A Self-Perception Gap?
On today’s WaPo op-ed page, John Kamm looks at a Pew Research Center polling data and finds a perception gap betwen how the Chinese think the world views China, and how the world actually does. Summarizing the data, Kamm concludes:
Essentially, the people of China think twice as many people in the world like their country as actually do. This isn’t a gap; it’s a chasm. And the information bubble around the Chinese people explains a lot.A common framework used when making net assessments is to consider adversary perceptions of themselves (so called “red-red” perceptions). Applying this approach to China*, this data indicates that it may have a serious self-perception gap, which has real consequences for its behavior in the international system.
The rest of the framework involves blue-blue perceptions (What is the equivalent gap in American perceptions of its own standing in world opinion?), blue-red and red-blue perceptions. It would be a good exercise to use the open source polling data and this framework to assess the accuracy of American-Chinese perceptions.
*I am apply the framework here, not asserting that China is necessarily an adversary.
