Europe finds favour among the Chinese, US not so much: Survey

An online survey has found that Chinese people hold a much more favourable opinion of European countries than of the United States.

"Chinese views of European countries and the US diverge sharply, despite these countries being typically grouped together as 'the West' in mainstream English and Chinese discourses," the researchers said.

Researchers from the National University of Singapore, Canada's University of British Columbia and Rice University in the United States came together to understand what the Chinese think of US and Europe.

The paper was published in January and peer-reviewed by the Journal of Current Chinese Affairs.

"The Chinese viewed the US much more negatively than Europe," authors Adam Liu, Xiaojun Li and Songying Fang said in the paper.

The researchers asked 2,083 Chinese respondents to choose from five options ranging from “very favourable” to “very unfavourable” and “don’t know” to tell how they feel towards the US and nine European countries, that included Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Britain.

The results were clearly against the United States. An overwhelming majority had an “unfavourable” view of the US, while 43 per cent held a “very unfavourable” view of the US. Only 23 per cent of respondents took a “very” or “somewhat” favourable view.

For European countries, most of the participants showed favour for most of them , except for Britain to which only 46 per cent people responded positively. Germany topped the list of most favourable European country with 69 per cent holding favourable views and just 23 per cent saying they felt unfavourably towards the nation.

Thesurvey was a counterpoint to the Pew survey results published in June, which concluded that a majority of the people in the 19 European countries polled hold negative views of China.

Across the countries surveyed by Pew, a median 79 per cent of respondents consider human rights policies as a serious problem.

(With inputs from agencies)

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