Finding #8. Beijing has cultivated 193 central-to-local or local-to-local ties with 174 cities across the SCA region, but over half (52 percent) were focused on just 16 priority cities.

At the central-to-local level, we were able to triangulate the specific locations for three sets of central relationships: Confucius Institutes, Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK) testing sites for Mandarin language proficiency, and content-sharing partnerships with SCA media. At the local-to-local level, we examined sister city relationships. Unfortunately, we do not have sufficiently precise information to include Confucius Classrooms or educational cooperation activities in this analysis. However, taking the four data points we have begins to provide a picture of the breadth and depth of the PRC’s socio-cultural ties at the subnational level.

Across all four sets of relationships, we identified 193 PRC touch-points with 174 cities across the 13 SCA countries. Sister city agreements account for the largest share of these connections (101) by far, followed by HSK testing sites (42) and Confucius Institutes (28). Content-sharing partnerships with PRC state-run media were relatively less frequent (22) but could have potentially wider geographic reach if they have national or provincial-level visibility. Rather than evenly dispersed, over half (52 percent) of these connection points were highly concentrated and focused on just 16 cities (see Table 12) in the region.

An important commonality among these top 16 cities is their geopolitical importance to Beijing as national capitals and/or economic importance as large metropolitan areas that represent attractive market opportunities to absorb Chinese goods, services, and capital. The highest intensity of Beijing’s soft power overtures is being directed towards Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan (15 connection points) and Kathmandu, Nepal (11 connection points).

In this chapter, we examined various tools Beijing uses to cultivate social (people-to-people) ties with SCA publics. We found that Beijing has synchronized the use of these tools in ways that feed prospective students into its higher education institutions and deliver vocational training to seed long-term markets for PRC goods, services, and capital through socializing SCA professionals to Chinese norms, technologies, and systems. Even as Beijing had a late start in establishing language and cultural centers, as well as positioning itself as a premier study abroad destination, it has quickly caught up to rival powers. The PRC’s economic and soft power tools reinforce each other, as a major driver of interest in Chinese language, education, and networks is to facilitate access to economic opportunities. However, Beijing’s footprint is highly concentrated, focused on capital cities and major metropolises, with over half of its emphasis on just 16 priority cities. In the next chapter, we turn from physical connections to virtual networks by examining the PRC’s potential to reach SCA elites on social media, with a particular focus on Twitter.

Finding #9. PRC engagement on Twitter depends on relatively few brokers who serve as access nodes to reach broader networks of SCA elites, except when it comes to higher direct interaction with Pakistan.

Most SCA elites appear to stick close to home in following handles from their own country. Figure 12 visualizes the relationships between handles from 12 SCA countries and the PRC. Each handle is represented by a circle colored by country. Circles with brighter hues indicate handles with connections between an SCA country and the PRC, while faded hues have only within-SCA or within-China connections. [65]

For most SCA countries, a relatively small number of brokers—handles that bridge two communities that would otherwise be unconnected (Chaudhary and Warner, 2016)—occupy critical positions in facilitating the flow of information and communication between SCA and PRC-affiliated Twitter handles (Borgatti et al., 2018; Freeman, 1978). But there is a notable exception to this trend: Pakistan. Compared with their SCA peers, Pakistani handles have higher overlap with PRC-affiliated handles in the same communities. The best way to illustrate this point is to compare two countries—Kazakhstan and Pakistan—which have historically attracted a large volume of the PRC’s economic (Chapter 2) and soft power (Chapter 3) overtures.

The majority of Kazakhstan and PRC-affiliated users exclusively follow those from their respective countries, increasing the importance of a small number of handles from each country that serve as connective tissue between groups that would otherwise be disconnected. Figure 13 looks beyond individual follower connections to map communities or clusters of interconnected actors within our sample of Kazakhstan and PRC-affiliated handles. [66] Kazakhstan user communities are represented by triangles and PRC user communities by circles. In section 4.2, we take a closer look at such brokers as the linchpins to the PRC’s ability to harness the network power of Twitter to propagate its preferred messages among SCA elites.

By contrast, PRC-affiliated handles are in the same follower community as Pakistani handles at far higher rates than with other countries in the region. Figure 14 visualizes the Pakistan (purple circles) and PRC (green circles) follower network. This apparent interconnection is consistent with the revealed priority PRC leaders have placed on cultivating economic and social ties with Pakistan, and the reciprocated enthusiasm of the Pakistani elite to these overtures, observed in other chapters. Of course, there could be other dynamics in play here. For example, Pakistani elites in our sample outnumbered their Kazakhstan peers four-to-one. If this is illustrative of broader patterns of Internet use within these two countries, Pakistan would make a more attractive market for the PRC to prioritize a social media strategy.

Finding #10. State-owned media are the PRC’s frontline representatives pushing out information to SCA elites on Twitter; diplomatic accounts are gatekeepers and amplifiers.

PRC engagement with SCA elites on Twitter is highly centralized. State-owned media—People’s Daily, China Daily, and Xinhua News, chief among them—serve as potent representatives to propagate Beijing’s messages abroad (Table 15). The PRC’s ambassadors and embassies, meanwhile, are powerful gatekeepers to determine what information to funnel back to other PRC actors about SCA countries. The PRC’s ambassadors to India and the Maldives, along with the PRC’s embassy in Pakistan, were among the highest scoring gatekeepers in controlling information and communication flows back to China (Table 16). [69]

In a censored communication environment, PRC state-run media and diplomatic accounts mutually reinforce one another, as diplomats view reposting and sharing approved PRC media content with their networks as low-hanging fruit to communicate “safely...without violating the [PRC’s censorship] rules” (Zhao, 2019). [70] Nevertheless, PRC diplomatic accounts have attracted their fair share of controversy. The former PRC Ambassador to the Maldives, Zhang Lizhong, engaged in a public “Twitter spat” with Maldivian politicians over the country’s indebtedness to China (Custer et al., 2019a). Schleib et al. (2021), meanwhile, found that the visibility of some PRC-affiliated content was being artificially inflated by a small number of false-front, super-spreader accounts.

Zhao Lijian—currently spokesperson for the PRC’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and formerly assigned to the PRC Embassy in Pakistan—stands out as uniquely prominent as both a top representative amplifying Beijing’s messages with SCA publics abroad and a top gatekeeper in determining what other PRC actors learn about SCA countries. In an in-depth analysis of his Twitter account, Cappelletti (2019) argues that Zhao Lijian exemplifies how a broader cadre of PRC diplomats blend public diplomacy and knowledge management to selectively project information that humanizes their home country, while “controlling strategically what...is shared to the public” to best further Beijing’s national interests.

Zhao’s Twitter content also illuminates two aims of the PRC’s social media strategy: reinforce positive perceptions of the PRC as an attractive partner and discredit the actions of strategic competitors in the eyes of SCA elites. These two aims are seen in juxtaposing more benign examples of Zhao’s tweets, highlighting the economic and social benefits of the CPEC partnership for the people of Pakistan (Cappelletti, 2019), versus provocative tweets implying that the US army was responsible for the spread of the coronavirus and accusing Australian soldiers of murdering Afghan civilians (Palmer, 2021). Both aims are advanced by Zhao’s prominence as a broker of communications and information flows between PRC and SCA elites.

SCA gatekeepers can enable or constrain the PRC’s ability to harness the network power of Twitter throughout the region. In South Asia, individual politicians were generally the most prominent gatekeepers that mediate the PRC’s access to the broader community of elites, followed by journalists (Table 17). Political gatekeepers included parliamentarians and executive branch officials, as well as incumbent and opposition leaders. Media organizations and journalists were particularly prominent gatekeepers in India (three of five were reporters with The Hindu, the English language daily newspaper) and Nepal (two of five were affiliated with media outlets Kantipur and Nagarik National Daily). In Pakistan, two accounts related to CPEC emerged as prominent access points for the PRC. Central Asian countries, meanwhile, had more centralized gatekeepers, often ministries charged with foreign affairs or international trade.

SCA representatives are consequential in shaping perspectives and views of their countries in the eyes of their PRC counterparts. Politicians were important, if not the primary, representatives for most SCA countries (Table 18). Again, these political elites were varied and included parliamentarians and executive branch officials, official agency or spokesperson accounts, and both incumbent and opposition politicians. SCA media and affiliated journalists were frequently among the top representatives for their countries. Notably, journalists associated with The Hindu, Nagarik Daily, Dhaka Tribune, Kantipur, and the Bhutanese Newspaper play dual roles: they were among the top five gatekeepers and representatives for their respective countries.

The case of Robin Ord-Smith is worth mentioning as it is somewhat unique. In August 2019, the former British Ambassador was elected the Business Ombudsman of Kyrgyzstan—a position created by the government and overseen by a special commission with representatives from the Kyrgyz government, development partners, and business groups—for a five-year term. The inclusion of Ord-Smith as a top representative for Kyrgyzstan could reflect two things: (i) there are relatively few Kyrgyz elites on Twitter, which artificially raises this account’s profile, and (ii) the ombuds position plausibly has an important role in informing external actors about the business and investment climate in the country.

Finding #11. PRC-affiliated accounts may be more frequently followed, but Indian accounts are more frequently mentioned by other Twitter users.

There are three striking features about the mentions network. First, fewer SCA and PRC elites mentioned others within the sample as opposed to merely following or being followed by them. There were only 328 accounts in the mentions network, as compared to 1,979 in the follower network. This could indicate a more superficial form of engagement—primarily information consumption and sharing via followership, as opposed to deeper interaction via mentions. Second, SCA and PRC rarely mention handles outside of their own countries and if they do, these cross-national mentions are more likely to be Indian handles, rather than PRC-affiliated accounts. In other words, even as PRC-affiliated handles are prolific in following, and being followed by, SCA elites, Indian accounts are top-of-mind for those in our sample, as they are more frequently mentioned in tweets composed by elites in other countries. Third, once again, Pakistan is an outlier: when PRC-affiliated accounts are engaged in cross-national mentions, these primarily occur with Pakistani elites, perhaps indicative of a greater degree of social familiarity and economic integration in light of CPEC (see Chapter 2).

One plausible explanation for the general prominence of Indian handles over PRC-affiliated accounts is that this might be a reaction to the PRC’s more centralized engagement with SCA elites on Twitter, which depends heavily on state-run media to push out narratives and diplomatic accounts to filter information back to China. Just as diplomatic accounts often resort to reposting approved stories from state-run media, fears of running afoul of what Zhao (2019) refers to as Beijing’s “invisible hand of censorship” could disincentivize PRC-affiliated accounts from mentioning other users in original tweets. Moreover, SCA elites may be less inclined to mention PRC-affiliated accounts on Twitter if they view them as primarily the institutionalized face of the Chinese Communist Party, as opposed to authentic interactions with individuals. This may show the limits of the PRC’s attempt to present the appearance of a multiplicity of voices and perspectives via a panoply of accounts that reinforce unified narratives (Zhao, 2019). [71]

Alternatively, this dynamic could have less to do with the PRC, than it does with India’s status as the regional hegemon in South Asia—where most mentions originated from. Although the number of mentions of other handles across our sample network is relatively small, on average, there are important exceptions to this rule. Figure 16 shows the distribution of mentions across accounts by country. Once again, the largest and smallest countries in the region—India and the Maldives—stand out for having higher levels of activity in the mentions network, both mentioning and being mentioned by other elites. Handles linked to India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Minister of Education Dharmendra Pradhan attracted substantially more mentions among elites in our sample as compared to their peers. India’s Minister for Road Transport and Highways, Nitin Gadkari, had the highest number of outward mentions of other elites in the network.

Substantial attention has been paid towards the PRC’s supply-side enthusiasm for harnessing social media, particularly Twitter, as part of its broader strategic communications efforts. Scholars have documented the vast uptick in the number of PRC diplomatic and state-run media accounts on Twitter and Facebook, as well as examined their use in overt public diplomacy with foreign publics, along with covert disinformation campaigns. Media outlets have done in-depth stories examining the PRC’s tactics on social media, such as inauthentic amplification via false-front super spreader accounts, as well as wolf warrior diplomacy. Technology companies, such as Twitter, have gone on the offensive to suspend accounts for offensive content or inauthentic behavior. However, there has been comparatively less attention on examining the extent of the PRC’s interaction with SCA elites on social media from the lens of network power to advance its national interests.

In this chapter, we examined how centrally positioned the PRC is within the social media networks of SCA elites to promote uptake of its desired narratives. For all the discussion of the PRC’s social media diplomacy in South and Central Asia, its Twitter footprint is surprisingly limited. Few SCA elites directly follow, or are followed by, the 115 PRC-affiliated accounts in our sample network. Instead, the PRC’s ability to influence narratives and connect with its desired target audiences on Twitter is contingent on a relatively small number of brokers—most often individual politicians and journalists in South Asia and government agencies tasked with foreign affairs and trade in Central Asia. The PRC relies heavily on centralized state-run media to push out positive stories about China to SCA countries, as well as diplomatic accounts to amplify these stories and filter information about SCA back to China. These accounts attract relatively fewer mentions by SCA elites than those associated with its strategic competitor, India.

In the next chapter, we turn from the PRC’s public diplomacy inputs to assessing the extent to which Beijing has been able to convert closer economic, social, and network ties into favorable perceptions among foreign publics and elites, in line with its objectives.

Finding #12. SCA countries can be organized into three groups with respect to how their citizens view the PRC: consistently favorable (Pakistan and Tajikistan), consistently unfavorable (India), and middle-of-the-road (everyone else).

Even as foreign powers often shared similar upswings and downswings in popular opinion over time, countries did not view these actors with the same degree of favorability. In fact, there were some notable differences between countries in their openness to individual foreign powers. Using hierarchical clustering analysis, [73] SCA countries can be organized into three groups with respect to how their citizens view the PRC (our primary foreign power of interest): consistently favorable (Pakistan and Tajikistan), consistently unfavorable (India), and middle-of-the-road (everyone else).

Pakistan, as explored in previous chapters, is in a league of its own in attracting an outsized share of Beijing’s attention—from financial diplomacy and education or cultural cooperation to social media engagement on Twitter. Yet, even as the PRC employs a diversity of tools to win over Pakistani publics and elites (Safdar, 2021), CPEC has certainly been the centerpiece of its overtures, in line with Beijing’s “extract” public diplomacy strategy for resource-rich countries (Chapter 2). [74] Pakistan stands out for its citizens’ consistently high approval of PRC leadership since 2011 (between 64 and 82 percent), increasing at a faster rate between 2014 and 2016, soon after the announcement of CPEC and BRI. No other foreign power comes even close to this response in Pakistan, with approval rates seldom rising above 20 percent. Taken together, high citizen approval of PRC leadership as compared to strategic competitors, revealed interest in learning Mandarin and Chinese study abroad opportunities, along with relatively high connectivity between PRC and Pakistani elites on Twitter, indicates how strong the Pakistan-China relationship has become in both absolute and relative terms.

Tajikistan also presents high approval rates for the leadership of both Russia (88 percent on average) and the PRC (63 percent on average). Comparatively, attitudes towards the US are less favorable (35 percent on average). Together, Pakistan and Tajikistan are cases of China’s “extract” strategy, in which there are great economic interests for the PRC, and the PRC has maintained high approval rates there.

On the other end of the spectrum is India, marked by consistently low approval (10-24 percent) and increasing disapproval of PRC leadership among survey respondents. India is unique in being both a recipient of the PRC’s overtures—primarily in the form of non-financial tools consistent with Beijing’s “nudge” public diplomacy strategy (Chapter 2) for countries that offer strategic advantages such as overland and maritime shipping routes, but fewer natural resources—and at the same time a competitor for influence in the region. India’s strategic rivalry with the PRC has triggered a relationship of mutual distrust which could hamper these approval rates. That said, Indian citizens do not have much enthusiasm for the alternatives. The US and Russia garnered only marginally better approval rates than the PRC: between 2006 and 2020, just over one-quarter of Indian respondents approved of the US, on average, compared to 20 percent for Russia, and 15 percent for the PRC.

The remaining SCA countries fall between these two extremes in citizen perceptions of Beijing: more moderate disapproval than seen in India but more moderate approval than in Pakistan and Tajikistan. The PRC faces strong competition from Russia, the status quo power in Central Asia, where relatively high approval rates of Kremlin leadership may reflect long-standing economic integration of these countries via trade and remittance flows, as well as the recognition of their dependence on Gazprom pipelines to export natural gas to Europe. [75] Moreover, Central Asian countries have deep social ties with Russia due to a shared Soviet past and the continued presence of Russian ethnic minorities within their borders (Goble, 2016; Vogt et al., 2015). [76] Nevertheless, satisfaction with Russian leadership varies among Central Asian countries and the Kremlin’s strategic competitors are having an easier time closing the gap in some contexts than others.

Moscow’s dominance is most evident in Kyrgyzstan, where approval of Russia (between 75 and 90 percent) outstrips other foreign powers by a large margin. [77] The closest any of the Kremlin’s competitors came to this was when 51 percent of Kyrgyz respondents approved of the PRC in 2007. Comparatively, Russia is still preferred over the PRC and the US in other Central Asian countries, but by a smaller margin and with greater volatility over time. This dynamic is most clearly seen in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, where the US and the PRC still trail Russia in citizen approval but have closed the gap in recent years. [78] This changing dynamic could indicate two things: (i) heightened activity on the part of the Kremlin’s strategic competitors in jockeying for influence in Central Asia; and (ii) a greater willingness to express dissatisfaction with Russia, especially considering the alternative partners on offer.

Several South Asian countries—Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka—are more of a battleground, where no one power has a clear edge over the others, at least in terms of popular perception. As described in Chapter 2, the PRC adopts a “nudge” strategy in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, offering relatively more non-financial diplomacy at the subnational level, [79] while it has a minimal presence in Afghanistan outside of Kabul. Attitudes towards foreign powers in these three countries were relatively tepid across the board. India performed somewhat better, on average garnering higher approval rates (though data is not available for all years), [80] while the US and the PRC were relatively close and Russia trailed behind. [81] That said, Beijing garnered its highest approval rating in Sri Lanka (56 percent) in 2020, despite heated controversy over ceding control of Hambantota port to the PRC on a 99-year lease, triggering backlash among global media and political opposition. [82]

Comparatively, attitudes towards all foreign powers tended to be more favorable in land-locked Nepal. Between 2006 and 2020, 43 percent of Nepalis approved of US and PRC leadership on average. In 2020, the US earned a 58 percent approval rating, with the PRC and Russia close behind (6 and 11 percentage points below the US, respectively).

Finding #13. Beijing’s financial diplomacy is associated with lower approval of Russia but higher approval of the US. It is also positively associated with PRC approval in "extract" countries, but not in "nudge" countries.

Here we probe further to make sense of the mixed results for the PRC’s financial diplomacy and elite visits. For financial diplomacy, we examine the results in relation to other foreign powers and how they differ between two groups of countries based upon different subnational public diplomacy strategies employed by the PRC (described in Chapter 2): “extract” (more financial diplomacy) and “nudge” (less financial diplomacy and more reliance on other tools). [86] While the data does not allow for a causal analysis, we investigate correlations (likely relationships) between these factors. We also look at a subset of elite visits—outbound visits by the head of government to SCA countries—that we hypothesize would be most likely to influence citizen attitudes. We exploit variation in the timing of the visits and the dates when GWP respondents were interviewed to assess how this might correspond to public opinion. [87]

With Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, and Nepal, Beijing relies more heavily on financial diplomacy at the subnational level (an “extract” strategy), whereas it leans on non-financial diplomacy with India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka (a “nudge” strategy). Once we take the PRC’s different strategies into account, we find that financial diplomacy was associated with increased approval of PRC leadership among respondents from “extract” countries, but there was no significant relationship for the other countries. To confirm that these different outcomes did not just reflect that all our “nudge” countries are in South Asia, we ran the same models separating Central Asia and South Asia and found the same results for both groups, with financial diplomacy associated with higher approval. This supports our argument that the difference observed in the first set of models is due to the “nudge” versus “extract” division.

Beijing’s financial diplomacy is associated with divergent reactions, not only regarding PRC leadership, but also its strategic competitors. Countries receiving more of the PRC’s financial diplomacy tended to have lower approval of Russia, but higher approval of the US. The negative association is more intuitive if SCA citizens view Russian and PRC financing as exchangeable, such that availability of PRC assistance obviates the need for Russian aid and weakens approval of Russian leadership.

The positive association between PRC financial diplomacy and US approval is more complicated. Greater exposure to PRC financial diplomacy could possibly increase SCA publics’ awareness of the differences between what Beijing and Washington have to offer, in ways that make the US overtures more attractive. For example, in a 2020 survey of policy elites, Custer et al., (2021) found that leaders prefer projects with more generous financing and transparent disclosure of the lending terms—attributes associated with the US over PRC-backed development projects. With greater competition may come additional scrutiny: common features of PRC-financial diplomacy projects such as the use of Chinese labor, less generous and more opaque lending terms, along with weaker social and environmental safeguards may sour public opinion after projects commence (Blair et al., 2019). [88]

High-level visits by President Xi Jinping (or his predecessor President Hu Jintao) to other countries are often highly publicized affairs in both PRC and SCA local media, as they often coincide with new commitments of economic assistance, people-to-people exchange or other forms of bilateral cooperation. Comparatively, other forms of elite visits—those by SCA leaders to China or meetings of working-level bureaucrats—may not elicit the same degree of attention or fanfare such that it rises to the level of public consciousness. Moreover, if we examine specific combinations of visits, it is possible that perceptions may diverge depending upon the country and the visitor. Employing data and models from Goldsmith et al. (2021), we examine these dynamics more closely by exploiting the timing of high-level visits and the dates when respondents to the GWP were interviewed to identify whether such elite visits produce a perception dividend for the PRC. Specifically, we examine whether there is a difference in approval rates among SCA citizens interviewed in the five-day period prior to a high-level visit from the PRC (the control group) versus those interviewed in the five-day period following (the treatment group). [89]

Although Goldsmith et al. (2021) originally found that high-level visits, in general, have a positive effect on public opinion (increasing approval and decreasing disapproval), our results are more nuanced. We find that the ability for the PRC to earn a perception dividend from elite visits appears to be situational, driven by specific combinations of visitor and host countries. Of the 1,761 elite visits between PRC and SCA leaders during the 2000-2017 period (Custer et al., 2019), only four match the Goldsmith et al. criteria of an outbound “high-level” visit by a head of government to an SCA country that fell within a five-day range from when the GWP conducted interviews in the country: President Xi’s visit to India in 2014, two visits by President Hu to Kazakhstan in 2010 and 2011, and one visit from President Xi to Kazakhstan in 2017. On average, these PRC high-level visits may have increased approval and decreased disapproval of PRC leadership among SCA citizens, but this was statistically insignificant.

However, this aggregate view appears to mask divergent results in the two countries. The single visit by Xi Jinping to India in 2014 generated a nearly six percentage point bump in approval of PRC leadership (a statistically significant result), as shown in Figure 18. Although the results for Kazakhstan did not meet the threshold to be statistically significant, they indicate the possibility that Kazakh citizens held more neutral or disapproving positions following the PRC high-level visits than before. In some respects, the results follow the conventional wisdom on attitude formation, whereby greater proximity with an issue may intensify existing feelings and opinions, positively or negatively (Hernández et al., 2021; Weaver, 1991). [90] But the growing percentage of respondents selecting “neither” is counter-intuitive, implying that visits instigate uncertainty in citizens, perhaps surfacing mixed feelings or conflicting attitudes, such that those who had previously formed an opinion one way or another prior to the visit became undecided.

Finding #14. In general, SCA citizens were more favorable towards Russia and the PRC, while their leaders were more favorable towards India and the US.

SCA elites surveyed appear to view the PRC and Russia less favorably than the US and India. Forty-six percent of respondents said they had a somewhat or very unfavorable view of China, as compared to 39 percent for Russia (see Figure 19). [93] In some respects, these results are unsurprising. In Central Asia, the PRC must overcome historical anti-Chinese sentiment (Jardine, 2019), limited cultural and linguistic ties (Peyrouse, 2016), and social media campaigns by “Sinophobic nationalist groups” (Custer et al., 2019). [94] In South Asia, the PRC must contend with India’s long shadow as the regional hegemon and the wariness of elites to avoid provoking New Delhi by aligning too closely with Beijing. In parallel, Central Asian elites have sought to exert their independence from the Kremlin’s sphere of influence (Shlapentokh, 2021), and Mostafa and Mahmood (2018) attribute the Eurasian Economic Union’s lack of success to distrust between the member states, which include Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

Respondents were more favorable (73 percent) towards India than expected, given growing unease among South Asian elites about New Delhi’s status as a regional hegemon. Custer et al. (2019) previously found that concerns regarding Indian interference in their domestic politics were among the most frequently cited reasons by South Asian interviewees for interest in cultivating closer relationships with the PRC as a counterbalance. [95] It could be that despite elites’ wariness of New Delhi’s geostrategic aspirations, long-standing cultural and linguistic ties still bind South Asian elites to India (Paradise, 2017) that may prove hard for the PRC to break. The US garnered the most favorable rating: 77 percent of elites surveyed viewed the US positively. This is surprising considering the heightened great power competition rhetoric between the US and the PRC; however, it could be that persistent distrust of Russia and the PRC for historical or cultural reasons may have strengthened the relative position of the US as an alternative partner.

To what extent do elite views of foreign powers converge or diverge from the general population in SCA countries? It is important to note that the measures of favorability are different for these groups: whereas citizens rated the degree to which they approved of a foreign power’s leadership, elites answered a more general question about their attitudes towards a foreign country. Nevertheless, both provide an insight into the standing of great powers jockeying for influence with foreign publics and leaders. If we compare AidData’s 2021 snap poll responses versus the most recent year of GWP data available, it turns out that citizens and leaders diverge quite a bit. Citizens’ approval of foreign powers on average across the region was the inverse of their leaders: placing Russia first (42 percent), followed by the PRC (38 percent), and then the US last (34 percent). In other words, SCA citizens were generally more favorable towards Russia than their leaders, while the opposite was true of the US. [96]

Finding #15. Economic opportunity drives how SCA leaders view the PRC and the US; they suggest increasing financial diplomacy and people-to-people ties to boost standing in future.

This raises the question: if leaders are not aligned with preferences of their citizens, then what else might be driving their attitudes towards foreign powers? If a respondent to AidData’s 2021 snap poll said they had a “somewhat” or “very” favorable view of a foreign power, they were asked a subsequent question about why that was the case and given the opportunity to select from a number of predetermined reasons, along with a write-in option. [97] In the case of relations with the US and China, it was largely a function of economic ties (see Figure 20), while for Russia and India, the more frequent responses had to do with social ties such as language and cultural similarities, along with historical and colonial ties.

Over 85 percent of respondents said the US and the PRC presented good economic opportunities and attractive development models for their countries. This suggests that SCA elites are not only interested in the immediate benefits of economic relations (whether trade, aid, or investment), but also value engaging with countries whose economic models they favor, to learn and replicate them domestically. SCA elites also deeply care about how foreign powers engage with them, emphasizing fairness, transparency, and treatment as an equal partner as the second most important reason why they hold a favorable view of the US or the PRC. The implication for Washington and Beijing moving forward is that their ability to gain favor with SCA elites is highly influenced by their ability to deepen economic ties and demonstrate fairness in dealing with partners, with social and network ties primarily acting as amplifiers and reinforcements of these preferred narratives.

In a follow-up question, 82 percent of SCA elites surveyed indicated that they most often identified the US as supplying humanitarian aid and the PRC as building transportation infrastructure in their countries. [98] This is consistent with the PRC’s emphasis on infrastructure investments as the cornerstone of its financial diplomacy (Chapter 2) and the traditional position of the US as among the top three providers of humanitarian assistance worldwide (Development Initiatives, 2020). Nevertheless, even as these responses largely match reality, they represent something of a caricature of PRC and US economic assistance narratives in the media and public discourse, which has implications for both foreign powers.

On the one hand, Beijing may stand to benefit from a close association with infrastructure, as leaders preferred such projects (+6 percentage points) over other forms of development assistance in a global survey of 141 countries, including SCA (Custer et al., 2021). On the other hand, the PRC’s highly visible public infrastructure projects have been a lightning rod for controversy in many SCA countries over a wide range of concerns—from increasing indebtedness and displacement of local communities to negative environmental spillovers and the use of Chinese labor and suppliers (Custer et al., 2019). For the US, the perception that it emphasizes humanitarian assistance has not invited the same degree of scrutiny and pushback; however, it runs a greater risk of seeming out-of-step with the priorities of SCA elites, which increasingly view infrastructure-led development as a gateway to economic growth (ibid).

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic was an external shock to the international system, with the potential to profoundly affect bilateral relations, creating both opportunities and constraints for the practice of public diplomacy. With this in mind, we asked survey respondents which of the four foreign powers (the PRC, India, Russia, and the US) best adapted their public diplomacy efforts in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. [99] Notably, the PRC may have been rated least favorably overall, but it was selected most often (28 percent) as the foreign power most able to adapt its public diplomacy to the COVID-19 crisis (Figure 22). Comparatively, SCA elites did not think the US, Russia, and India did as well in adapting their public diplomacy in response to the pandemic.

Beijing has certainly synchronized the use of multiple tools—donations of vaccines and medical equipment, provision of medical teams, and the use of traditional broadcasting and social media—to position itself as an indispensable partner and mitigate criticism of its handling of the pandemic domestically, while calling into question the motives and follow-through of strategic competitors such as the US (Fuchs et al., 2020; Müller et al., 2021; Watts, 2020). This capacity for adaptive learning indicates that Beijing could be poised to improve its standing with SCA elites in future under the right conditions. By contrast, the fact that the US was the largest provider of COVID-19 pandemic response grants globally as of June 2020 (Development Initiatives, 2020) has not helped it shake negative perceptions that it has mismanaged the crisis at home and abroad (Wike et al., 2020; Ameyaw-Brobbey, 2021).

With the PRC and the US poised at a “critical juncture” in a bid for leadership of the post-COVID international order (Ameyaw-Brobbey, 2021; Campbell and Doshi, 2020), respondents weighed in on what these two foreign powers could do to improve their standing in SCA countries over the next four years. [100] SCA elites surveyed had similar prescriptions for both: more financial assistance, but also more people-to-people ties (Figure 23). Seventy-one percent of respondents said financial assistance should be the highest priority for the US, followed by promoting people-to-people ties (62 percent), such as facilitating exchange programs and study abroad opportunities. For the PRC, respondents advised strengthening people-to-people ties first (52 percent), but only by a small margin over financial assistance (49 percent). This reinforces the emerging theme of this study, that economic and social ties go together in winning favor with SCA elites and publics.

In this chapter, we examined what a nationally representative citizen survey can tell us about perceptions of the PRC over time in absolute terms and relative to its three strategic competitors in the region: India, Russia, and the US. Using a set of statistical models, we tested whether and how Beijing’s public diplomacy tools may translate into improved popular perceptions in SCA countries. Finally, we leveraged an AidData snap poll survey of SCA elites in 2021 to assess the degree to which their views converge or diverge with the public, as well as how they view the public diplomacy efforts of four great powers active in the region. In the next chapter, we reflect on the implications of this study for SCA countries, the PRC, and its strategic competitors, during a period of heightened competition for regional and global influence.