How popular is China?

My guess is it's because they got bored of articles about China's meteoric rise (or perhaps they just ran out of synonyms for "meteoric") but an article from the Financial Times yesterday pronouncing China's "fall from global favour" seems a bit overblown. These claims that the sky has begun to fall in Shanghai are based ...

My guess is it's because they got bored of articles about China's meteoric rise (or perhaps they just ran out of synonyms for "meteoric") but an article from the Financial Times yesterday pronouncing China's "fall from global favour" seems a bit overblown.

My guess is it's because they got bored of articles about China's meteoric rise (or perhaps they just ran out of synonyms for "meteoric") but an article from the Financial Times yesterday pronouncing China's "fall from global favour" seems a bit overblown.

These claims that the sky has begun to fall in Shanghai are based on a massive new report from the Pew Research Center that delves into public opinion in 47 countries around the world.  Most of the findings are fairly unsurprising (Israelis don't like Iran, Japanese don't like China, and the entire Middle East has beef with the United States), so perhaps it makes sense to run with what may be a trend. Even so, only about half of the 15 countries with data available have seen a drop in favorable attitudes towards China over the past 2 years, and most of those were concentrated in Western Europe.

Who cares? Well, not China. Never ones to get too worked up over public opinion, the Chinese leadership have bigger fish to fry than Spanish human rights activists. What's more, if one delves a bit deeper into the Pew report, one finds that in the places that have received most of Beijing's attention recently—Africa, Latin America, Asia—China is wildly popular, much more so than the United States.

To paraphrase Congolese Ambassador Serge Mombouli from his quote here yesterday: People the world over are bloody well sick of having American ideas about democracy shoved down their throats, and would much rather have a bite to eat and electricity at night. It seems that about sums up world opinion right now.

Sam duPont is a Master's candidate at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School and focused his capstone research on transitional democracies and elections in fragile states.

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