Hollywood in China: How American Culture Shapes Chinese Views of the USA, Iowa City, Iowa, October 17, 2013

- [Alan Brody] I want to acknowledge our university and community supporters, the University of Iowa Honors Program and the University of Iowa's International Programs. Both contribute time, talent, and logistics that enable us to do our work better. I also thank our sponsors for their financial support. The sponsors of today's program and AW Welt Ambrisco Insurance and the New Pioneer Food Co-Op. To both of them, thank you so much for helping us. Our format today is the usual one with my introduction of the speaker. That will be followed by our speaker's remarks which will run up until one o'clock followed by a question and answer period. You'll have cards on your table there so you can jot down your questions as he goes along. Those will be collected at one o'clock. Let me now introduce our speaker. I have to admit, I thought I didn't know him before, but as we were sitting here talking, we learned that the two of us were together in Beijing in 1996 to '97 when he was out there doing his dissertation research and I was in the middle of a four-year term with UNICEF in Beijing. We have in common a little cup with our picture on it from the Fourth of July picnic that the US Embassy puts on every year. I have one with my and my son, and he has one with himself and a friend. You see, what's that about seven degrees or less than seven degrees of removal is definitely true. I'm also just learning from him, but I'll give you first a general thing. He is the director of the Institute for US-China Issues and a professor in the Department of International Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of several books, China's New Nationalism: Pride, Politics, and Diplomacy. He is co-editor, he'll be talking later about another book he's recently finished. He is the co-editor of Chinese Politics: State, Society and the Market. Those involved in Chinese studies are probably familiar with his dozens of academic journal articles focusing on nationalism and China's domestic and foreign policies. He received his B.A. in East Asian Studies from Middlebury College, and an M.A. in Chinese Studies from the University of Michigan, and his PhD in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley. All of that sounds very impressive to the academics among us, but actually, I think in the thing, you got the most important academic credential of all that makes him fit to stand before us today and really give us the inside look is something that goes back further. He was born in Singapore, and then as a, I don't know what age you call someone a young man, but it was actually at the age of 11 or 12, as a young gentleman let's call him, he went to Chinese public elementary school in Beijing at the end of the 1970s around 1978 to '80. This was just at the end of the cultural revolution when everything was beginning to change, and Deng Xiaoping was speaking about the way forward for China and rather than taking things from the top down, people would have to learn to cross the river by feeling for the stones under their feet. So he was there in the middle of that wonderful time, and I'm sure that goes into all of his perspectives we are really blessed to have him here today. I welcome, and ask you to welcome, Dr. Peter Gries. - [Peter Gries] Thank you, Alan, and thank you, Ed, and the students, and others who've helped organize this event. I'm delighted to be here and to share the next half hour with all of you. I'd actually like to begin by sort of backing things up because the specific topic of the impact of Hollywood in China is a very recent research development for me. I thought I would sort of put it in a bigger picture that would also be, I think, more appropriate for this context. I want to first sort of give you my basic perspective as a political psychologist. I've sore of come out of the closet as a political psychologist over the last few years. Now I call myself a political psychologist. My training at Berkeley was in political science, but I've jumped into social psychology over the last few years. Essentially, if we contrast how most political scientists and economists think about reality, there's a really very fundamental difference. Political scientists generally think that the objective reality, the objective world speaks for itself, so when we think about US-China relations, we really think in terms of the balance of power, economically, militarily, bombs and rockets. That's US-China relations, and yes, that is US-China relations for 95% of scholars out there. I'm part of the 5% who says no. If we take a psychological perspective, we should understand that perception is often reality. The world, objectively speaking, doesn't speak for itself. We have our ways of viewing the world that are what we act upon. It is not the world itself that we act upon. It is our perceptions of the world that impact our attitudes and our behaviors. Since that's what I'm fundamentally interested in is the future of US-China relations and because of my long-standing personal connection with China, friendships with Chinese going way back, I have a basic, normative position which grounds all of my research, which is I don't want another US-China war. For that reason, I want to understand why we think about each other in the ways that we do in the hopes that we can avoid behaviors that will lead to conflict. Now, we might think that well, if perception is everything, everyone sees the world differently, there's no hope for social science. That's not what psychologist believe, that there are patterns and that there are consistencies in attributes of individuals. This is the persons, the systematic, our perceptions of the systematic product of both persons and situations. This is going to be the organizing framework for my talk. By persons, what I'm talking about is individual differences in things like ideology. Like, for example, we can be patriotic or we can be liberal or conservative or nationalistic, but also situations. So other things that impact our attitudes are things like the environment, the situations we're in, the contacts we as Americans have with Chinese or Chinese have with us as Americans. What I would like to do is basically structure today's talk in four parts, all of which center around this person-by situation way of thinking about the drivers of our mutual perceptions and misperceptions. I'm going to start with the American side because that's what I know the most about, I've done the most research on, and I have the best data on. Then, I'm going to turn to the Chinese side. On the American side, I'm going to focus on the key ideology that shapes our views of China. That begins with big L, Liberalism, the cherishing of individual liberty and freedom that is common to all Americans. But then I'm also going to talk about ideological differences among Americans, how liberals and conservatives systematically differ in the ways they view the world in general and China in particular. Then, I'm going to talk about some research I've done on how contact with Chinese shapes American attitudes towards China. Then, I'm going to flip over to the Chinese side, which is where the research is more shaky because there's not as much data and it's more new. I'm going to again begin at the level of the person and again focus on ideology, but in the Chines case, it's not Liberalism, no surprise, it's Nationalism. It's nationalist ideologies that are the most fundamental shapers of Chinese international attitudes and American attitudes in particular. Then, I'm going to finally, at the end, get to the topic of today's talk. It's going to be a kind of long, roundabout way of getting to the very latest experimental work that I've been doing. All of this research is a product of a research lab that I direct in the Institute for US-China Issues, which I also direct. The lab is on the political psychology of US-China relations. We bring together mostly social psychologists, cross-cultural psychologists, and political scientists, international relations theorists to do research. Okay, so number one is thinking about ideology as a driver of American attitudes towards China. The argument I want to make here is that big L, Liberalism, so the fact that America, the American tradition comes out of the European transition. It's a product of the Enlightenment, and the core idea here being just in two words, individual freedom. All Americans cherish individual freedom. I think that this fundamental commonality that we have as Americans drives a perception of China that is quite prevalent which is that it's basically the foil for the individual liberty that we cherish, that China becomes the land of the un-free in a way, if we want to use the zombie kind of, the undead or the un-free. The reason I got this picture up here, has anyone never seen this picture before? To me, that's incredibly revealing and you all have just made my point, so I owe all of you a beer. Why is it? I mean, this was actually the birth of cable news. If you all remember, you all should remember this, CNN, everyone was like is cable news going to work? Are people really going to be interested in cable news? Then we had the Tienanmen massacre, and then after that, we had the first Gulf War. Then we were stuck with cable news. Now, we got Twitter and everything, so it's Tienanmen's fault. Anyway, the point there is that there were tons of journalists, tons of coverage, and yet, this is the image that every anniversary American editors, journalists choose to focus on. Why do we make that choice? Why is this the one image of the bazillions that we have from that event? It's because it says something about us. We, as Americans, identify with this lone individual, his courage, and standing up to what? The evil Chinese state. I mean, what do the tanks represent? I call this, with my students, reductionist view of Chinese politics. Basically, you can reduce Chinese politics to brute force. We're free, they're slaves. That's it. Needless to say, as a teacher of Chinese politics, I struggle against this reductionist view of Chinese politics and try to convince my students that you can't possibly rule a country of 1.3 billion with guns to the heads of every Chinese 24/7, that there's more to Chinese politics than brute force. I'd like to argue that this view of China is not unique. Liberalism structures, American, British, European views of lots of things. The fear of the state embodied in George Orwell's 1984, it pervades our popular culture, everything from Hollywood movies about machines taking over. It doesn't matter if it's a machine, it's a mob, it's a state, anything that jeopardizes the individual liberty of the middle class is scary. This goes back to de Tocqueville's concerns about the tyranny of the masses, right? This is very fundamental to American liberalism. This is something Chinese just don't get. They don't understand how our views of China are a product of this larger ideology. The data I want to present to you for these next two sections of the talk, the first half of the talk, come from a book that Alan alluded to that I have coming out in March from Stanford University Press which is actually my first foray outside of Chinese politics and Chinese foreign policy. It's on how ideology divides liberals and conservatives over foreign affairs, and it looks at how ideology is a commonality and a difference in terms of how it impacts American attitudes towards foreign countries. I did a nationwide survey in 2011, and this bar chart represents mean feelings for the full population in terms of feelings of coolness and warmth towards a variety of foreign countries and international organizations. China is towards the bottom. In our survey, the average Americans felt pretty cool towards China. 34 degrees on a zero to 100 scale, so in absolute terms it's pretty cool, but also in relative terms it's pretty cool. The only countries that are cooler are North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan. So, not particularly good. How do you explain this? Obviously, there are a lot of reasons for that, but the one I want to highlight today is the point I already made. It's the big I, ideology of capital L, Liberalism. The fact that what we cherish as individual freedom, I think has a broad, constraining role on how the typical American views the world. What you very clearly see is that the countries that we feel the coolest towards are countries that we tend to see as not very free, North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, China. The countries that we feel the warmest towards, England, Japan, Israel, Germany, those are countries that, you know, we think are fellow democracies. They're places where freedom is secure. Okay, but we all know that Americans are also divided, right? And actually, this is what my book is primarily about. It's not the ideology that we share. It's the differences within the broad consensus. Americans are divided in terms of partisanship. An underlying partisanship is ideology. We have liberals and conservatives. This chart takes the same data and it simply divides people by whether they self identify as strongly liberal or liberal on the on hand or conservative or strongly conservative on the other hand. It compares those subgroups mean scores. So if you're above that central line of zero, it means that liberals felt more warmly towards those countries, and you notice, there's only two exceptions to the rule, the United States itself. Conservatives felt more warmly towards America than liberals did, and actually, this is consistent with survey results on patriotism and nationalism. Conservatives are consistently more patriotic and nationalistic than liberals are. I know a lot of liberals won't like to hear that. That's another paper, or another talk we could have, but the other exception which is really interesting is Israel, and there's a chapter on the Middle East in my book which was really fun to write 'cause I didn't know anything about it and I learned a lot. It is the one place where conservatives, for a variety of reasons including biblical literalism in the Book of Revelations, feel extremely strongly about Israel. Whereas liberals tend to be more sympathetic towards the Palestinians. But the general trend here you can see is that liberals tend to feel warmer towards foreign countries and international organizations. China's right in the middle. It's a substantial difference. Liberals feel warmer towards China than conservatives do. I don't think that this should surprise you that the public opinion data reveals something that's common sense. Part of the reason I wrote this book, however, is that the public opinion researchers, people like Andy Kohut at Pew and those at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, they've completely missed the boat on this. The survey researchers have actually argued that there is no ideological effect on the American people's international attitudes, that pretty much, Americans share the same international attitudes. It's just, it's a long story why that happened mostly having to do with survey methodology and analysis. Just to point out for Alan's sake as UNICEF, the UN is at the far right of this bar graph because there was a massive 49-degree difference in warmth between American liberals and American conservatives. That chapter was almost as fun as the Israel and Middle East chapter to write because I learned a tremendous amount about just how long American liberals and conservatives have been arguing about International organizations. Indeed, the very rise of fundamentalist Christianity was tied in with the debate over the League of Nations. It was then that these kind of theological debates came out into the public, and all of a sudden, American Protestants became, began arguing amongst themselves about what a Protestant should be. The League of Nations is what kind of got that started, but it still lives on. UNICEF is a highly partisan issue among certain Americans. Okay, but we're going to be focusing on, on China and now I have some kind of technical statistics. Please don't worry about this. This is a mediation analysis. It seeks to explain what I showed you before, why conservatives desire a tougher policy towards China than liberals do. What we know from social psychology and cognitive psychology is when you ask someone a difficult question like what foreign policy should we have towards China, nobody has the expertise to really answer that directly or very few people. Instead, we use these heuristics for shortcuts. One kind of heuristic is called the affect heuristic which is we substitute a difficult sort of cognitive question with an easier gut feeling question. Instead of answering the question what policy should you have towards China, you actually ask yourself how do I feel about Chinese people? That's the box up at the top. Or how do I feel about the Chinese government? That, in fact, is what ends up driving your answer to the question of what policy should you have, should America take towards China. Let's talk first about the top path. It turns out people, people's attitudes towards Asians in general, not surprisingly, drive their attitudes towards Chinese in particular. There is a small, small effect, not large of ideology on prejudice against Asians and Chinese. It's not large, but it is statistically significant. It has a long history in American politics as well. Ever since Chinese began immigrating to the West Coast, there was anti-Chinese prejudice. My survey from 2011 reveals that that does persist. Although, it is fairly small. It persists in terms of being an ideological cleavage. Overall though, there are actually very positive American attitudes towards Chinese. More important is the bottom path in this model which shows that basically when asked what policy do you what towards, foreign policy do you want towards China, people will tend to think about well, how do I feel about the Chinese government. Then they'll sort of say well, what do I know about the Chinese government? Oh, it's communist, right? So, not surprisingly, it's this communism that becomes absolutely sort of one of the major drivers of our foreign policy preferences. I think it's intuitive for most of us that there are cleavages between liberals and conservatives over communism, right? Long history, ever since McCarthyism, Ronald Reagan, anti-communism has been central to the rise of the conservative movement. So little surprise that liberals and conservatives differ over China, in part because the Chinese government is seen as communist. In fact, I did another mediation model, and again, don't worry about the technical aspect of this, but this just, what I'm trying to do here and a big part of my book is actually to go beyond simply saying liberals versus conservatives because we all know that there are many different types of liberals and conservatives. I actually measure four different dimensions, of sort of sub-dimensions of ideology. Three of them are here. Cultural traditionalism, this is attitudes towards things like sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. It's the biblical literalism kinds of stuff. Economic inequality, so attitudes towards income redistribution, libertarian versus communitarian politics as a political dimension. The fourth dimensions, which was not relevant for this analysis, is what I call social or socio-racial ideology, but what this analysis basically shows is that for three of these four dimensions help account for the big difference between liberals and conservatives over communism. Basically, you have different kinds of liberals and different kinds of conservatives who for different reasons have the same, basic position on communism. For example, say on the conservative side, if you're an Evangelical Christian, you may not like communism because it's atheist, but if you're a Libertarian, you may not like communism because you don't even like the American government, let alone a communist Government, right? Yeah, so that's what that's about. Okay, so that's one down. Now, we're going to move on to, remember, we talked about persons and situations as being drivers of our international attitudes. So I have written one paper and I have some evidence in the new book as well that addresses the question of the impact of globalization and in increased contacts with Chinese and the China attitudes of the American people. And I want to point out that the Chinese government is betting heavily on the idea that increased contact and knowledge about China will improve western attitudes towards China. In fact one of the mantras that I've been hearing for 30 years whenever talking with Chinese about prompts in US China relations, it's basically the reason we have problems is you all just don't understand us. If you knew us better, you'd love us. So it's the panda idea there right and then over to the right, I have the Confucius institute logo. The Chinese government has been investing hugely in increasing western knowledge of China and contacts with Chinese. The Chinese government's position is very reminiscent of the work of a very famous social psychologist named Gordon Allport, who proposed the contact hypothesis in the 1950s. He argued that the reason why increased contact between groups often reduces prejudice is that increased contact leads to greater knowledge and that reduces fear and then reduces prejudice basically. Much of the US Civil Rights Movement was based on this idea. So policies like busing, school integration, were premised on the idea that you put people together. They'll know more about each other and you'll reduce prejudice. Of course what social psychologists now know is that contact is indeterminant. You have to have good quality contact for increased contact to help. In fact they know that greater contact that's poor quality or interpreted poorly only exacerbates conflict and makes things worse. I think students of US China relations should try to learn from some of this experience. So let's start from the question of how much do Americans know about China the issue of knowledge. I'm a big King of the Hill fan. I don't know if any of you watch this. But it's about a small town in Texas where a propane salesman named Hank has his friends on the block and this Laotian guy in the very first season moves in next door. And there's a very funny dialogue between Hank and his buddy Bill who is a barber at the local military base. Meeting Kahn from Laos, and it's just a very funny exchange that sort of pokes fun at American ignorance of the world. So I actually put this to the empirical test and in my 2011 survey, I asked five questions, factual questions in multiple choice format to the American people basically. And unfortunately it is pretty clear that Americans are very not knowledgeable about China. But I think it's fair to say that Americans aren't knowledgeable about very many international countries. That's why I think all of you are here is you probably want to promote greater education about the world. I'd also say that I think that's true for most countries. Most people everywhere know very little about foreign countries and they probably think they know a lot more than they really do. And another point is that knowledge and understanding are two completely different things. I would argue that Chinese actually do probably know more factoids about America than vice versa. Does that mean they understand America better than Americans understand China? I don't think so. I actually think our ideologies lead to an equal amount of misperception. But these questions I've got the correct answer highlighted. You can kind of look at them yourself, because the only way to assess whether an average of 43 is a good or bad score is to decide how to make a subjective assessment of how difficult the questions are. I don't think the questions are too difficult. And I would also add that in any multiple choice test if you have four response categories, pure chance should lead to a score of 25. So 43 is not too much better than just guessing. I think it's true that we don't on average know that much, but we do vary. Some people know more and some people know less. This is a statistical model. Again I don't want you to worry about the details of it, but the basic, the negative sign next to the number indicates that the more Chinese friends or more contact with Chinese, responded to my survey said they had the less prejudice they felt towards the Chinese people. It was a small effect but in the expected direction. And the impact of knowledge was exactly as Allport says it should be that if contact leads to greater knowledge, it's a positive number, 0.29, which then reduces prejudice, negative 0.34. But here is what made this a publishable worthy paper is knowledge decreased prejudice but it increased negativity towards the Chinese government. And that's why the paper we wrote was called when knowledge is, what did we call it? Double edged sword. Knowledge is a double edged sword. So it has good and bad impact. Greater American knowledge about China reduces prejudice against Chinese people but makes us dislike the Chinese government even more, which is pretty consistent with the argument I made to you before about capital L liberalism. And both of these things impact policy preferences but attitudes towards the government matter more. So this suggests that the Confucius Institute investment is a mixed bag and can have a downside. For some Americans as they learn more about China, they end up disliking the Chinese government more and wanting a tougher China policy. Okay so now we are finally going to move to China, where we don't have as good data because it is harder to do research in China. And I want to fairly quickly go over what my first book was about. It was called China's new nationalism and it's getting at that person's level. So the level of psychological predispositions and ideologies. In China, it's not liberalism. It's nationalism. This is from the 1999 Belgrade bombing. Alan was in Beijing at this time. NATO forces bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and three journalists/intelligence agents were killed in that raid and there were huge protests in China and abroad. This is in 1999. Clinton was our president and you see he is smoking a bomb, a NATO bomb but it's also kind of reference to, a phallic references to the Monica Lewinsky scandal which is kind of interesting way of putting him down. But the real question was at that time why were Chinese so angry and Alan and I were talking about this earlier, the popular western press basically said it's all the government's fault. The Chinese people weren't really upset. They were just manipulated by the Chinese government. And a big part of my book arguing no it's not that simple. The Chinese people have a set of beliefs that are tied to the nationalist ideology that led them to be genuinely angry at the United States. And it's because of the centrality of Nationalism to Chinese identity. Ever since 1949, when the Chinese Community Party was established, what Mao is remembered for saying is not workers of the world unite. It's China has stood up. Stand up against what? Stood up against western imperialist aggression. So this has been a long theme and central to that is the historical narrative of the Century of Humiliation that begins with the First Opium Wars. Whole series of wars and humiliations for another 100 years basically through World War II and the Korean War with the United States is when many people argue the century ended. But it's useful to know that the way this history has been understood has shifted. In the Mao's period, China confronted a hostile world and needed the construction of sort of these heroic figures, and so there is a victor narrative of resistance against the Japanese during the World War. Resistance against the United States in the Korean war. And kind of suppressing memories of suffering at that time. In many ways, it's actually analogous to the way Israel has evolved in its memory of the holocaust. In the 1950s, it was all about heroic ghetto resistance. It was not about the Holocaust itself, and it was only after Eichmann's trial in the late 1950s that Holocaust Day as we know it now started to take shape. So there was this victor narrative, heroism. This is a website. What I argue in the book is that a new victimization narrative started to emerge at the 50th anniversary of world War II in 1955. And Chinese started confronting their suffering at the hands of Western and Japanese imperialism at that time and that is really central to understanding how Chinese perceive these kinds of events like the Belgrade bombing. This is an editorial that came out right after the Belgrade bombing. And you can see how this history is just right on the fingertips. And this is not exceptional because it's the people's daily. I was reading blog posts and letters written by Chinese. This is how Chinese think about it. They have this history of being humiliated and bullied and they want to raise above that. But they'll understand things like the Belgrade bombing in those terms. Okay so that was the person's the ideological side. Now Hollywood in China. What impact has contact with America have on Chinese attitudes towards the United States? Well what kinds of contacts are there? Almost none. This is a 2008 survey that showed if you look at the very bottom less than three tenths of 1% of the Chinese in this 2008 survey said they'd had traveled to North America. Only eight tenths of 1% said they even knew an American. What kinds of contact or exposure do they have? Well it's popular culture. Could it be that this kind of globalization of Hollywood culture forms a kind of indirect contact that may have some of the same effects that Gordon Allport's contact hypothesis laid out. There is not a lot of evidence to answer this question. I did find an item in the same China General social survey from 2008, increasing contact with foreign films, music, and books is damaging to our own culture. It turned out that both the, most typical and average response on a one to seven agree-disagree scale was a four. So basically neutral. So on average we can't really say anything. There is a little bit of information you can gain by looking at the demographic drivers of answers to that question, and they're pretty much as expected. Older people were more likely to agree with that statement. Where greater education was associated with greater disagreement. Educated people tend to be more globalized, more cosmopolitan and minorities were less likely to buy into the predominantly Hahn narrative of western bullying and western imperialism. But it's not very informative overall. In 2011, I did a large internet convenience sample of Chinese netizens. It's not representative so it's only suggestive, but I included items that measured Chinese nationalism. These are items like China is the best country in the world, agree disagree and it turned out that that item did negatively predict warmth towards America. So the more nationalist you were, the cooler you felt towards America, makes sense. I also included a long list of international celebrities, four of whom were American and it was just how much do you like or dislike these celebrities and it included Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt, Eminem and Lady Gaga and I averaged the scores to create a scale and it turned out that item correlated positively with warmth towards America. The more someone said yeah I like these guys, the more they also were likely to feel warmly towards America. So I saw a ray of hope And I said I need to look into this. I thought a lot about my experiences in China and how these images in the magazines are just kind of part of daily life. You have these magazines stalls on a lot of intersections in major cities and that's how if they're not meeting Americans directly their exposure is this kind of it's called parasocial exposure, what sociologists call it. We have parasocial relationships with celebrities. Which means we feel like we know them when we don't. Just 'cos we watch them on TV. So I did an internet experiment where I saw took advantage of that. I've run into time, so I'm going to go through this just very quickly. It's a non representative sample of mainly college students. And I asked them to assess, I didn't ask them to look at the people. I said please tell me how attractive the graphic design of these magazine covers is. And I randomly distributed people into two groups. One group in the control condition was asked to assess the graphic design of magazines that happen to have Chinese celebrities on the covers and the other group was randomly assigned to assess the graphic designs of similar Chinese magazines but with Americans on the covers. My hope was that those who, I kind of have this indirect exposure to the Americans without thinking about it would end feeling more warmly towards America. And there was a time lag, this is examples of what the questions look like. The result was exactly opposite. And unfortunately consistent with my earlier work on nationalism. So people who were randomly assigned Chinese college students were randomly assigned to the American celebrities prime, ended up desiring a tougher American policy than those who had looked at the Chinese celebrities and it was the substantial difference. There was no effect when asked about what policy would you like towards third party countries. Like South Africa, Brazil, or Canada. So wasn't just a kind of mood inducement, the effect appeared to be focused and retaliatory in nature. This was consistent with the fact that there was also warmth towards fellow Chinese, which increased when you were exposed to the American celebrities condition. Combining these two things, what I did was it's called the mediation analysis and the argument is basically that when exposed to these American celebrities, the subliminal exposure increased desires for tougher US policies, in part due to a self enhancement motive, that's why they ended up sort of compensating by feeling warmer towards fellow Chinese. This is consistent with a study done by some social psychologists, in which they altered a clip from Rocky IV to allow the American to win. One group gets the Russian winning, the other group gets the American winning and what they found when the American lost, Sylvester Stallone lost to the Russian, these American college students lost national self esteem, but when they were subsequently allowed to derogate Russia their self esteem returned. So I think our results in the Chinese experiment are consistent with that. I guess I'll skim through. This is an even more interesting finding, which basically gets at this person by situation interaction. Because what I was just showing you was at the macro level. But different kinds of people responded to the situational or environmental stimulus in different ways. Specifically, what I called national narcissists. People who are very sensitive about their national identity were more likely to react negatively. Those are the people in the red line. So when they saw the American celebrities, they basically ended up feeling cooler towards the United States. But more cosmopolitan Chinese who were low on national narcissism, reacted as I had hoped or expected in the first place, which is they actually ended up feeling warmer towards the United States. So I think that's it. Thank you. Sorry went a little over. - [Alan Brody] Let me just ask you a slightly off from the topic you're presenting but one of the thoughts I had in China often, I was there during that Bill Clinton, during the impeachment proceedings and everything watching them in Beijing and it struck me at that time how difficult it is for people outside this country to understand the political culture of this place. What in the world is going on? And I basically applied the saying that we really are the, to the rest of the world, the inscrutable Americans, which is you may recall was an expression we used to apply to Chinese. So I'm wondering if you'd just take a minute or so not too long, 'cos I think other questions will come back to its research, of that point of view and particularly this week the Chinese have been heard from, they've spoken out rather firmly. They do hold 2.2 trillion dollars I believe of American debt and how do they look at this and any insights into that? - [Peter Gries] And actually the debt question is one of the questions that's come up. I'll deal with the first one first and then the debt one. The question of the inscrutable Americans and how foreigners and Chinese been particular viewed the United States is actually a perfect question for this talk, because that's sort of one reason why its important to understand for me at any rate. Chinese do not understand the argument I made about American liberalism. The big L liberalism and how central it is to American identity, because of course they understand America through their own prism of nationalism. Anything else that doesn't fit the script, is just BS. So on human rights issues, they believe that the only reason Americans care about human rights in China, a Chinese nationalist their view of this is it's just another way to humiliate China. There is no legitimacy given, no credence given to the idea that Americans would actually care about things like the individual liberties of the Chinese people. Why? Because they don't understand how central liberalism is to American political culture. So they have very, very fundamental misunderstandings. That's why I said during the talk that Chinese may actually know a little bit more about America than Americans know about China. So how many of you could name a Chinese celebrity? Probably not many. But most Chinese would be not just be able to name American celebrities, but they can say how much they like or dislike Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston so they probably know more about us than we know about them but they don't understand more. They really don't precisely for this reason, that constantly projecting their own modes of thinking on to us, so if there's some movie that comes out that has any kind of China connection to it. I don't know if you all remember about 10 years ago, there was a Richard Gere movie called Red Corner and it was about an American lawyer who gets framed for murder in a Beijing hotel or a Shanghai hotel. And of course Chinese were all saying that this is fun-hua, it's anti-Chinese. It's racist. And if you look at the movie, it's a classic case of big L liberalism. Because actually the most sympathetic characters in the movie are Gere's Chinese female lawyer. And the bad guys are not just the Chinese government, but also the US embassy. Because the US embassy is symbolic of the state. The movie is really about American fears of the state, whether it's an evil Chinese state or an evil American state. And it' all about how individuals are great, whether it's Richard Gere, who I'm not a big of, but really this female lawyer was the most sympathetic character. So it's a fundamental misunderstanding, what was really an expression of our liberalism was interpreted as sort of anti-Chinese prejudice which it wasn't. The economics question, I'm not a political economist and this isn't my area of expertise. But my basic position on the debt is that there is a lot of misunderstanding in the United States of the economics of what goes on with both the trade imbalance and the fact that China is the largest holder of US treasury notes. The way I think about it is the same way that we talked about nuclear issues during the Cold War, mutually assured destruction. If they shoot their missiles, we'll shoot our missiles, we'll all die. In terms of the debt, the same thing exists. I call it mutually assured economic destruction. Although it's even better than that from our perspective because we have all the cards. We really do. Who decides the value of the dollar. We do. What happens to their savings of US dollars when we make those decisions? Whatever we decide. We have all the chips. Not them. Another way to think about this is if I owe you $10 you may have some leverage over me, but if I owe a billion dollars you don't want to kill me 'cos you won't get your billion dollars back. Plenty of mobster movies about that. We have all the leverage when it comes to that but Chinese government made a decision that I think in the end was poor that because they were worried about inflation they decided not to invest the earnings from an export oriented economic development strategy and instead force savings basically. And the only place you could do that is in T-bonds basically. And so they put all this money in T-bilis and now they're at the mercy of American economic policy. - [Alan Brody] There were a couple of questions about the Chinese attitude towards the US versus Japan. And related to that the disputes over the islands and things like that. Can you comment on that? - [Peter Gries] Yes, actually I've done a lot of work on Sino-Japanese relations and the news is even worse because there is a fundamental difference. The commonality is that when Chinese think about the Century of Humiliation, they lump together the British because of the opium wars, the French the Americans and the Japanese because all these countries together were part of this Century of Humiliation. But when it comes to Japan, there is another narrative that kicks in. Which is the narrative of China as the beneficent older brother. That gave Japan civilization a millennia ago in the Tang dynasty over a 1000 years ago, we Chinese we gave the Japanese characters. We gave them Buddhism, we gave them civilization and they should've been good tributary states and they should've been thankful. Instead in 1895, they turn around they kick out butts in the Sino-Japanese Jao War. They humiliate us publicly with the Treaty of Shimonoseki. And then guess what happens 50 years later? They invade us, they rape our women, and they kill 30 million Chinese. And then they won't say sorry. It's a double whammy when it comes to Japan. Chinese feel anger in all of its dimensions. At the most simple level, Aristotle made a distinction between higher and lower forms of anger. Lower is kind of visceral anger and when Chinese confront the rape of Nanjing, and the brutality of what happened in Nanjing in 1937 in December it just creates visceral disgust and anger. But that's short lived. What sustains anger against Japan is what Aristotle called the higher form or ethical anger. Righteous indignation. How could you do this to us? After all we've done for you for over a 1000 years, so the anti-Japanese sentiment is on a whole another ballgame than anti-American, anti-French, anti-British sentiment. It's much more serious. On the one hand we should be thankful that we are not the direct targets of that kind of anger. On the other hand we will get sucked in. In fact my most likely scenario for a future US China conflict is not one that comes out of a direct conflict over economic and military issues. What most of my colleagues in political science study, I think the most likely scenario is us getting sucked into a conflict with Japan. If there was a Belgrade bombing or a spy plane collision involving the Japanese instead of the United States, I don't think leadership in Tokyo or Beijing could stop public opinion from forcing their hand and escalating the dispute and then the United States will get sucked in. Another possibility is a conflict with Taiwan. Which could also draw the United States out. And you have the nuclear situation in the Korean peninsula. So the part of the world I study is full of excitement. - [Alan Brody] Well I've got a couple of more questions, but I think we are really out of time now. One more question, alright. You see public opinion sway things here. There is a question here about how much do you think American exceptionalism contributes to the American side of the perception of the Chinese and the world and they tagged on the question, what about social media and I think it is a good after thought, 'cos I think looking at that and the impact of social media and where does that take us with some of these questions you're asking. - [Peter Gries] I'm not quite sure what to do with the second half, so I'll start with the first. I'm reminded of how this American exceptionalism was an issue in the last presidential campaign because I believe Obama was in Europe at one point and asked do you think America is an exceptional country and he said and replied something like yes I believe America is exceptional and I'm sure that the Swiss believe they're exceptional and Germans believe they're exceptional. He was probably in Switzerland or something like that. Of course conservatives back in Washington jumped all over that and said are you crazy? Only America is really exceptional. This is actually related to the national narcissism I talked with you about in the Chinese context. Americans can be divided on nationalism and national narcissism too. The inflated sense of grandiosity and entitlement is what the idea of national narcissism gets at. And yes I have tons of evidence, survey evidence that shows that Americans who are hired whether it's on nationalism or national narcissism are more likely to feel coolly toward foreign countries and especially countries that compete with the United States. So countries like China, so that sense of American exceptionalism when taken to the extremes of national grandiosity and entitlement is pernicious because it leads to an exaggerated sense of threat from countries like China. Social media who had the question initially? Maybe they could elaborate for me. Unfortunately I feel like I failed a little bit in my talk because of the way you ask the question at the end. Because my point is it's not an either or. The whole point behind talking about a person by situation interaction is that it's contingent. So you're asking about a particular kind of situation. The experiment I did was about sort of subliminal exposure to magazine covers. What you're talking about is comparable to that. So it's things like being part of a blog network or receiving Twitter feeds. It's a kind of peer socialization effect. Through the internet. I would conceive of that as a situational factor that drives our attitudes that interacts with these preexisting personality variables. How one will respond to these kinds of peer socialization pressures will depend on a lot of things about who you are. Such as are you a certain kind of liberal or a certain kind of conservative. Are you a national narcissist or more of a cosmopolitan? Do you believe in American exceptionalism or do you believe that most people think that their countries are exceptional. I think all of those things will matter and that's actually what this, that's why this is the payoff actually statistical work is that it shows an interaction between certain kinds of people and certain kinds of situations so I guess this is my answer to your question is that it depends. - [Alan Brody] On behalf of the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council I want to thank Professor Peter Gries for his talk on Hollywood in China, how American culture shapes Chinese views of the US. Once again I thank the University of Iowa's international programs and the UI Honors program for their continuing generous support and special thanks to AW Welt Ambrisco Insurance and the New Pioneer Food Coop who supported today's program. Peter here comes the highlight of the day, and I prepared for this earlier by comments about mugs and how important they are as mementos and I want to share with you this memento of today. It's the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council mug. Thank you very much. - [Peter Gries] Thank you. - [Alan Brody] Enjoy your coffee. Should you wish to become an ICFRC member or support our wonderful programs like today's, with the tax deductible contribution you can visit us at the back of the hall, call us at 319-335-0351 or you may mail donations directly to ICFRC, 1120 University Capitol Centre, Iowa City, 52242. Thank you all of you again for joining us today and we are adjourned. - [Narrator] You are watching City Channel Four, on TV, online, on demand, on Facebook and now on the go, on your mobile device.