Suchergebnisse

A military conflict over the Taiwan Strait seems increasingly likely today against the backdrop of intensifying geopolitical competition between China and the United States. While much has been discussed and debated about the prospects for and consequences of war, we know little about how ordinary Chinese evaluate the full set of policy tools that Beijing could potentially leverage against Taipei in the near term. Drawing from a unique public opinion survey in China, we find that armed unification, or 'wutong', garners only a slim majority (55%) of support, no more than for a range of less aggressive policy options, from using small-scale warfare, to coercing Taipei into negotiating, to simply maintaining the status quo. Only one out of one hundred rejected all but the most extreme option of 'wutong'. Analyses of respondent attributes further reveal that aggressive policy preferences are primarily driven by nationalism and peer pressure, but dampened by concerns about the economic, human, and reputational costs of non-peaceful unification and the likelihood of US intervention.(J Contemp China / GIGA)

What drives consumer activism during trade disputes? We investigate this important and timely question using a survey experiment in the context of the recent Canada–US trade dispute. We find that Canadians are more likely to express willingness to take punitive actions in the form of boycotting during a trade conflict when they learn that Americans are taking such actions (retaliation), when many fellow citizens are taking such actions (peer pressure), and when they are rallied by their government (elite cue). Among the three conditions, peer pressure has the largest effect. These findings contribute to our understanding of the microfoundations of consumer activism during international trade disputes. They also have important policy implications in a world where both protectionism and populism are rising.

What drives consumer activism during trade disputes? We investigate this important and timely question using a survey experiment in the context of the recent Canada–US trade dispute. We find that Canadians are more likely to express willingness to take punitive actions in the form of boycotting during a trade conflict when they learn that Americans are taking such actions (retaliation), when many fellow citizens are taking such actions (peer pressure), and when they are rallied by their government (elite cue). Among the three conditions, peer pressure has the largest effect. These findings contribute to our understanding of the microfoundations of consumer activism during international trade disputes. They also have important policy implications in a world where both protectionism and populism are rising.

Recent public opinion polls conducted in Europe and the United States show increasingly negative views of China. Does the Chinese public hold similar views of "the West"? Conducting a two-wave survey in China, we found great divergence and asymmetries in Chinese public perceptions. First, Chinese views of European countries and the US diverge sharply, despite these countries being typically grouped together as "the West" in mainstream English and Chinese discourses; the Chinese viewed the US much more negatively than Europe. Second, whereas the Chinese reciprocated American antipathy, there was an asymmetry in public perceptions between China and Europe, with the Chinese expressing much greater favourability towards European countries than the other way around, though the degree of favourability still varied by country. Analyses of respondent attributes also yielded insights that both confirm and challenge some of the conventional wisdom regarding age, education, and party membership in Chinese public opinion. (JCCA/GIGA)

How can democratic governments convince their citizens to support a costly military alliance? We theorize about two rhetorical tools that foreign policy leaders have historically used to achieve this goal: instrumental cues emphasizing national interests and ideational cues highlighting shared values. We then assess the effects of these appeals in various forms and contexts by analyzing two original survey experiments fielded in the United States. Our analysis shows that alliance rhetoric – whether positive or negative – can sway public support for alliances. Positive appeals to both interests and values raise citizen approval for maintaining a costly alliance in times of peace and during an active crisis, though their effects are slightly muted in a crisis. We also find that negative rhetoric erodes public support for alliances, but only under limited conditions: negative rhetoric affects public support for peace-time alliance policies but not for defending an ally during a crisis, and its effect disappears in the presence of positive rhetoric. The findings contribute to literatures on the domestic politics of international institutions and the role of political communication in foreign policy.

China's rapidly growing local government debt problem has long been recognized by foreign observers as a risk, but inside China, only recently was this problem called out as alarming. Why has local government debt been allowed to grow with little direct intervention from central authorities? We argue that it has much to do with a "grand bargain" between the central government and localities during the 1994 fiscal recentralization reform. While much scholarly attention has been paid to the consequences of the 1994 reform that left localities with a tremendous fiscal gap, our findings show that Beijing in fact gave localities the green light to create new backdoor financing institutions that counteracted the impact of fiscal recentralization. In essence, these institutions were the quid pro quo offered to localities to sustain their incentive for local state-led growth after 1994. The bargain worked, and growth continued. The drawback, however, was that China's economic growth has been accompanied by the accumulation of local government debt with little transparency and central control. When the global financial crisis slowed growth, and local deficits and debts spiked, Beijing began to shut down backdoor financing and opened front-door options that were transparent and under the control of national authorities—but with limited success. In the wake of COVID-19, the question is whether the pendulum will swing back toward more tolerance of local debt for the sake of economic growth. (China J/GIGA)