The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Harry Li, whose interest is in affective polarisation in China towards Russia and the United States. Such affective polarisation describes in-group favouritism and out-group hostility, but past research has mainly examined how this plays out in two- or multi-party political systems, rather than towards broader issues and themes.
In China, while there is a one-party system that does not allow for partisan polarisation, polarisation around specific issues and topics may nonetheless exist; here we might regard friendly or allied countries as part of the in-group, and competing and hostile countries as the out-group, for example. This extends affective polarisation into the field of international relation.
China has a more friendly relationship with Russia than the US, and we might expect that this manifests in affective polarisation towards the two countries, too. This might be affected by partisan media coverage about one or the other country; more ideologically neutral or diverse media coverage (including from international news sources) would counteract such tendencies, and might depolarise attitudes. Levels of political knowledge amongst news users might also affect such patterns.
This study examined these processes by drawing on data from the Chinese Internet Users’ Social Consciousness Survey in 2020 (so before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine); as part of this respondents were asked about their favour ability towards both countries, their frequency of news use, and the channels they used. The survey also included general questions testing for overall political knowledge and interest.
Political news use is positively associated with political knowledge and affective polarisation; news use thus leads to political learning and polarised attitudes. People with higher political knowledge have a higher level of affective polarisation. Overseas news use resulted in a significantly lower level of affective polarisation, compared to people who exclusively used Chinese news channels.
Chinese domestic news reporting about certain groups, subjects, and countries therefore contributes substantially to affective polarisation; the diversity of overseas news channels serves to reduce such polarisation tendencies.
