Policymakers in the “Five Eyes” countries seem to have concluded that China represents a significant security threat. But do their publics agree?

For much of its history, the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing agreement that links Australia with Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and United States was largely unknown outside of specialist policy circles, with the five respective governments seemingly happy to keep it this way. In 2023, however, intelligence chiefs of the five countries made an unprecedented collective public announcement warning of the dangers posed by Chinese hacking and theft of intellectual property. In June this year, they again spoke out together, again on China, warning about attempts by the People’s Liberation Army to recruit Western military trainers.

We can think of the Five Eyes agreement as an institutional manifestation of the more abstract concept of the “Anglosphere”—a somewhat amorphous term centred around the idea that English-speaking nations share enough of a common history, culture, and values to make international cooperation between them seem easy and natural, despite vast differences in their geographic, economic, and strategic positions in the world. Scholars of the Anglosphere have pointed out the close security relationship between these five “core” states while also noting their shared history of settler colonialism and racial violence. Strangely, however, they haven’t yet focused their attention on relations between the Anglosphere as a group and China, despite the obvious recent tensions.

Clearly the Five Eyes governments talk to each other about China and seem to be developing a collective position on certain security and diplomatic issues, but what about the public in these countries? Is there a common “Anglosphere viewpoint” on China? In what ways do public perceptions of China in the five countries converge and where are they different from one another?

Over recent years, aggregate attitudes to China have tracked similarly across the Anglosphere, with the last few years of the 2010s being a time when views towards China became much more negative in all five countries. We wanted to look beyond general views, however, so in 2022 we conducted representative public opinion surveys across all five countries, asking respondents about not only their overall view of China but also to assess more specific aspects of China’s image—its military strength, economic importance to their own country, cultural attractiveness, and foreign policy. We also asked how they felt about certain issue areas where there has been tension or controversy in relations between China and the Anglosphere countries—trade relations, investment from China, China’s military power, Chinese technology, its influence on democracy, and the promotion of Chinese language and culture.

In all these areas, with just a few exceptions, we found the average responses for the five countries to be very close to one another. We measured responses to the four image questions using a Likert scale of 1-7, where 1 was very weak/unimportant/unattractive/negative and 7 was very strong/important/attractive/positive. For images of China the biggest discrepancy between country responses was just 0.75, which was the gap between Canada’s (lower) and NZ’s (higher) perceptions of China’s economic importance. In responses to the issue questions, which were measured on a thermometer scale of 0-100, where 0 was the most negative and 100 the most positive, we again saw very similar results, with some exceptions in the case of NZ. On three issues—trade, technology, and the promotion of language and culture—the responses of the four countries excluding NZ were all within a three-point range of each other, while the NZ response was around 10 points higher than the next most positive country.

Figure 1: Attitudes to aspects of China’s image (mean values). Source: own data (Sinophone Borderlands)

Figure 2: Attitudes to issues involving international disputes with China (mean values). Source: own data (Sinophone Borderlands)

Other than New Zealanders being somewhat more positive, the other comparison that stands out is that the US public is not always the most negative towards China. Americans are the least worried about China’s military power or its influence on democracy and, compared to their counterparts in Australia, Canada, and the UK, are less concerned about Chinese investment, have a less negative view of China’s foreign policy, and view Chinese culture as more attractive. This is somewhat surprising considering how critical of China the US government has consistently been over recent years.

We also used regression analysis to look deeper at some of these drivers of overall attitudes. Again we found a broadly similar pattern in what makes people more or less likely to have a positive view of China, but a few differences stood out. Here we noted that out of the six issue areas we asked respondents about, it was the issue of China’s influence on democracy that was the strongest predictor of overall attitudes to China in all countries except the US, where the technology issue was more significant. The UK also stood out as the only country where general views of China were more influenced by attitudes to Chinese culture than by attitudes to China’s foreign policy, perhaps indicating that the British public currently thinks about China primarily in cultural rather than strategic terms.

Our survey is just a snapshot of opinion at a particular point in time, but it does highlight some important issues. When we look at areas where Anglosphere governments have been talking about security risks from China, such as in debates over Chinese technology or Chinese Communist Party interference in democratic processes, we do see their concerns reflected in public attitudes. Scholars of the Anglosphere have previously discussed how collective participation in wars has helped forge a sense of shared identity among the group—could a common narrative of defending liberal democracy against an authoritarian threat from China now be playing a similar role in bringing the group closer together?

However, at the same time there is the possibility of views towards China further fragmenting internally along demographic lines. Anglosphere scholars have previously pointed out the racial elements at the heart of the narratives of shared history and identity that bind together this group of countries. If there are strong racial undertones to the way that tensions between China and the Five Eyes is framed in public discourse—and clearly there are voices in China that are attempting just such a framing—then it seems possible that we will see these internal differences of opinion becoming sharper. Future surveys of public attitudes to China will need to pay attention not just to aggregate views but also to how those views are distributed across society.

This analysis is based on findings from the authors’ recent article in the Australian Journal of International Affairs. It can be found here. 

Kingsley Edney is Lecturer in Politics and International Relations of China at the University of Leeds. His research focuses on China’s efforts to shape its international image. He is the author of The Globalization of Chinese Propaganda: International Power and Domestic Political Cohesion, co-editor of Soft Power with Chinese Characteristics: China’s Campaign for Hearts and Minds, and has published articles on China’s international relations in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Contemporary China, and Pacific Review, among others.

Richard Turcsányi is an Assistant Professor at Palacký University Olomouc and Program Director at Central European Institute of Asian Studies. He is an author of Chinese Assertiveness in the South China Sea, co-editor of Contemporary China: A New Superpower? and has published numerous articles on Chinese foreign policy and relations between China and (Central and Eastern) Europe. In recent years he led a large-scale public opinion survey in 56 countries worldwide regarding their attitudes towards China and international affairs (sinofon.cz/surveys).

This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.