Thursday, November 13, 2025 — Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis (CCA) has published “Views of China across the Global South: the Rule and the Exceptions” by Andrew Chubb, Senior Foreign Policy and National Security Fellow. The paper is the latest output from CCA’s Global Public Opinion on China (GPOC) project, explaining how and why there are significant variations in views of China across the Global South.
“The advent of ‘Global China’ in the 21st century has likewise brought competing and often sharply contradictory local narratives in various parts of the Global South. On one handChinese trade and investment has stimulated development and economic opportunities, while the quality and sophistication of Chinese products has steadily increased,” writes Chubb. “On the other hand, concerns over Chinese lending practices, extractive resource projects, environmental disasters, industrial overcapacity, and many PRC companies’ preferences for Chinese labor have increased.
” Chubb’s latest brief distills the following conclusions from GPOC’s database of over 1300 surveys of citizens across the Global South:
1. Since 2000, positive views of China have outweighed negative by a factor of about 2 to 1.
2. However, the ratio of positive to negative views has been narrowing over time. Whereas before 2020, the overall ratio of positive to negative responses to surveys in the Global South was around 2.3 to 1, the first five years of the 2020s have seen this figure drop to 1.7 to 1.
3. The COVID-19 pandemic had major negative effects on China’s image in key parts of the developing world, particularly Latin America and South Asia, but may actually have improved China’s image in other regions, particularly Southeast Asia.
4. Across the Islamic world, with the important exceptions of Iran and Turkey, China’s image has generally been improving, despite repressive policies of internment and re-education against predominantly Muslim populations in Xinjiang.
“The Muslim world provides many of the most interesting and open-ended examples,” concludes Chubb. “Evidently, the 2023 Iran-Saudi deal brokered in Beijing has also evidently failed to win over Iranian citizens, but Beijing’s role in mediating the conflicts between Palestinian factions appear to have won plaudits among a generally skeptical Palestinian population.
” Read the paper here. Members of the media interested in interviewing Chubb or learning more about the GPOC project should email pr@asiasociety.org. |
