Global views of China are often understood as divided between a negative Global North and a positive Global South. But is there really a North-South split on China? The dataset presented in the Global Public Opinion on China (GPOC) project suggests a much more complex reality.

It is not news that China’s image has taken a hammering in the developed world, particularly since COVID-19. (A separate analysis reviewing when, where, and how this happened is posted here.)

The GPOC data also confirm that, in the aggregate, citizens across the Global South — developing economies as categorized by UN Trade and Development — indeed have more positive views of China. Across more than 1,200 surveys taken in the developing world, positive views of China have outweighed negative views by a factor of about 2 to 1.

Yet the exceptions to this generalization are anything but trivial.

India’s 1.4 billion citizens once held generally positive views towards China but have leaned negative in most surveys since 2010. Then, as the chart below shows, during the pandemic, Indian views of China plunged to a level similar to that seen in Europe and North America.

The pandemic also coincided with deadly clashes in 2020 along the disputed Sino-Indian border that prompted a wave of anti-Chinese outrage in India. Before that, Prime Minister Modi had attempted to cultivate friendly ties with Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping, including by keeping the tense, protracted 2017 standoff at Doklam off the news agenda. This suggests the negative sentiments recorded in surveys of Indian public opinion likely reflect grassroots popular nationalism more than top-down political mobilization.

In Brazil, too, views of China have been predominantly negative since the pandemic and have not recovered. Numerous other countries in Latin America have seen similar trends.

In Turkey, whose 85-million-strong population shares an ethnic affinity with Uyghurs, negative sentiments have long predominated. The eye-catching pair of positive outliers on the chart below from 2018 and 2019 are from two different sources, and they suggest President Erdogan’s efforts to cultivate ties with Beijing and downplay the issue of Uyghur repression were having an impact until COVID-19. 

In Iran, most surveys collected since 2020 have produced negative results. Although political ties have been warm, historically, China’s image among Iran’s predominantly Shi’a Muslim population has not been correspondingly positive. Also, the 2023 Iran–Saudi Arabia deal brokered in Beijing has seemingly failed to win over Iranian citizens.

Across the Middle East and North Africa, positive and negative views of China were roughly balanced through most of the 2010s, but China’s image improved from 2018 onward. This suggests the positions taken by most of the region’s governments, applauding the mass internment and re-education of Uyghurs and other Muslim minority populations as counter-terrorism achievements, have neutralized the effects of Western media reporting on the issue. China’s aggregate approval rating across the region has remained positive, even through the pandemic. 

In Sub-Saharan Africa, citizens have generally leaned positive by a factor of 3 to 1. Although the pandemic was a drag on China’s otherwise positive image in various parts of Africa, the 223 million citizens of the continent’s largest power, Nigeria, showed little sign of blaming Beijing despite social media frenzies over instances of racist treatment of Africans in southern China early in the pandemic. 

Closer to home, East Asia is a region divided. Views of China in Northeast Asia — Japan, South Korea, Mongolia, and Taiwan — are famously cold. But to the south, majorities in most ASEAN countries express positive feelings despite China’s historically disruptive role in the region and its current South China Sea policies laying claim to the “maritime heart of Southeast Asia.”

On the land side, in Central Asia, the story is likewise a positive one for Beijing in a region that has seen a major uptick in survey coverage. The collected data — primarily from Central Asian Barometer, which was launched in 2017 — show that attitudes cooled during the pandemic but have since rebounded rapidly. 

In sum, views across the Global South are much too varied to characterize it as one side of a global divide. Such variation should not be surprising. Excluding China, the Global South accounts for more than 70% of the global population. This shows that narratives about a global crash in favorability toward China, and a world divided between North and South when it comes to China, offer limited analytic traction.