Looking with Five Eyes: Attitudes to China across the “Anglosphere”

For much of its history, the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing agreement that links Australia with Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and United States was largely unknown outside of specialist policy circles, with the five respective governments seemingly happy to keep it this way. In 2023, however, intelligence chiefs of the five countries made an unprecedented collective public announcement warning of the dangers posed by Chinese hacking and theft of intellectual property. In June this year, they again spoke out together, again on China, warning about attempts by the People’s Liberation Army to recruit Western military trainers.

We can think of the Five Eyes agreement as an institutional manifestation of the more abstract concept of the “Anglosphere”—a somewhat amorphous term centred around the idea that English-speaking nations share enough of a common history, culture, and values to make international cooperation between them seem easy and natural, despite vast differences in their geographic, economic, and strategic positions in the world. Scholars of the Anglosphere have pointed out the close security relationship between these five “core” states while also noting their shared history of settler colonialism and racial violence. Strangely, however, they haven’t yet focused their attention on relations between the Anglosphere as a group and China, despite the obvious recent tensions.

Clearly the Five Eyes governments talk to each other about China and seem to be developing a collective position on certain security and diplomatic issues, but what about the public in these countries? Is there a common “Anglosphere viewpoint” on China? In what ways do public perceptions of China in the five countries converge and where are they different from one another?

Over recent years, aggregate attitudes to China have tracked similarly across the Anglosphere, with the last few years of the 2010s being a time when views towards China became much more negative in all five countries. We wanted to look beyond general views, however, so in 2022 we conducted representative public opinion surveys across all five countries, asking respondents about not only their overall view of China but also to assess more specific aspects of China’s image—its military strength, economic importance to their own country, cultural attractiveness, and foreign policy. We also asked how they felt about certain issue areas where there has been tension or controversy in relations between China and the Anglosphere countries—trade relations, investment from China, China’s military power, Chinese technology, its influence on democracy, and the promotion of Chinese language and culture.

In all these areas, with just a few exceptions, we found the average responses for the five countries to be very close to one another. We measured responses to the four image questions using a Likert scale of 1-7, where 1 was very weak/unimportant/unattractive/negative and 7 was very strong/important/attractive/positive. For images of China the biggest discrepancy between country responses was just 0.75, which was the gap between Canada’s (lower) and NZ’s (higher) perceptions of China’s economic importance. In responses to the issue questions, which were measured on a thermometer scale of 0-100, where 0 was the most negative and 100 the most positive, we again saw very similar results, with some exceptions in the case of NZ. On three issues—trade, technology, and the promotion of language and culture—the responses of the four countries excluding NZ were all within a three-point range of each other, while the NZ response was around 10 points higher than the next most positive country.

Other than New Zealanders being somewhat more positive, the other comparison that stands out is that the US public is not always the most negative towards China. Americans are the least worried about China’s military power or its influence on democracy and, compared to their counterparts in Australia, Canada, and the UK, are less concerned about Chinese investment, have a less negative view of China’s foreign policy, and view Chinese culture as more attractive. This is somewhat surprising considering how critical of China the US government has consistently been over recent years.

But in addition to comparing the aggregate views for each country we also wanted to look at the differences within each country and whether these internal differences manifested in similar ways across the group. Here we found some significant demographic differences in attitudes to China within all five countries. In particular, more educated individuals who live in more developed regions self-identify with higher socio-economic classes and are generally satisfied with their economic well-being. These country’s political situations tend to encourage more positive views of China than those living on the peripheries—less educated, unsatisfied, and expecting their life to get worse. At the same time, non-White ethnic minorities and more recent immigrants tended to be less negative towards China than members of the majority White populations and those who are third generation (or more) citizens, suggesting that there is an ethnic as well as socio-economic aspect to the variation in attitudes throughout the Anglosphere. These internal differences were most pronounced in the United States, where factors such as age and political party affiliation are also associated with some sharp divisions in attitudes.
We also used regression analysis to look deeper at some of these drivers of overall attitudes. Again we found a broadly similar pattern in what makes people more or less likely to have a positive view of China, but a few differences stood out. Here we noted that out of the six issue areas we asked respondents about, it was the issue of China’s influence on democracy that was the strongest predictor of overall attitudes to China in all countries except the US, where the technology issue was more significant. The UK also stood out as the only country where general views of China were more influenced by attitudes to Chinese culture than by attitudes to China’s foreign policy, perhaps indicating that the British public currently thinks about China primarily in cultural rather than strategic terms.

Our survey is just a snapshot of opinion at a particular point in time, but it does highlight some important issues. When we look at areas where Anglosphere governments have been talking about security risks from China, such as in debates over Chinese technology or Chinese Communist Party interference in democratic processes, we do see their concerns reflected in public attitudes. Scholars of the Anglosphere have previously discussed how collective participation in wars has helped forge a sense of shared identity among the group—could a common narrative of defending liberal democracy against an authoritarian threat from China now be playing a similar role in bringing the group closer together?

However, at the same time there is the possibility of views towards China further fragmenting internally along demographic lines. Anglosphere scholars have previously pointed out the racial elements at the heart of the narratives of shared history and identity that bind together this group of countries. If there are strong racial undertones to the way that tensions between China and the Five Eyes is framed in public discourse—and clearly there are voices in China that are attempting just such a framing—then it seems possible that we will see these internal differences of opinion becoming sharper. Future surveys of public attitudes to China will need to pay attention not just to aggregate views but also to how those views are distributed across society.

This analysis is based on findings from the authors’ recent article in the Australian Journal of International Affairs.

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