Propaganda works.
What’s funny is I can’t tell if you’re talking about younger Americans refusing to hate China or older Americans chanting “China Bad!”
300,000 people are on the organ donor wait-list in China at this very moment.
You’re a perfect example of the power of propaganda lol
Both tbh
American failures are being used to prop up Chinese successes. This is particularly true in urbanism discussions. China is by no means perfect and thinking that they are is harmful to progress.
No CPC ever sold off my future to fund forever wars
Younger people increasingly get their news from social media, and they’re exposed to a more diverse set of news. Meanwhile, older people tend to primarily get their news from traditional media.
There’s a similar trend with support of Israel and Palestine https://www.axios.com/2023/10/26/generational-divide-on-the-israel-hamas-war
This shows just how propagandized traditional media is in the west.
Also good to remember that digital media can be just as propogandized if you interact with it at a base level. Shopping around for a wide breadth of sources and opinions should be viewed as standard requirement for forming a more accurate sense of world events.
Social media dominantly uses algorithms that fine-tune user feeds according to what they think will lead to highest engagement and end up becoming personalized echo chambers. They provide the exact opposite of “a more diverse set of news”.
Even with the algorithms tuning people’s feeds the diversity of information and views online is very clearly far higher than it is in traditional media where editors decide what content is published, and how it’s framed. You’re also using a platform that doesn’t use any algorithms to mess with the feed to write all this.
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.
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?
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!”
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.
