U.S. President Joe Biden meets Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G-20 Leaders Summit in Bali, Indonesia, November 14, 2022.
Kevin Lamarque | Reuters
A majority of American adults in a poll say they are unsure whether Chinese President Xi Jinping will “do the correct thing in world affairs”, in response to a Pew Research Center poll released Wednesday.
Despite this pessimism, greater than half of the US population said the 2 countries could work together on trade and economic policies.
The survey, which followed greater than 3,500 American adults between March 20 and 26, comes as tensions between the US and China escalate to the purpose of limited bilateral interaction. Putting pressure on Beijing is certainly one of the few topics with strong bipartisan support within the US
Meanwhile, Xi has consolidated his power in China and is searching for to bolster China’s global influence.
In March, China brokered the restoration of diplomatic ties between Middle Eastern rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran. Beijing has thus far refused to sentence Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine while calling for peace talks.
It isn’t clear to what extent respondents to the Pew survey were aware of such events and events within the world.
The survey found that 13% of Americans who took the survey said they’d never heard of Xi, rising to 27% amongst respondents aged 18 to 29.
Nevertheless, most respondents took a pessimistic view: nearly half, or 47%, said they’d “no confidence in any way” that Xi was handling world affairs well, while one other 30% said they were “not very confident.”
About three-quarters of respondents said that China doesn’t consider the interests of nations just like the US and that China interferes within the affairs of other countries, the report says.
Greater than half of the respondents said that China doesn’t contribute to global peace and stability.
This directly contradicts Beijing’s narrative that it contributes to world peace and economic development.
In keeping with data from the World Bank, over the past few years China has accounted for over 15% of world GDP. In 2010, China overtook Japan to grow to be the second largest economy within the world, behind america
China’s Foreign Ministry released documents this 12 months highlighting U.S. involvement in “many wars abroad” they usually claim US alliances within the Asia-Pacific region are was intended to “disrupt the peace”.
Economic cooperation
US-China economic cooperation was certainly one of two areas where respondents to the Pew survey remained more optimistic.
Barely greater than half said the 2 countries could work together on trade and economic policy, without specifically asking about specific policies.
Pew found that the one other category where greater than half of the respondents said the 2 countries could work together was student exchange programs.
The variety of Chinese students within the US and American students studying in China has declined sharply in the method the Covid pandemic. This reflected a general decline in bilateral travel, which had not yet improved significantly, in response to the report published last week by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based bipartisan policy research organization and think tank.
The report’s co-authors are Scott Kennedy, Chairman of the CSIS Trustee Chair in China’s Business and Economics, and Wang Jisi, Founding President of Beijing University’s Institute for International Strategic Studies.
During visits to China over the past 12 months, Kennedy said people he met told him that Washington was fully answerable for the decline in US-China relations and that China was still on the inevitable path of becoming a significant power.
Overall, China is anticipated to overtake america because the world’s largest economy in the approaching years.
One in all the deeply rooted narratives in China, often mentioned by Xi, is that the ruling Chinese Communist Party is leading the country “on the correct side of history” and is emerging from the nineteenth century “humiliation” by Western imperialists.
General pessimism
Respondents to the Pew survey mostly didn’t see areas of potential cooperation between the US and China.
Of the five areas mentioned within the survey, greater than half of the respondents expressed pessimism in three: international conflict resolution, climate change policy and combating the spread of infectious diseases.
“I do not know what we could work on with them. Actually not over the climate,” the Pew report said, citing a 25-year-old anonymous woman who attended the main focus group.
The Biden administration said the US was competing with China and imposed export bans on critical semiconductor technology to China. This was as a consequence of the Trump administration’s tariffs on Chinese goods and the blacklisting of Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei.
A recent Pew survey found that just about half of those surveyed within the US said China gets more out of the bilateral trade relationship, and greater than 80% said China’s growing technological power is a serious – if not very serious – problem for the US
The balloon incident caused US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to postpone his trip to Beijing. Sources told CNBC last week that senior officials from the Commerce Department would visit China as a part of an effort to put the groundwork for Secretary Gina Raimondo’s potential trip later this 12 months.
—Kayla Tausche of CNBC contributed to this report.