With less than a week to go before India hosts the G20 summit in New Delhi, reports have indicated that Chinese President Xi Jinping might skip the summit this year, whereas US President Joe Biden has confirmed that he will attend. And despite Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Xi meeting on the sidelines of BRICS in South Africa, where resolving the ongoing border dispute was discussed, ties between New Delhi and Beijing remain tense.
India also reacted strongly to a map released by China on 28 August, which reiterated its claims to Indian territories such as Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai Chin. The Ministry of External Affairs said such moves serve only to further “complicate the resolution of the boundary question”.
The tensions between India and China — which have particularly heightened since a standoff between troops of the two countries in May 2020 — have had a serious impact on the attitudes of Indians towards Beijing. Indeed, an analysis of data from Washington-based think-tank Pew Research Center shows a marked 21 percent decline in Indians’ favourable views towards China from 2019 to 2023.
But India isn’t the only country whose views on Beijing have grown more negative. A side-by-side comparison of Pew surveys between 2019 and 2023 shows that favourable attitudes towards Beijing have generally been dwindling among middle-income countries or emerging economies.Here’s a look at how global attitudes towards China have changed between 2019 and 2023 — particularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, which began in that country.