China is an important security concern for the United States and its allies, including the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing group that is sometimes described as the core of the ‘Anglosphere’ security community. While we would expect securitising discourses at the elite level to reproduce some common perceptions of China, to what extent are attitudes to China shared across the publics in these countries?
In this article, we unpack public attitudes towards China in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Drawing on the results of public opinion surveys we conducted in 2022, we note areas of similarity and divergence then drill down into the drivers of public attitudes. We show that even though aggregate attitudes towards China in the five countries appear to align with official security discourses, this hides significant variation in how different groups within these societies view China. In particular, ethnic minorities and recent immigrants, along with members of higher socio-economic classes, urban residents, and young people, tend to be more positive towards China. Our findings bring new insights into the potency of government-driven securitisation, particularly in terms of identifying groups within societies that are less inclined to follow their government’s view of China.
The paper was originally published by Taylor & Francis.
