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The Public Diplomacy Blog is intended to stimulate dialog among scholars, researchers, practitioners and professionals from around the world in the public diplomacy sphere. The opinions represented here are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.

WHY OBAMA IS LESS POPULAR IN ASIA
NOV 20, 2008 - 10:33AM PDT
Posted by Adam Clayton Powell III
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Much that is written about public diplomacy focuses on Europe and the Muslim world. National news media in the US, headquartered in New York and Washington, equates foreign opinion with approving editorials in The Guardian and large crowds in Berlin. By those criteria, President-elect Barack Obama is wildly popular. Just elect Obama, the thinking goes, and America's public diplomacy problems are solved. Not quite: The data indicate Obama was never as popular in Asia as in Europe. And it turns out President Bush was never as unpopular in Asia as he was in Europe. This was documented by the Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project, which found Obama's popularity much higher in Europe than in the rest of the world. Surveying publics in 24 countries, Pew researchers asked whether respondents had more confidence in Obama or McCain to serve as the next president of the United States. In Europe, Obama was enormously popular: In France, Obama had a 51-percentage point lead over McCain, in Germany it was 49 percentage points and in Spain it was 53 percentage points. (Obama also had a 20-point advantage in European countries over Hillary Clinton.) But in the Arab world, Obama's advantage was much narrower, leading McCain by just eight points in Egypt, four points in Pakistan and a single percentage point in Jordan. And in Asia, Obama's approval edged McCain by just five percentage points in the two largest countries in the world, China and India. What is going on? And why should Americans care? Taking the second question first, the answer is quite simple: America runs on Asian money. The U.S. deficit is funded by Asia – and especially by China. Almost four years ago in this space, Peter Herford wrote that China was less critical of the U.S. than other countries, and that was not unrelated to its role as America's banker. Today’s economic crisis has only increased America's financial dependency on Asia, so what Herford wrote is even truer now. Remember, European economies are in recession – Europe’s economies are actually shrinking. But in Asia, the financial crisis means China's economy may only grow by eight percent. Does Washington need $700 billion to bail out U.S. banks? Washington is out of money; go to the cash windows in China. Does GM need federal funds to avert bankruptcy? Send loan requests from the Midwest to the Middle Kingdom. Do Democrats want to expand health care benefits? They will have to send the doctors' bills to Beijing. Think of it as China's version of the Marshall Plan. Our historic "special relationship" across the Atlantic with Britain has shifted to a new financial special relationship across the Pacific, to our wealthy partners in China. And in an echo of the Marshall Plan and the 1940s, there is even a similar motive: Just as the U.S. rebuilt bankrupt Europe in part as a bulwark against Stalin and Soviet power, China has an interest in keeping a strong U.S. as a bulwark against Putin and an…... FULL TEXT
 
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