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Opinion | US-China relations: poisoned public opinion driving vicious cycle towards new cold war
- Public opinion in the US and China towards the other is at its lowest point, hampering efforts to improve relations and avert the drift towards conflict
- Politicians’ need to appear tough on the other side and preserve their legitimacy is driving them to even more hawkish positions
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As a child, a dark tunnel at the entrance of our village in Nanjing frightened us children. Rumours even suggested it was haunted. The tunnel was actually an air defence shelter. Constructed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, they were all over Chinese cities in case the United States or the Soviet Union, the two largest powers in the world, attacked us.
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The Cold War has long since been buried in the dust of history, but it is not unthinkable that we could be heading into a new cold war and that children from both sides will have to live in a climate of fear once again. The tensions between China and the US are rising, and public opinion in both countries is not helping.
In early June, a survey of more than 2,000 Chinese people conducted by Stanford University found that 75 per cent of respondents held negative views of the US. The same survey showed that American respondents’ views of China were similarly negative at 76 per cent. The findings are in line with other polls that show unfavourable views of each other are at record lows.
Another poll by the Roper Centre in the US found that Americans’ views of China have started to resemble their views of the Soviet Union decades ago in terms of hostility, pessimism and militarism.
This mutual negative feeling towards each other is worrying as it could fuel tensions between the two, which are already high.
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The relationship between China and the US has experienced a roller-coaster ride. After Richard Nixon’s visit to China in the early 1970s, which broke the political ice, a brief honeymoon period emerged. In Chinese, the US is meiguo, or “beautiful country”. Millions of Chinese people, myself included, took this to heart. The US was seen as a dream country with its freedom, democratic system and opportunity for all.
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