Against Everything Involving China? Two Types of Sinophobia in Taiwan

Abstract

This paper develops a two-dimensional concept of Sinophobia (恐中) to study Taiwanese attitudes toward mainland China as well as their sources and political consequences. Taiwanese skepticism toward China has grown in recent years, concomitant with increasing cross-Strait interactions and exchanges. This has been widely characterized as a “Sinophobia syndrome.” To investigate this phenomenon, we divide Sinophobia into two types—“group-difference-driven” and “risk-driven”—and investigate whether the two types exert different effects on individual preferences regarding policies involving China. Multivariate analyses show that a model that distinguishes between the two types of Sinophobia fits the data very well and that the risk-driven attitude influences decisions on issues related to China more strongly than does the group-difference-driven attitude. This finding suggests that although perceptions of group difference may prompt fears of China, it is not a powerful determinant of policy preferences. Additional analyses reveal that the risk-driven attitude also influences other policy-relevant attitudes and behavior, including voting in the 2012 presidential election.

Ambivalence and perceptions of China: Two list experiments

“…While there were indeed periods of relative calm, a large proportion of Taiwanese continue to hold unfriendly or mixed feelings toward China and on most cross-Strait issues (Gries and Su, 2013; Tzeng et al, 2017; Wang and Cheng, 2017). These unfavorable views stem to a large extent from the negative impressions created by China’s incessant saber-rattling and verbal threats against Taiwan and the authoritarian government in Beijing, and in part from public worries about China’s harmful influence on Taiwan’s full-fledged democracy given its enormous economic and military might (Lee et al, 2018).…”