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Younger Americans are friendlier to China (www.economist.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 10 months ago (2 children)

This kinda looks like a bad poll. The wording seems to setup a bad choice of extremes. The respondent has to either choose "friendly" or "an enemy". But the relationship between the US and China is a much more complex thing. The US and China are certainly in competition in a number of areas, economically and geopolitically. The induction of China to the WTO in 2001 impacted the US's manufacturing sector negatively (see: https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-9/forty-years-of-falling-manufacturing-employment.htm). The US and China are at odds over the fate of Taiwan. But, in spite of all that, the US and China have deep trade links which benefit both countries greatly. And both countries are likely better off than they would be without the other. Global trade is generally positive for the economies involved, though global trade can also fuck individuals inside each economy, including driving wealth concentration and harming the economically disadvantaged and people whose skills don't align well with the industries their country is focused on.

Trying to boil US-China relations down to either Friendly or "Enemy" misses a lot of the nuance and may mean people aren't giving an accurate picture of how they view China.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Those options seem fine for a poll imo. If you ask the same question to older demographics and more people pick "enemy", then isn't the conclusion in the headline valid?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

A lot of nuance will be missed without some gradation between "I <3 China" and "Down with Pooh!" For example, if we added "Slightly favorable", "Neutral", and "Slightly unfavorable" we would begin to see just how favorable younger generations are. Rather than presume there is a deep divide on trade policy, if two bars are almost equal, we may see they are largely neutral. Similarly we could see just how favorable their views of TikTok really are by looking at the spread between neutral to "I <3 China!"

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I know what you're saying, but it's still a shitty poll. I think people in the past were way looser with the word enemy. Everyone was an enemy, the Russians, communism, drugs, immigrants poverty... everything was a fucking enemy that needed a war.

So, even though just as many people might distrust China the language has changed and we wouldn't call them "enemy".

The Chinese government is authoritarian, evil and awful but I still wouldn't call China an "enemy". Because life isn't black and white, and once you call somone an enemy you've shut off your brain and nothing good will come out of it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

The issue is that your reducing a multivariable spectra to a single binary. That kind of data compression destroys a massive amount of valuable data, and alot of nuance along with it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

I'm neither a friend nor an enemy to most people in the world.

But when it comes to orgs, I'm an enemy of most od them, and definitely an enemy of every State.