National images, trust and international friendship: Evidence from Chinese students
| Author | Graeme AM Davies,Kingsley Edney,Bo Wang |
| Date | 01 March 2021 |
| Published date | 01 March 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117820904091 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117820904091
International Relations
2021, Vol. 35(1) 69 –89
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117820904091
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National images, trust and
international friendship:
Evidence from Chinese
students
Graeme AM Davies
University of York
Kingsley Edney
University of Leeds
Bo Wang
University of International Business and Economics
Abstract
This article uses a new dataset of Chinese student attitudes to foreign affairs to analyse how
perceptions of the United States, Russia, Japan and North and South Korea affect respondent
perceptions of international friendship with these states. Employing a mediation analysis we
find that perceptions of national trustworthiness above all other images is the crucial factor in
explaining cross-national friendship. These findings suggest that trust-building measures would be
a fruitful avenue for both reducing the likelihood of conflict in the region and fostering cooperative
international interactions.
Keywords
China, images, international friendship, trust
University students are one of the most active and vocal sectors of society on foreign
policy issues in China. Understanding student attitudes to other countries is one of the
keys to studying the interaction between Chinese public opinion and foreign policy. In
Corresponding author:
Graeme AM Davies, Department of Politics, University of York, Heslington Lane, York YO10 5DD, UK.
Email: graeme.davies@york.ac.uk
904091IRE0010.1177/0047117820904091International RelationsDavies et al.
research-article2020
Article
70 International Relations 35(1)
this article, we use a new dataset of Chinese student attitudes towards foreign affairs to
identify how perceptions of national attributes and behaviours affect respondent images
of other states and specifically friend/enemy distinctions.
We conduct a mediation analysis to show that the image of national trustworthiness
has the greatest influence on student perceptions of international friendship and that this
is particularly pronounced when the foreign state in question is more generally perceived
to be an enemy of China, such as Japan or the United States. Trust not only has a direct
effect on friendship but also mediates a whole series of perceptions about other coun-
tries. Our findings show that trust and peacefulness are strongly correlated in respond-
ents’ minds. Perceptions of a foreign state being peaceful, powerful or similar to China
appear to have a much smaller direct effect on perceptions of friendship. However, when
we build a model that combines direct and indirect effects on friendship we see that trust
and peacefulness are the key factors behind friendship, with the exception of the Russian
friendship image, which is driven by trust and power.
These results indicate that focusing on trust provides the most plausible mechanism
for increasing perceptions of friendship with other states among Chinese students. Our
study suggests that models that look only at direct effects of perceptions of peacefulness
and similarity on friendship will miss a crucial pathway to friendship. We also find that
respondents are sophisticated in their thinking about friendship, making more strategic
alliance-based calculations when estimating China’s friendship with Russia, concentrat-
ing on trust and power, rather than peacefulness.
The article has five sections, with the first discussing previous research on image
theory and reviewing past studies of Chinese images of foreign countries. The second
proposes a theoretical framework for examining the key images of international friend-
ship held by a section of the Chinese public. The third section discusses the new dataset,
outlining research design and the variables used in the analysis. The fourth examines the
mediating effect of trust on friendship, and the final section provides some general
discussion.
Previous research
Image theory provides a powerful tool to help us understand how elites make decisions
about out-groups and how they view other states and peoples in the international sys-
tem,1 although image theory has generally not been used to investigate mass attitudes to
foreign affairs. Images are an important way for individuals to sort multifaceted material
that would become overly complex and unstructured without cognitive shortcuts.2
Images have both the potential to simplify decision-making but also distort it, potentially
exacerbating conflict or leading to groupthink.3 Initial studies of images and interna-
tional relations (IR) can be traced back to the work of Kenneth Boulding who applied
image theory to elite decision-making.4 For Boulding a foreign policy image was defined
as: ‘the total cognitive, affective, and evaluative structure of the behavioural unit, or its
internal view of itself and its universe’.5
Boulding argues that the two images that are best placed to explain leaders’ foreign
policy decision-making are the hostility/friendliness of other states and their perceived
strength/weakness.6 Later studies extended the strength/weakness image to take into
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