

    p. cm.—(Contemporary Asia in the world)

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-231-15208-2 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-52549-7 (e-book)

    1. China—Foreign public opinion, American. 2. United States— Relations—China. 3. China—Relations—United States. 4. Public opinion—United States. I. Xie, Tao. II. Title. III. Series.

    E183.8.C5P26 2010

    327.51073—dc22

    A Columbia University Press E-book.

    CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

    References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing.

    Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

    For Mary, Can, and Youwen

    with love and appreciation

    ⋆ Contents ⋆

    LIST OF FIGURES

    FOREWORD BY ANDREW J. NATHAN

    PREFACE

    1. The United States and China

    2. The Economic Dragon

    3. The Rise of China as a World Power

    4. Democracy and Human Rights

    5. Friends or Foes?

    6. The Future of U.S.-China Relations

    APPENDIX 1. MAJOR SURVEYS USED

    APPENDIX 2. REGRESSION TABLES

    NOTES

    WORKS CITED

    INDEX

    ⋆ List of Figures ⋆

    2.1    Rise of China’s Economy in Comparison with U.S., 1950–2008

    2.2    U.S.-China Trade in Goods, 1973–2008

    2.3    Does China Practice Fair Trade?

    2.4    Views of Globalization, Jobs, and China by Income Level

    3.1    Number of Countries Recognizing China, 1949–1988

    3.2    Americans’ Decreasing Opposition to Admitting China to the UN

    3.3    Increasing Support for U.S. Diplomatic Recognition of China

    3.4    Americans’ Average (Mean) Ratings of Selected Countries’ Influence

    3.5    Percentage Saying Each Country Very Important to U.S.

    3.6    Percentage Saying China as World Power Is Critical Threat to U.S.

    3.7    Support for Use of U.S. Troops If China Invaded Taiwan

    3.8    Support for Friendly Cooperation and Engagement with China

    4.1    Support for Linking U.S.-China Trade with Human Rights

    5.1    Feeling Thermometer Ratings of China and Other Countries

    5.2    Favorability Toward China and Other Asian Countries

    5.3    Favorable Ratings of China (10-point scale), 1954–2001

    5.4    Favorable Opinions of China (four-alternative question), 1977–2009

    ⋆ Foreword ⋆

    Andrew J. Nathan

    American China specialists spend a lot of time worrying about how Chinese foreign policy is made. But the reverse question is in some ways more puzzling: how do we in America make our policy toward China? The most important part of the answer is the one most often overlooked: the guiding role of public opinion in a democracy. It now stands revealed by Benjamin Page and Tao Xie.

    The United States and China are an odd couple when it comes to policymaking toward one another. In China, a small group of leaders deliberate among themselves to lay down the principles that guide policy. They suffer no interference from the national legislature or media. Their directives are implemented by a disciplined bureaucracy that nearly always sticks to message. Official media trumpet the guiding principles in unison. The Chinese people take the policy as given. Few are known to dissent from it.

    In the United States, it is hard to know who is in charge. Presidents come and go every four or eight years. Instead of representing a single ruling party with a consistent policy, presidents come from competing parties that claim to have different stands on all kinds of issues. Each new president, even if he comes from the same party as his predecessor, wants to do something new. Moreover, presidents do not control the legislature or the bureaucracy, and have to negotiate with them or work behind their backs to get anything done. Under our separation of powers, courts can weigh in with decisions of their own. And in our federal system, states and even cities can announce their own trade sanctions or hold ceremonies for victims of repression—or do the opposite, and grant concessions to attract investment. All this takes place amid an intense scrum of disputation among lobbies, media, think tanks, Congressional caucuses, and talking heads. Policymaking is hidden behind the dust of struggle and seems endlessly unstable.

    Is China a threat or not? Should we seek smooth relations with the people in power even though they rule undemocratically, or should we punish them for human rights violations like those in Tibet and Xinjiang? Should we deepen trade relations which allow China to grow richer and more powerful, or interrupt them to punish China for currency manipulation and intellectual property rights violations? Is Chinese military modernization a threat to U.S. interests or do we need China as a partner to keep the peace in Asia? Do we blame China for supporting the dictators in North Korea, the Sudan, and Myanmar, or thank China for creating a channel of influence over them? Is China helping to modernize Africa or seeking to displace Western interests there, and in Latin America and the Middle East? Do we want China to rise, or don’t we?

    As Americans noisily debate these questions, Beijing’s America specialists struggle to explain to their leaders where our China policy is headed and why. Does U.S. pressure to open Chinese markets reveal a plan to take the lion’s share of profits from the economic relationship and use it to sustain American hegemony? Are the U.S. relationships with Japan, India, and Vietnam aimed at tying China down with a ring of potential threats? Why does the U.S. deter Chinese military pressure on Taiwan—is this part of a strategy to weaken China by keeping it divided? Or—as other Chinese analysts claim—is U.S. policy essentially strategy-free, the jerrybuilt result of compromises and tradeoffs among competing interest groups, bureaucracies, members of Congress, religious movements, human rights organizations, and business lobbies? As China grows in global importance, there are few groups or institutions without a stake either in cozying up to China, or in punishing it.

    China policy accordingly has seen continuous debates and disruptions—over Taiwan, trade disputes, human rights, and military accidents. The United States placed sanctions on China after the 1989 Tiananmen tragedy, and some of those sanctions quietly survive today (for example on the sale of higher-end military technology to China). Many Americans called for a boycott of the 2008 Beijing Olympics to protest China’s failure to do more to stop the genocide in Darfur. Many deplore China’s repressive policies in Tibet. Democrats have come to office promising to protect American workers from unfair Chinese competition; Republicans have come to office promising to demonstrate overwhelming military strength to deter any Chinese challenge; and leaders of both parties have promised to do more to protect democracy in Taiwan and fight for religious and political freedom in China.

    Yet, paradoxically, behind the noise, American China policy since Richard Nixon has followed a consistent line. In 1967 Nixon wrote, We simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors…. Our aim, to the extent that we can influence events, should be to induce change.¹ Nixon’s policy was labeled engagement, and it has survived under one name or another under every president since. Washington normalized diplomatic relations with Beijing, ushered China into the World Trade Organization, and built up the most intensely interdependent trade and investment relationship in the world. Engagement took as its premise the fact that China was there and would not go away. It accepted that the rest of the world would have to live with China, and that we could only influence, not control, its direction and pace of change. Most boldly, engagement made the radical commitment that a prosperous and strong China—for all challenges it might bring—would be more consistent with American interests than a poor and turbulent China.

    Page and Xie reveal the key to the paradox of strategic contention plus consistency. American democracy—so often so dysfunctional on the surface—works. They draw on a literature on the role of public opinion in American policymaking, which Page helped to create, that shows how the common sense of the common citizen acts as a balance wheel—in their metaphor, a set of dikes—to keep the broad trend of policy going in a consistent direction even as it wanders left and right in response to the pressure of events.

    Page and Xie have done a unique service in compiling, and making sense of, all the information on Americans’ views of China available from reliable polls over many decades. It turns out that the public’s views are in some ways surprising. First, they are substantive and rich: the American people have more extensive, consistent, and nuanced views on China than most analysts have realized. Moreover, the public in the aggregate is more moderate on China relations than one would gather from the tenor of policy debates. They are less alarmed by the so-called China threat in the economic realm, less worried about a Chinese military or security threat, less willing to confront China in general, less willing to go to war over Taiwan in particular, less committed to making China a democracy, and less willing to complicate relations over human rights issues than the media and politicians who often speak for them.

    Americans consistently favor engagement. But in contrast to what a succession of American presidents have promised, they have not bought in to the myth that engagement will turn China into another America or dissolve all conflicts of interest between our continental country between two oceans and their continental country on the mainland of Asia.

    Engagement has turned out to have its ups and downs. It worked—but the way it worked reminds one of the ancient admonition to be careful what you wish for. If China is no longer outside the family of nations, [nurturing] its fantasies, it is instead inside the family of nations in a big way, crowding everyone else, and exercising a newfound powerful voice in our affairs. The American people recognize this fact with appropriate ambivalence. But on balance, they accept this outcome as preferable to the alternative—an angry, isolated, poor, and turbulent China.

    This analysis should not induce complacency. Because public opinion matters so much, everyone with a stake in or opinion about American China policy tries to shape it. The public responds to these efforts, as well as to events like the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, the rising trade imbalance, and military crises in the Taiwan Strait. Mismanagement of the relationship, confrontational behavior by either government, or the rise of ideological tides in either country pushing hostility toward the other, would produce shifts in American opinion that could set the relationship on a new longterm course with more dangerous results. The relationship will continue to require careful management by both governments to assure that the policy on the U.S. side continues to command the public support that it needs to succeed.

    1. Asia after Vietnam, Foreign Affairs 46.1 (October 1967): 121.

    ⋆ Preface ⋆

    This book was written to help general readers and policy makers, as well as students and scholars, understand how ordinary Americans—the American public as a whole—think and feel about China.

    We believe that good relations between the United States and China are crucial for the peace and prosperity of the world, and that ordinary Americans’ views of China will inevitably affect those relations. We also believe that policy makers’ impressions of U.S. public opinion will affect future U.S. policy. Yet many participants in U.S. policy debates suffer from mistaken ideas about public opinion. Many think that the American public is abysmally ignorant of foreign affairs and is emotional and erratic in its opinions. Many imagine that ordinary Americans are relentlessly hostile toward China, or strongly protectionist, or single-mindedly focused on human rights, or bent on belligerent military confrontation. Those impressions are wrong.

    Our aim is to provide accurate information about what the American public thinks, and thereby to contribute—in a modest way—to the prospects for peaceful cooperation and engagement between the United States and China. For it turns out that the actual opinions of the American public constitute no barrier at all to good U.S.-China relations. Indeed, if policy makers acted exactly in accord with the expressed wishes of the U.S. citizenry, U.S.-China relations would probably improve.

    In order to give a comprehensive picture of what Americans think about China, we have compiled and analyzed the results of many opinion surveys conducted by different survey organizations over the fifty-plus years since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. (In chapter 1 we explain how it is possible to draw trustworthy information from these surveys.)

    We present the results in as clear and fast-moving a fashion as we can, generally reporting nothing more complicated than percentages, and sometimes using simple graphs. Technical issues are mostly relegated to endnotes or appendixes, which readers should feel entirely free to ignore. In a few cases, when we cannot avoid mentioning complicated matters in the text, we alert readers that they may want to skim a section or skip ahead.

    It has been possible to write the book only because of a great deal of help from our families, our friends and colleagues, our home institutions, and the many organizations that produced the survey data we analyze. We are profoundly grateful for this help.

    We begin our thanks close to home. We are very grateful to our wives, Mary and Can, for tolerating distracted behavior, difficult moods, and absences due to research for the book. Can bore with Tao Xie’s long absences even when she was pregnant with their first baby, Youwen, and subsequently when she was exhausted from taking care of the newborn. We hope that the manuscript improved with each draft; for certain, Youwen grew bigger and stronger each day. We know no better way to express our love than to dedicate the book to Mary, Can, and Youwen.

    Both Northwestern University (NU) and Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU) have provided supportive and intellectually stimulating environments for us. In addition to helpful and friendly political science colleagues (notably including Hendrik Spruyt, Victor Shih, and Jonathan Caverly), NU provided key facilities (including online access to survey data), assistance (the librarians in the government publications section deserve special thanks; they also helped with Tao Xie’s first book), and funding (from NU’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and the Fulcher Chair).

    Ben Page profited greatly from three trips to BFSU, including one very intensive, all-too-short springtime visit during which he tried to learn about China while teaching American politics. Tao Xie acknowledges financial support from the Information Center for Worldwide Asia Research (for help with initial data collection) and from BFSU, which—through its Office of 211 Projects—provided crucial funding for further research.

    Two individuals at BFSU deserve special thanks. Mei Renyi was generous with his time and with his expertise on U.S.-China relations. In his capacity as dean of the School of English and International Studies, Sun Youzhong has been unusually supportive of Tao Xie’s research. He was enthusiastic about this project from the beginning and did his best to ensure the availability of time and funding.

    Several BFSU students provided valuable research assistance. We thank undergraduates Liu Chenzi, Zhao Xinyan, Lin Chao, and Zhouqian, and graduates Huang Shan, Xia Ting, and Liu Fei.

    Colleagues elsewhere have also been important. Sun Zhe and Zhao Kejin from Tsinghua University, and Zhou Qi from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, convinced Tao Xie of the importance of the topic and encouraged him to persist. For comments and suggestions on various parts of the manuscript, we are grateful to Victor Shih, Akiko Fukushima, Shin-wha Lee, Sook Jong Lee, Jan Melissen, Victor Marin, Jon Caverley, Hendrik Spruyt, Stacy Wagner, and Suisheng Zhao. We also thank colleagues at the American Studies Center of BFSU, the 2008 conference on soft power in Asia: identity, power, and public diplomacy in Seoul, and the 2009 annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago. For many insightful comments on the entire manuscript we are very much indebted to Bruce Russett and three anonymous reviewers.

    We are also grateful to more individuals than we can possibly name who sponsored, organized, conducted, and helped us obtain data from the many opinion surveys we have used. These include not only the six key surveys done for C-100, Pew, PIPA (Program on International Policy Attitudes), and CCGA (Chicago Council on Global Affairs) that are described in chapter 1 and appendix 1, but also surveys by the Gallup Organization and a dozen or so media polling organizations. Thanks also to the wizards at iPoll (the Roper Center), americans-world.com (PIPA), and pollingreport.com, who made it easy for us to find obscure and long-lost surveys that help illuminate the full picture of Americans’ opinions.

    Very special thanks are due to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (formerly Chicago Council on Foreign Relations), which sponsored three of the major surveys we used and with whom Ben Page has worked closely on the design, analysis, and write-up of a dozen foreign policy surveys since 1974. We thank John E. Rielly and the energetic teams (including Art Cyr, Nora Dell, Catherine Hug, and many consultants and research assistants) who designed and analyzed the surveys conducted by Harris in 1974 and by Gallup every four years from 1978 through 1998. Special gratitude is due Marshall M. Bouton, the current president of the Chicago Council—who has directed the CCGA surveys since 2002 and has collaborated with Ben Page on a book as well as numerous council reports—and to the council staff, collaborators, and consultants who played active parts in the 2006 and 2008 surveys that we use extensively. These include Christopher Whitney, Silvia Veltcheva, David Tully, Gregory Holyk, Rachel Bronson, Thomas Wright, Catherine Hug, Kim Byung-Kook, Michael J. Green, the Honorable Teresita Schaffer, Dali Yang, David Shambaugh, Steven Kull, Clay Ramsay, and Evan Lewis. Greg Holyk also helped with our follow-up questions. And we thank the people of Knowledge Networks who carried out the recent CCGA surveys, especially Bill McCreedy, Stefan Tobias, Mike Dennis, and Melanie Thomas.

    We are grateful to be part of the large survey research community that makes it possible to do this kind of research.

    ⋆ One ⋆

    THE UNITED STATES AND CHINA

    The rise of China, if it continues, may be the most important trend in the world for the next century. When historians one hundred years hence write about our time, they may well conclude that the most significant development was the emergence of a rigorous market economy—and army—in the most populous country of the world.

    NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, The Rise of China, Foreign Affairs (1993)

    China today is like a dragon that, waking up after centuries of slumber, suddenly realizes many nations have been trampling on its tail. With all that has happened to it over the past 200 years, China could be forgiven for awakening as an angry nation, and yet Beijing has declared that it will rise peacefully.

    KISHORE MAHBUBANI, Understanding China, Foreign Affairs (2005)

    THE FUTURE PEACE and prosperity of the world is likely to depend heavily on the relationship between the United States—the world’s dominant military and economic superpower—and China, a rapidly rising power whose economic and military strength may match that of the United States within a few decades. Will the United States and China work out a peaceful, cooperative long-term relationship? Or will they clash diplomatically or even militarily?

    Many factors could upset the relationship. Tensions have mounted over such matters as Taiwan, China’s growing influence in East Asia and elsewhere,

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