Chapter 11
The Europeans’Perception of China
Liu Zuokui
Abstract The Europeans’perception of China has been investigated mainly from
four perspectives, including the impression of China, China’s responsibility, China’s
threat and the future development of China. The surveys show that the European
public’s views towards China are contradictory, and are pessimistic and passive in
their attitudes concerning the impression of China, China’s responsibility and threat,
and China-EU cooperation in the future. In the past 10 years, this negative mood of
the European public towards China is increasing while the positive one is
decreasing. However, regarding China’s future development, the European public
generally“has confidence”in China. The European people’s perception of China is
influenced by a number of complex factors including globalization and the European
sovereign debt crisis, the poor image of the Chinese people abroad and the survey
agencies’methodology. In addition, the opinion survey agencies in the USA have
played a very important role in shaping the Europeans’views towards China.
Keywords The European publicPerception of ChinaPessimistic and passive
Opinion survey
11.1 Notes on Studies of European Perceptions of China
The years 2003–2013 were the years during which great changes took place in
China. European views and expectations about the changing China are undoubtedly
the issues which highly deserve attention in studies of China-EU relations. The
Author examined and analyzed these issues and prepared this survey report.
First, the Europeans defined in this survey report are mainly European common
people principally in EU countries. Currently, studies of Europeans’perceptions of
China have been available in the international academic circles, but surveys on EU
people’s perceptions of China at the EU level have not yet been conducted.
Therefore, this survey report will choose representative perceptions of China which
L. Zuokui (&)
Department of Central and Eastern European Studies, Institute of European Studies,
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China
©Social Sciences Academic Press and Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2017
H. Zhou (ed.),China-EU Relations, Research Series on the Chinese Dream
and China’s Development Path, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-1145-0_11
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