Triumphalism and Inconvenient Truth: National Self-Image in a Rising Power

• In Event: Chinese Politics Mini-Conference: China on the Global Stage: Policies and Reactions

Abstract

Citizens tend to hold positive conceptions of their own countries and how people of other nations view them. This may be particularly the case in an authoritarian rising power, where government propaganda feeds a positive narrative about the country's image abroad, and restrictions on free information flow prevent people from learning negative information about it. But there have been no systematic studies about this phenomenon, or whether correcting people’s misperceptions about their countries' images affects their political attitudes. In this study I show with survey experimental evidence that the Chinese public overwhelmingly overestimate the extent to which China has a positive global image. Further, younger people overestimate China’s global popularity more, while those with overseas travel experience and foreign media consumption overestimate it less. More importantly, correcting misinformation about China’s global image reduces people's positive evaluation of China and its governing system, and dampens their expectations about China's external success in the world. These findings suggest that being immersed in China’s one-sided information bubble about the country’s power and popularity has made the public overly sanguine and even complacent about the country’s global standing. At the same time, the Chinese public is responsive to new information rather than resisting it through motivated reasoning. The study thus has rich implications for our understanding of how perceptions about the outside world shapes people’s domestic attitudes, and how propaganda may backfire by excessively raising expectations to levels that cannot be met.

Author

• Haifeng Huang, University of California, Merced