As China changes, so does its image of US

As President Hu Jintao prepares to visit the US next week for the first time as China's leader, he represents a country whose popular understanding of America has become more diverse, yet whose negative impression of the US as a "bully" and "rival" continues to deepen, particularly among young people.

The US is seen by urban Chinese through a complex love-hate relationship, and through a lens shaped both by official propaganda and a greater number of personal impressions. In recent years, views on the US have intensified as many Chinese feel more pride about the rise of their nation, say experts and ordinary people.

Many Chinese still feel a century-old sense that America is young and flexible, a "sunshine society," a place of wealth and generosity where laws are made to protect people, as one Beijing scholar here puts it. At the same time, more Chinese describe the US as trying to keep China poor, say it is trying to block China's rise as a world power since the US is weakening, and argue that the US media is more critical of China and Chinese leaders than it is to its own society and leaders.

"Most Americans are very kind," says Luo, a philosophy student whose comments were typical. "But now [after 9/11], the Americans don't care about the rest of the world, what is happening in other places, except when it concerns their own lives."

"What I hear is, 'I want my kids to go to school in the US, I want to go there on vacation,' " says a Western diplomat. "But at the same time [Chinese say] America is acting like China's enemy."

For college student Li Zhao, America is the California coast that actor Dustin Hoffman drives in "The Graduate," her favorite US film. For engineer Wang Yue, it is a grinning, gun-toting soldier wearing desert camouflage. For Yi, the US is a picket-fence neighborhood with lots of dogs, where "everyone says hello in the morning."

Such views tumble out at the "English Corner," a weekly gabfest of English students from all over Beijing at People's University. Across the street, "War of the Worlds" is playing at one of the biggest film theaters in Beijing. This is mostly a sympathetic crowd. They are interested in US lifestyles, sports, films, food: bowling, foos ball (a new rage), pizza, wealth.

They speak of the US role in defeating Japan in World War II, of helping Beijing get the 2008 Olympics, and American concern over the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. Ms. Li leads an explication of the song "Scarborough Fair."

One enterprising Chinese working for a joint venture compared the maturing Chinese view of America to the popularity of name-brand restaurants. Currently, Pizza Hut is the hottest restaurant in China, with long lines in the evenings.

"Pizza Hut is the McDonald's of 10 years ago," she says. "We used to think the US was McDonald's. Now we think it is a grownup restaurant, where you use knives and forks. People go because despite what you hear, the West is still cool in our minds."

Yet even at English Corner, deep suspicions are articulated about the US. "Anti-Americanism is building, and getting bigger," says a graduate student who did not give his name. "This feeling used to be due to propaganda. But now so many Chinese feel it, that no propaganda is needed."

Perhaps propaganda is not needed. But it is not as if Chinese have a choice. State-run media in China is an arm of the central propaganda department, and no paper dares to run material on US-China relations that is unapproved.

The Chinese "unofficial" position is constantly mixed with the view that America is constantly undermining China. An American college student in Beijing recently read a Chinese textbook stating that Martin Luther King Jr. never had the sympathy or help of white Americans, and that blacks in the south are hated by whites. "It wasn't even entirely true in the 1950s civil rights movement period," commented the student, who hails from Atlanta, Ga.

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