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Notes -
This is an online poll.
The alternative was Trump, so it became a fargroup vs. outgroup question.
I really don’t see the left having much admiration for China, they’re too involved in religious repression of Muslim minorities and too ethnically-chauvinist for the social-and-not-economic left to find them appealing. There’s also the one-child policy legacy, widely understood as a policy that led to mass-murder of female infants and thus is seen as horrifically misogynist (it’s literally an example of the government controlling women’s reproductive rights!). I’m sure there’s some tankies somewhere who admire Mr. Xi, but they’re not mainstream.
If anything, “China is not trustworthy and can’t be allowed to grow in power” is the one foreign policy matter where there’s broad agreement across the political spectrum in the US. See strong support for the Hong Kong protesters, spy balloon fiasco, scandals about Chinese students being spies, fear of a war over Taiwan, the CHIPs Act (that failed). There’s bipartisan support for a firm position against China and the progressive left has no interest in allying with them. I suspect if tensions over Taiwan ever went hot, left-wingers would be more likely than right-wingers to support war; it would be another Ukraine.
I know some grassroots right-wingers who’ve bought into the propaganda that Russia is some great haven for social conservatism, but I don’t know any left-wingers who believe China is anything but a repressive authoritarian regime. Unlike the Soviet Union, they don’t have the cover of limited information — when an elderly official was dragged out of a party meeting it was all over Twitter — and people on the ground who speak English like the people of Hong Kong and Taiwan can speak to how China’s actions threaten their freedom.
Plus, their regional dominance threatens Japan, and everyone in America seems to agree the Japanese are cool.
Conspicuous China hatred is a racially tinged deep red thing to me; it might have religious overtones(persecution of Chinese Christians) and almost certainly has fifties level anti communist paranoia.
Maybe conspicuous Chinese hatred is like that, but my point is that low-level suspicion and dislike is so ubiquitous that it's not conspicuous. Particularly when it's focused on the CCP and not Chinese people, as it almost always is.
I'm not really talking about "The Chinese eat dogs!!!" stuff, which I agree has a racial component. Though I do believe there's growing suspicion more broadly about Chinese attitudes towards animals after the China-sympathetic view of COVID's origins was that people in Wuhan were eating bats, and especially after reports that the Chinese government was mass-killing family pets of infected people.
(If you want to find the few tankies who like the Chinese government, find the people who would get mad at me using the acronym "CCP" and loudly insist it's actually the "CPC". It's the lowest tier of language policing, which is why you'll only find it among internet communists.)
The question is not whether the left has suspicion and dislike of the Chinese, it's whether that level of suspicion and dislike is lower than the levels of suspicion and dislike of the right in their own country.
And to answer that question, we’re going to need something much better than a Twitter poll.
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