China's Public Views of the World (Vol. 1)

China is increasingly integrated with the world.  Under this circumstance, how do the Chinese people look at the world?  China’s Public Views of the World (Vol. 1), edited by Li Shengmin, Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), and Zhou Hong, Director of IES, attempts to answer this question.

The book contains five chapters, each dealing with one survey about the public views of the Chinese people towards Japan, U.S.A., Russia, Europe, and Latin America.

The three-year project of the five opinion surveys, starting from 2007, was undertaken by the scholars from five different research institutions at CASS.

According to Li Shengmin, this survey will help the government of China to “make the right foreign policy decision” and also to raise China’s soft power. Zhou Hong says in her preface that the Chinese academics need to know what the general public is thinking about the world.

It seems that most of the respondents do not know much about the world.  One of them wrote in the query, “I feel shameful that I know so little about Russia.  All my knowledge about this country was from my high school textbook. From now on I shall pay more attention to the outside world.”  Another one expressed similar feeling, saying that he knows nothing about Latin America except the football stars of the region on the other side of the Pacific.

This book is published in Chinese by the Social Sciences Academic Press in Beijing.