How do citizens in the United States and China evaluate the fairness of the international system and the impartiality of its legal institutions? As the two countries vie for global leadership, public perceptions of the existing order and visions for its reform can shape global trajectories by influencing support for or resistance to their governments’ efforts to reshape world order. While prior research has examined public attitudes toward bilateral relations, far less attention has been paid to how these publics view the broader structure and principles of the global order, a focal point of normative debate over which superpower and which vision will best serve humanity. This study addresses this gap through a comparative survey of American and Chinese publics. We find that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the two publics converge substantially in their views on the sources and solutions to global injustice, while diverging in their assessments of the current system’s fairness, with Americans expressing higher level of dissatisfaction.
Xiaojun Li is currently Associate Professor of Political Science at UBC and non-resident scholar at the 21st Century China Centre at UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy. He has also held visiting positions at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies (2014-2015), Fudan Development Institute (2016), the East-West Center (2018), and the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute (2021).
Xiaojun Li is currently Associate Professor of Political Science at UBC and non-resident scholar at the 21st Century China Centre at UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy. He has also held visiting positions at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies (2014-2015), Fudan Development Institute (2016), the East-West Center (2018), and the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute (2021).