COVID-19 and American Attitudes toward U.S.-China Disputes

Abstract

The COVID-19 outbreak has fueled tension between the U.S. and China. Existing literature in international relations rarely focuses on virus outbreaks as factors affecting international relations between superpower countries, nor does research examine an outbreak's potential influence on the public's opinion about their country's foreign policy. To bridge this research gap, this study explores the extent to which the American public may be prone to favor policies that "punish" China via existing U.S.-China disputes, such as the South China Sea dispute and the U.S.-China trade war. I conducted an online survey using Amazon's Mechanical Turk and ran multinomial and ordered logit models to estimate the association between an individual's preferred policies and the country or government an individual blame for the impact of the pandemic. After controlling several essential confounding factors, such as one's levels of nationalism and hawkishness, I found strong evidence that there is a positive association between people's attribution of blame to the Chinese government and the likelihood of supporting aggressive policy options in the two disputes with China. That is to say, U.S. citizens who believe that the Chinese government is solely culpable for the outbreak in the U.S., compared to those who think otherwise, are more likely to support hawkish policy options, such as confrontational military actions, economic sanctions, or higher tariff rates. The research provides a glimpse into where Americans may stand in these disputes with China and the potential development of U.S.-China relations in the post-pandemic era.

Magnitude and Determinants of Mortalities Related to COVID-19: Evidence from 94 Countries Using Regression Techniques

“…There has been a sudden spurt of academic studies cutting across various domains of knowledge on the factors contributing to the increase of COVID-19 pandemic cases, transmissions and deaths. These studies mainly focus on the following: spatial effects of COVID-19 (Guliyev 2020); effects on temperature and humidity variations in the number of COVID-19 deaths (Ma et al 2020;Wu et al 2020;Qi et al 2020); environmental impacts on COVID-19 transmission (Xu et al 2020); air pollution and COVID-19 infection (Yongjian et al 2020;Bontempi 2020); maternal deaths due to COVID-19 (Hantoushzadeh et al 2020); association between the COVID-19 cases and deaths (Sarkodie and Owusu 2020); COVID-19 and stock market volatility (Sreenu and Pradhan 2022); COVID-19 and microfinance institutions (Sangwan et al 2021); social distancing and COVID-19 death (Conyon et al 2020); labour mobility and fatality due to COVID-19 (Wright et al 2020); nationalism and COVID-19 (Wang 2021;Gülseven 2021;Zhao 2021;Pan and Korolev 2021;Lin 2021;Givens and Mistur 2021;Yang and Chen 2021;Zhao 2021;Boylan et al 2021;Albertoni and Wise 2021;He and Chen 2021); global politics and COVID-19 (Salvati 2021;Makarychev and Romashko 2021;Chen 2021; Wang and Sun 2021;Lin 2021;Huang 2021;Chang 2021;Jaworsky and Qiaoan 2021;Caballero-Anthony and Gong 2021); mitigating measures against COVID-19 (Zhang et al 2021;Ullah et al 2021).…”

Can Debunked Conspiracy Theories Change Radicalized Views? Evidence from Racial Prejudice and Anti-China Sentiment Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified China’s relations with the major western countries [ 51 , 81 ], amplified nationalist ideologies and strategies at home and abroad [ 38 , 122 ], and accelerated the transformation of the global economic order [ 3 , 12 , 110 ]. Republican hawkishness toward China during the Trump era has triggered deep anxieties and fear of a potentially complete collapse in the US–China relations (for Hawkish tendencies in public opinon on the COVID-19, see [ 68 ],also see [ 119 ], for a survey of Chinese opinons on COVID-19). In the post-COVID era, Biden’s fixation on reversing polarization at home may resort to consolidating the image of a shared enemy abroad, particularly when Democrats and Republicans agree on virtually nothing but the “China threat”.…”

“…The median age of the sample was 34, and the median level of education was a 4-year college degree. Previous studies have substantiated the usefulness of MTurk in navigating public opinon about China in the US during Covid-19 [ 68 ].…”

Towards a Long-Term Sino-US Relationship: Implications and Potential Solutions of the Future Chinese Media Strategy for Global Speech Power

“…Human rights and quarantine were the most often used keywords in searches on the themes of Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong. The US side exploits the ideological rivalry between subjects on all sides and China in the US-China public opinion playing field to make Western values such as democracy and freedom (Crean, 2019;Lin, 2021;Suglo, 2021).…”