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Images of the United States and China in Southeast Asia: A Test of the Threat and Opportunity Hypotheses

Christian Collet (International Christian University, Tokyo)

Keywords: Comparative research

Abstract

The election of Barack Obama in 2008 brought a much debated shift in American foreign policy emphasis toward Southeast Asia. Concurrently, China's "charm offensive" to the region, which began years earlier, turned cool as territorial issues flared. The "soft power" competition between the two offers a unique opportunity to test hypotheses regarding the stability and determinants of public-level images of major powers and their leaders in the post Cold War era. Using data from the Pew Global Attitudes Survey conducted in five countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam), this paper examines a set of questions derived from the social psychologically inspired literature in international relations on image theory and anti-Americanism (e.g., Herrmann, Tetlock and Visser 1999, Herrmann 2003, Chiozza 2010). How much of American and Chinese images are explained by threat perception? Do publics view the major powers, as some literature suggests, as zero-sum? To what extent are the images of leaders and countries detached from one another? Does the perception of greater economic opportunity mitigate the perception of threat? And how much is globalization -- defined as human, economic and information exchanges across borders - interacting with perceptions of fear and opportunity?

Preliminary analysis suggests that threat perceptions among Southeast Asians override the sense of economic opportunity when it comes to major country images. With the exception of Vietnam, publics do not see the US and China in zero-sum terms. A second preliminary finding reveals the strong attachment of country and leadership image -- publics do not appear to be capable of evaluating highly salient leaders, like Obama and Xi -- independently of the country's they represent. This fusion suggests that the potential effects of soft power strategies weigh heavily on the actions and communications of heads of state, as opposed to the functional effect of the policies themselves.