Negative views of China at historic highs in Canada
Global survey lays much blame for views on handling of COVID
Unfavourable views of China soared this year among people in some of the world’s largest economies, a new 14country Pew Research Center survey has found.
Last year, survey results were much more varied, but this year a clear majority in each country expressed a negative opinion of China. Most believe Beijing has done a bad job dealing with the COVID-19 outbreak.
In Canada, Australia, the U.K., Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United States, South Korea and Spain, negative views reached their highest points since the non-partisan U.S.-based centre began polling on this topic more than a decade ago.
Seventy-three per cent of Canadians now hold an unfavourable view of China, exceeding the previous record set last year by 13 percentage points.
“It’s quite startling to see how far China has fallen. It really tracks back to when President Xi Jinping took office and is consistent across countries,” commented Margaret McCuaig-Johnston, a former assistant deputy minister at Canada’s Department of Finance, who spent decades helping to build relations between Canada and China.
McCuaig-Johnston is among those whose view of Beijing has turned much more negative in the wake of Chinese authorities’ human rights abuses against Muslim people in Xinjiang and the detentions of Canadians in China.
“One would think that Xi would get the hint with this survey that his aggressive (foreign policy) actions aren’t working,” she told the Star.
Pew researchers did not ask respondents to differentiate between their views of China’s leadership and Chinese institutions, such as the country’s medical community.
However, across the 14 countries surveyed, a median of 78 per cent said they have no confidence in Xi to “do the right thing when it comes to international affairs.”
Only the U.S. received more negative evaluations from the public, with a median of 84 per cent saying the U.S. handled the outbreak poorly. Only global confidence in the leadership of U.S. President Donald Trump was lower than confidence in Xi.
It is notable public opinions of the world’s two largest economic powers plummeted this year, said Laura Silver, the lead author of the report.
“We definitely see that views of how these countries have handled COVID-19 is colouring people’s attitudes of both the U.S. and China,” Silver told the Star.
To McCuaig-Johnston, the takeaway is countries shouldn’t rely on either power to play a leadership role in containing the virus.
The telephone survey of 14,276 adults was conducted between June 10 and Aug. 3. The margin of error is plus or minus 4.2 percentage points.
In a separate Pew survey, meanwhile, most respondents rated their own country’s handling of the pandemic much more positively. In Canada, only 11 per cent thought Canadian officials handled the outbreak poorly.
COVID-19 has killed more than 209,000 people in the U.S., and while the reported death toll in mainland China, according to Johns Hopkins University, is much lower at 4,739 deaths, Beijing continues to face global anger for reports it suppressed information about the outbreak.