After the China Shocks: Understanding Negative Attitudes Toward China in the U.S.

• In Event: Labor and Trade

Abstract

China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) led to major disruptions for certain industries and regions of many advanced industrialized countries. Coined “The China Shock,” it yielded a burgeoning literature in economics on the negative distributional consequences of free trade and in political science a better understanding of the anti-globalization backlash that has roiled elections and spawned social movements. However, the China Shock is often portrayed as only an example of economic globalization, we posit that public opinion toward economic integration with China is distinct from attitudes toward globalization writ large. We measure attitudes about China directly and to more clearly understand the normative drivers of negative attitudes about China. Treating the China Shock as a proxy for generic globalization may overstate the American public’s dissatisfaction with globalization and trade in general and understate or even mask other concerns about economic integration with China specifically.

Using a survey experiment and follow-up focus groups, we expose respondents to different normative considerations that may drive negative attitudes toward China and study the disparate effects of the treatment on populations exposed to trade shocks, Covid-19 impact, automation and technological change, and employment insecurity. Negative reactions may be driven by ideological considerations prompted by reference to the Chinese Communist Party, which has led the PRC since 1949 (Gries 2014); negative reactions could also be linked to feelings of ethnocentrism and concerns that China is too culturally different than US (Kinder and Kam 2009); finally, concerns could be justified through the frame of relative status decline of the United States as China is predicted to surpass the US as the world’s largest economy in the next decade (Mutz 2018). In the follow up focus group interviews, we examine how attitudes toward China are associated with these different concerns of ideology, cultural/ethnic difference, and relative status change. In both the focus groups and the survey experiment we explore differences across political partisanship, gender, race, and education levels.

Abstract Keywords:

China, US-China Relations, globalization, trade, public opinion, focus groups

Authors

• Mary E. Gallagher, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

• Daniela Stockmann, Hertie School

• Yujeong Yang, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign