Americans Still View China as World's Leading Economic Power
February 10, 2012
Americans Still View China as World's Leading Economic Power
Expect China to be leading power in the future
by Jeffrey M. Jones
PRINCETON, NJ -- Americans believe China is the leading economic power in the world today, by a significant margin over the United States. This is the second consecutive year the majority of Americans have viewed China as economically dominant; previously, China held a smaller lead. By contrast, in 2000, Americans overwhelmingly believed the U.S. was the leading economic power.
The U.S. economic downturn and the continued expansion of the Chinese economy are the likely factors behind Americans' belief that China is the world's top economic power.
Still, the vast majority of Americans name either the U.S. or China as the world's leading economic power. Relatively few Americans regard Japan (7%), the European Union (3%), India (2%), or Russia (less than 1%) in those terms. Japan has ranked third in recent years, but finished ahead of China in 2000.
China Also Viewed as Likely Power in the Future
Looking ahead, Americans still expect China to be the leading economic power in 20 years, but by a slightly smaller margin over the United States, 46% to 38%. These opinions, though similar to last year's, have shifted in the past. In 2000, when the U.S. economy was strong, and in 2009, shortly after Barack Obama took office, more Americans believed the U.S. rather than China would be the top economic power in the future. In 2008, just as the recession was beginning, and in the last two years as the economy has continued to stagnate, a plurality of Americans have thought China would be the top power in the future.
Seniors View U.S. as Leading Economic Power
At least a plurality of Americans in all key subgroups believe China is the leading economic power today, with one notable exception -- senior citizens. Among Americans aged 65 and older, 50% say the United States is the leading economic power and 41% say China. Americans under 50 are particularly likely to believe China is the leading economic power.
Seniors, as well as those aged 50 and older, are also less inclined than younger Americans to believe China will be the leading economic power in the future.
Democrats, independents, and Republicans hold similar views as to which country is the leading economic power today. However, they differ with respect to the future -- independents believe China will be the leading power, while Democrats and Republicans are divided as to whether China or the United States will be.
Implications
Officially, the United States still has a larger economy, based on gross domestic product, than China. However, if China sustains its current economic growth rate, it will surpass the United States' economy as the largest in the coming decades.
Americans clearly acknowledge the growing influence China has on the world economy, and believe it is already the leading economic power in the world. That view likely has been affected by the economic downturn in the United States in recent years, which means opinions could change if the U.S. economy starts to recover.
Survey Methods
Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted Feb. 2-5, 2012, with a random sample of 1,029 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.
For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points.
Interviews are conducted with respondents on landline telephones and cellular phones, with interviews conducted in Spanish for respondents who are primarily Spanish-speaking. Each sample includes a minimum quota of 400 cell phone respondents and 600 landline respondents per 1,000 national adults, with additional minimum quotas among landline respondents by region. Landline telephone numbers are chosen at random among listed telephone numbers. Cell phone numbers are selected using random-digit-dial methods. Landline respondents are chosen at random within each household on the basis of which member had the most recent birthday.
Samples are weighted by gender, age, race, Hispanic ethnicity, education, region, adults in the household, and phone status (cell phone only/landline only/both, cell phone mostly, and having an unlisted landline number). Demographic weighting targets are based on the March 2011 Current Population Survey figures for the aged 18 and older non-institutionalized population living in U.S. telephone households. All reported margins of sampling error include the computed design effects for weighting and sample design.
In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.
View methodology, full question results, and trend data.
ShareUntil now, two narratives have defined both the press coverage and public discussion of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators camped out in lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park.
The first depicts a collection of buffoonish, semiliterate juveniles engaged in a seeming left-wing version of a college prank. There is, to be sure, something to this story.
In last week's Zombie Parade the protesters, giddy with their cleverness, portrayed themselves as the living dead whose lives had been sucked from them by unnamed corporations.
One of the pre-Halloween costumers was asked why she had chosen to dress up like a zombie who looked like Marie Antoinette, the French queen guillotined by the revolutionaries of 1793. She replied that she had no idea of who Marie Antoinette was but just liked the look of the costume.
The second narrative sees the protesters as ripe to be harnessed by the labor leaders who hope to tap into their energy on behalf of the Obama 2012 campaign.
Watching New York Federation of Teachers President Mike Mulgrew prance about, speaking in the name of the protest, you might think Occupy Wall Street had signed on to a campaign to raise teachers' salaries in a city whose budget shortfalls are already producing layoffs.
But both of these explanations presume that there is a single, largely unified group of people in Zuccotti Park. There isn't. The exhibitionists, lost souls and zanies acting out tend to congregate in the Western stretch of the block-long park.
To their east, where anti-Obama placards outnumber those supporting the president, a more cerebral group of protesters is gathered. Their organizational skills have kept the encampment running in reasonably good order for these past three weeks.
Some of them, carrying anti-Obama placards, are standard issue leftists who, like the New York Times editorial board, think that the president's problem is that he has been too moderate and thoughtful.
But others are caught up in the practical details of self-government on a small scale. They are doing their best not to be co-opted, which is why, despite the hoopla from labor leaders, they haven't signed on to the union campaign. Like Students for a Democratic Society in the early 1960s, they are grappling with a paradox.
On the one hand, they insist that corporations ineffectively run the government; on the other, they want more government regulation to control the corporations.
By contrast, the Tea Party has a ready and plausible answer as to how to restore self-government and break the grip of the crony capitalism that ties the Obama administration to Wall Street. They want to drastically reduce the size of government.
The protesters have no such view. Like their 1960s predecessors, they're chasing their tails trying to imagine procedural reforms that will allow the demonstrators to govern themselves, while also curbing the power of those greedy capitalists.
It's too easy to dismiss the protesters, with their "Eat The Rich" signs, as just spoiled "trustafarian" misfits. They see themselves as the American equivalents of Egypt's Tahrir Square protesters who brought down President Hosni Mubarak, but they haven't noticed that it's the Islamists who are inheriting the Arab Spring.
Mocking them is easy; but here at home, the problem of crony capitalism is in fact eating away at our civic entrails. Leftists willing to grapple with this malignancy should be welcomed, if only for the potential seriousness of their efforts.
As the more thoughtful 68ers eventually discovered, the idea of reforming government by expanding it is a circular dead end.
Fred Siegel is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and scholar in residence at St Francis College in Brooklyn.
And, and there, yet there’s another problem. You have what I call the “Get the ‘N’-word out of the White House party,” the Tea Party, this kind of sensibility, which is much more of a distraction-