Approval of Chinese and American leadership in South Asia

I’ve been crashing on a whole variety of things: teaching a new IR of South Asia lecture class, finishing the first full draft of my Armed Politics book manuscript for a late May book workshop, keeping up with the news and new research, and trying, and mostly failing, to not catastrophically fall behind on absolutely everything. So I am basically accomplishing almost nothing beyond frantically building Powerpoint slides and triaging my email.

That said, a project I am *thinking* about as my next book is the domestic politics of foreign policy in South Asia. I have several data collection projects of various forms going on regarding India, and am finding various interesting pieces of quantitative data and case studies to explore in the rest of the region.

I’ve been particularly interested in tracking down public opinion data, which seems like a potentially under-explored area. The internal breakdowns are of greater theoretical interest (what explains variation within each country in views of China?), but here’s an aggregate comparison of “Approval of China’s Leadership” from the Gallup World Poll, 2006-18 (the chart can also be found here if you have trouble reading it embedded in this post):

Pakistan (red) is by far the highest approval overall, and has increased a good bit in the last decade, at 73% in 2018, with 55% the lowest in 2009 and 82% the highest in 2016. Nepal follows up (light blue), hitting 52% in 2018, up from a low point of 29% in 2012.

Sri Lanka (yellow) and Bangladesh (green) sit in the middle – both have bounced around a bit, but broadly in the 30-40% approval range over time. India brings up the rear, from 8%-24% depending on the year.

Now here’s the equivalent for the United States (link to chart here):

There’s a substantially lower spread – Nepal brings up the top at 55% in 2018 (low point 28% in 2011), followed by a clustering of India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka at 39-41%, and Pakistan the lowest at 14%. Pakistan has ranged from 7% (2006) to 26% (2011), India is currently at its highest approval (lowest in 2011 at 16%), Sri Lanka has bounced from 48% (2002) to 14% (2012) back up to 39% in 2018. Bangladesh’s low was 19% in 2007 and its high was 48% in 2013.

Obviously there are massive caveats with this kind of work, but I thought these were interesting patterns across countries and time.