Public opinion can be a slippery idea. It can refer either to the collective opinions of the public as a whole or to opinions expressed in public, typically through the media and online, which can be highly unrepresentative. Social media users know only too well the disconnect that can exist between online opinion and the views of everyday people.

Large-N surveys attempt to tap the views of a broad and, where possible, representative sample of the public. But polling — especially on a global scale — carries the risk of manufacturing public opinion: respondents may have had no opinion about the subject until the pollsters asked them.

While we cannot be sure how often this happens, the more prominent a topic is in daily life or public discussion, the more likely citizens will have thought about it. And there are plenty of indications that more citizens around the world now have opinions of China.

The globalization of the Chinese economy, and its associated technological, environmental, and strategic footprints, have made China a factor in ordinary lives on every continent. Add to that an intensifying global superpower rivalry, a high-profile paramount leader, and a multi-billion-dollar foreign-directed propaganda drive — all of these give reason to expect views to be forming among populations around the world.

More Surveys, More Influence

Public opinion on China has already appeared as a factor in national-level policymaking in many countries. From Kenyan election debates focusing on Chinese infrastructure and labor practices to local uprisings against the Solomon Islands’ switching diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing to anti-Chinese protests by supporters of Myanmar’s junta, public views are shaping policymakers’ choices about their engagement with China.

The chart at the top indicates how the number of national surveys asking respondents’ views of China has increased in parallel with China’s increased prominence. At the forefront has been the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes and Trends project, which began in 2007. A suite of area-focused “Barometer” surveys by academics — in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia — has extended the geographic scope of these surveys, especially in the developing world.

Coverage reached new heights in 2022 with the EU-funded Sinophone Borderlands survey led by Richard Turcsanyi and Kristina Kironska at Palacky University Olomouc, and the first ten months of 2024 have already seen the second-most surveys of any year. The numbers of surveys will continue to increase as some projects release data after embargo periods of up to two years.

Thus, as the world’s citizens have been forming views about China, a proliferation of surveys has been taking the pulse of citizens’ attitudes toward China with increasing frequency and across a wider geographic scope.

This raises a challenge: how to combine results from various surveys together into a global picture?

Building a Global Picture

A necessary first step is to identify comparable questions. Global Public Opinion on China (GPOC) focuses on the most fundamental, general opinions of China, its influence on the world, and on the respondent’s own country. This enables responses on different scales to be rendered comparable by zeroing in on the split between positive- and negative-leaning attitudes at the most general level.

The next question is how to aggregate the results. One option is the “poll of polls”: this is as simple as averaging them out. The difference between the percentage of positive versus negative views provides a basic “net favorability” rating for China, akin to a presidential approval rating, formed from all available surveys.

This simple approach is not indefensible. There is something to be said for focusing on actual data rather than relying on estimations or reweightings based on judgments about the importance of particular surveys or countries. And nearly 1,200 of the 2,500 surveys included in GPOC were conducted in the Global South, so the “poll of polls” approach is not hopelessly skewed in favor of the developed world.

By this measure, global views of China have seen a fairly steady decline over time, as illustrated below. 

The downside, however, is that weighting all surveys equally tends to give greater say to citizens in countries where more surveys are conducted.

Sum Total of the World’s Countries?

An arguably fairer way to assess the global picture is to weight each country equally, as implied in the system of sovereign states. This approach is reflected in GPOC’s “Map” view, which shades each country according to the balance between positive and negative views of China in the most recent year for which there is survey data.

So, what does the view look like from this angle?

In total, GPOC’s dataset taps views of China in 160 of the world’s countries, of which 102 leaned positive in the latest survey year and only 62 leaned negative. Global opinion of China thus looks much more positive when all countries get an equal say.

Intriguingly, however, the country-level view of global public opinion only reinforces the trend identified in the “poll of polls”: negative views of China increased over the long term while positive views decreased. The chart below tells the story. 

However, not all countries are equally representative of global opinion.

Some countries might carry extra weight due to their economic influence. As shown below, switching the GPOC map to size countries by GDP provides insight into the challenges that Beijing faces in shifting world opinion in its favor.

With few exceptions, the larger a country’s economy, the more staunchly China-skeptic its citizens are — even when using the purchasing power parity estimation of GDP, which actually understates Euro-American dominance of the world economy. 

Weighting Perceptions by Population

But perhaps the strongest argument can be made that surveys in countries with a larger population merit a correspondingly greater say in calculations of world opinion on a given topic, including China.

This method of estimation greatly boosts the importance of India, whose generally negative views among a population of 1.4 billion offset the strongly positive views of more than 50 countries in Africa. The GPOC’s population-based map of world opinion on China vividly illustrates this picture. 

Charted over time, as below, the population-weighted view markedly narrows the gap between positive and negative views through much of the 2000s and 2010s. But it also shows the long-term trend of steadily increasing negative sentiments over time. Perhaps on balance, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau predicted, increased contact over time tends to generate conflictual views.

Given that global public opinion concerns the views of the world’s citizens, the GPOC’s yearly “Global Average,” shown in the top right of the interactive, is calculated using the population-weighted approach. The conclusion it points to is a roughly equal split between positive-leaning and negative-leaning views of China worldwide. In 2024, the surveys in the dataset cover 76% of the world’s population, an estimated 29% of whom leaned positive, 26% negative, and the remainder expressing neutral or no answer.

A Work in Progress

Policymakers grappling with the competing demands of strategic competition, economic development, and national security are making crucial decisions related to China under unprecedented critical scrutiny from networked societies, as well as elite corporate and individual constituencies.

As China’s influence — whether positive, negative, or neutral — deepens around the world, citizens are likely to form increasingly multi-layered views about the country. A person’s general feeling toward China may or may not match their appraisal of its high-tech manufactures, infrastructure projects, economic prospects, or their personal impressions of Xi Jinping.

The GPOC project’s goal is to elevate and clarify citizens’ voices on China policymaking, inform decisions among the world’s governments and bureaucracies — including China — in the interests of everyday citizens, and support evidence-based discussion and analysis in the media, online, and in expert communities. Future enhancements to the GPOC dataset will add layers to provide more specific dimensions of global views on China.