China is weird. Maybe not the country or the people but certainly the response and reaction to China from everywhere and everyone else. China’s relationship with the rest of the world is the textbook definition of “It’s Complicated.”
Personally, some of it has to do with jealousy in the West. The Chinese did invent the Big Four: papermaking, the compass, gunpowder, and printing, not to mention maybe the umbrella. But then again, it was the West that took all of those to greater heights, especially gunpowder. China sometimes likes to take credit for the umbrella but an Austrian woman—Slawa Horowitz—got the patent for an umbrella that folded in 1929.
There has also been a problem with the Mandarin name “Zhōngguó” as many Westerners think that it is arrogant to consider your country as the “Center of the World.” Then again, China and India were always number one or two for “Richest Nation in the World” in terms of total size up until about 1500 A.D. However, it was the Portuguese that brought that “Center of the World” idea to Europe, not the Chinese. That was the same Portuguese that coined the name “Mare da China”—China Sea—creating some of the geo-political problems we have today.
Modern China does not exactly go out of its way to make the world feel comfortable. Remember May 2015? Probably every newspaper in the world had a story about “Chinese billionaire takes 6,400 staff on holiday to Paris and Côte d’Azur.” That sort of conspicuous consumption used to be reserved for Saudi Arabian royalty and South American drug lords.
There are some local China apologists that seem more than willing to take a bullet for Xi Jinping on all issues. China cannot do anything wrong as with the Covid-19 experience. Or “Democracy crackdown in Hong Kong? Never heard of it.”
Meanwhile, the Philippines has never been a big fan of China. This is in spite of the world’s first Chinatown being established in Manila in 1594. The ‘Manila Galleon Trade’ really put the Philippines on the map and that was all due to transporting Chinese goods to Spain.
Opinion surveys conducted since 1990 in the Philippines show a consistent pattern. “Net Trust” in the United States has been strong, mostly above 50 percent. The lowest was about positive 15 percent in 2005 and above 80 percent from 2012 to 2014. The “Net Trust” in China has always been negative, with brief periods in 2016 and 2017 above Zero. The low point of trust in China came in 2015 at almost a negative 50 percent.
According to the management consulting company Gallup Inc., China has always been tough to love. Gallup released earlier this week a survey titled “Rating World Leaders—The US vs. Germany, China and Russia.” Since the election of Donald Trump as US president, global perceptions of the US have gone from 48 percent approval to 33 percent. Now nobody likes the US.
But since 2007, nobody has liked China. Its approval rating has always been in low to high 20s with an occasional burst to 30 percent to 31 percent approval. The difference now is that the US and China are tied for “Least Approved Leadership on Earth” at 33 percent and 32 percent, respectively.
The only consolation for Trump and Xi is that Russia and Vladimir Putin are lower at 30 percent. Nobody likes the “Global Godfathers.”
E-mail me at mangun@gmail.com. Visit my web site at www.mangunonmarkets.com. Follow me on Twitter @mangunonmarkets. PSE stock-market information and technical analysis tools provided by the COL Financial Group Inc.