From The Guardian
China’s reputation has deteriorated rapidly over the last four years, particularly in the west, and a large share of global opinion would back some form of international help for Taiwan if Beijing tries to take the island by force, according to a survey.
It comes as Xi Jinping warned of “dangerous storms” on the horizon as he was confirmed on Sunday as Chinese leader for a precedent-breaking third term, and as Washington warns that Beijing is accelerating plans to annex the island.
The YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project also found that while sentiment towards China was significantly more favourable in other parts of the world than it was in the west, respondents in 20 of the 25 countries surveyed prefer the US as reigning superpower.
The survey revealed a dramatic decline in China’s global standing since it was first run in 2019, with the percentage of respondents saying they felt China played a positive role in the world falling by as much as half in some countries.
Pro-China sentiment has collapsed over the past four years from 46% to 24% in Poland, 36% to 17% in France, 30% to 13% in Germany, 32% to 11% in Denmark, 41% to 24% in Italy, 35% to 11% in the UK and 44% to 23% in India. It has fallen from 27% to 18% in the US.
While Covid-19 partly informs this negative sentiment, with majorities of more than 80% convinced that the pandemic started in China and considerable proportions (at least 40% in many countries) suspecting it originated or was created in a laboratory, human rights abuses also appear to be an increasing focus.
In countries including France (45%, up from 39%), Germany (53%, up from 46%), Denmark (53%, up from 45%), Spain (30%, up from 21%) and Greece (29%, up from 18%), more people this year than last selected China from a list of countries as one they believed had “put hundreds of thousands of its own citizens, or more, into mass prison camps, without fair and proper legal process”.
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