The share of those in India and South Africa who felt China disregarded their national interests had vastly increased over the past decade, according to Laura Silver of Pew Research Centre and the study’s principal researcher.
“India has experienced a considerable negative shift in its views, distinctly standing out among the middle-income countries we surveyed,” said Silver. “Brazil’s views have also grown more negative, but remain somewhat divided between favourable and unfavourable.”
In contrast, sentiments in South Africa showed only a slight shift. While 40 per cent of respondents voiced negative views of China, 49 per cent said they still saw the Asian giant favourably. The South African respondents also took a more positive outlook towards other issues raised in the survey.
Brazilians and Indians appeared to be more sceptical of China’s contributions to global peace and stability, with 62 per cent and 56 per cent expressing negative views, respectively. Conversely, South Africans were more optimistic, with 47 per cent adopting a favourable stance on Beijing’s role.
Similarly, while 67 per cent of Indians and 57 per cent of Brazilians distrusted Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s ability to make the right decisions, 47 per cent of South Africans were confident in him.
“South Africa’s opinions of China are comparatively positive and have changed minimally over a time period where sentiments in many other countries have drastically turned negative,” Silver said.
A majority of the Indian and Brazilian survey respondents distrust Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s ability to make the right decisions. Photo: Reuters
She believed the results reflected that South Africans tended to see Chinese investments, soft power and its global role “more positively”.
On the other hand, in Brazil the data seemed to indicate that views of China fell along domestic political lines: 45 per cent of respondents who backed the incumbent left-wing governing coalition in Brazil had a favourable view of China, as opposed to 36 per cent who did not back President Lula da Silva.
The survey results for India were unsurprising as deaths in border conflicts with China in 2020 were “politically used to exacerbate Hindu nationalism and consolidate the influence of the partisan group led by [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modi”, said Karin Costa Vazquez of India’s O.P. Jindal Global University as well as the Beijing-based think tank Centre for China and Globalisation.
In Brazil, the coronavirus pandemic and former president Jair Bolsonaro’s linking it to China may have fuelled negative views of the country, Vazquez said.
“Jair Bolsonaro actively contributed to the construction of narratives such as ‘Chinese virus’, ‘ineffective Chinese vaccine’, aligned with the anti-China sentiment of the Trump administration and inertially reproduced by the Brazilian media.”
Vazquez said the results cast doubt on China’s ability to consolidate cooperation with the Brics countries, guided by the economy, security and people-to-people exchanges.
For years Beijing has fostered relations with civil society, pinning its hopes on person-to-person connections to forge understanding, she added.
“When people turn their backs on this type of initiative, as is happening in India, dialogue becomes more difficult and relationships more prone to hostility.”
The recent Pew data illustrated that despite Beijing’s cultural initiatives intended to build global understanding of China, only a quarter of respondents regarded its films, television series and music positively, said Paulo Menechelli of the Brazilian think tank Observa China.
This contradicted a current rising fascination with Asian cultural artefacts, Menechelli said, particularly those from Japan and South Korea. It also contrasted with the Chinese embassy in Brazil’s deepening investment in areas like film festivals, book clubs, Chinese language course promotion and the celebration of Chinese holidays.
He suggested that Beijing’s tight controls of cultural output could be influencing how these efforts were perceived.
“Xi Jinping consistently emphasises the need to ‘tell China’s stories well’, yet what are these stories?” Menechelli asked.
Censorship in China, especially around topics the political establishment and party leadership find even slightly controversial, directly hampered the ability to export these products, he added.
Menechelli said many Brazilians were familiar with the American political system due to TV series like House of Cards, in contrast with their limited exposure to the Chinese system and its lack of transparency.
This contributed to ignorance and subsequent unease, leading to more negative opinions about China not just in Brazil but globally, he added.