Unpacking “the West”: Divergence and Asymmetry in Chinese Public Attitudes Towards Europe and the United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".