China Watches Back: Chinese Public Opinion on the United States and Asia

Join us for a discussion on new research exploring Chinese public opinion on the U.S., Taiwan, and relations across Asia. Description For a decade, U.S.-China rivalry has reshaped the global economy and increased militarism across the Pacific. While American popular opinion has shifted against this trend in favor of cooperation between the world’s largest powers, very little is known about how the Chinese public views the United States and its allies in the Asia-Pacific. New research from The Carter Center and Emory University shows that the Chinese citizenry sees the United States as a major national security threat. Yet, majorities also support cooperation on issues like trade, technological innovation, and global security. Further rivalry, therefore, seems to go against popular will in both countries. This spirit of cooperation does not necessarily extend to U.S. allies in the Asia-Pacific, however, where Chinese people show roughly equal willingness to resort to diplomacy and military escalation. Join Emory University's Renard Sexton and The Carter Center's Yawei Liu and Nick Zeller for the release of a new edition of China Pulse, a project tracking Chinese public opinion on the United States, Taiwan, and China's neighbors across Asia. About the Speakers Renard Sexton is a political scientist who studies conflict and development, particularly in Asia and Latin America. His research combines quantitative methods, fieldwork, and experiments, and has been published in top academic journals, policy forums and public outlets. From 2022 to 2023 he served as a senior advisor in the China/Taiwan unit at US Indo-Pacific Command through a Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) fellowship. He is currently Associate Professor of Political Science at Emory University, and the director of the Security and Conflict Lab. Yawei Liu is the Senior Advisor on China at The Carter Center and an adjunct professor of political science at Emory University. An expert on U.S.-China relations and Chinese grassroots democracy, he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the associate director of the China Research Center in Atlanta. He is regularly invited to speak about Chinese public opinion, and his previous engagements include the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Brookings Institution, the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, and the Institute for China-America Studies. Nick Zeller is a senior program associate for The Carter Center's China Focus initiative, a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and research associate at the Second Cold War Observatory. His research examines Chinese public opinion on international relations in the midst of U.S.-China rivalry. Prior to joining the Carter Center, he held visiting positions in Asian history at the University of South Carolina and Kennesaw State University. He received his Ph.D. in modern Chinese history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.