Against Everything Involving China? Two Types of Sinophobia in Taiwan

This paper develops a two-dimensional concept of Sinophobia (恐中) to study Taiwanese attitudes toward mainland China as well as their sources and political consequences. Taiwanese skepticism toward China has grown in recent years, concomitant with increasing cross-Strait interactions and exchanges. This has been widely characterized as a “Sinophobia syndrome.” To investigate this phenomenon, we divide Sinophobia into two types—“group-difference-driven” and “risk-driven”—and investigate whether the two types exert different effects on individual preferences regarding policies involving China. Multivariate analyses show that a model that distinguishes between the two types of Sinophobia fits the data very well and that the risk-driven attitude influences decisions on issues related to China more strongly than does the group-difference-driven attitude. This finding suggests that although perceptions of group difference may prompt fears of China, it is not a powerful determinant of policy preferences. Additional analyses reveal that the risk-driven attitude also influences other policy-relevant attitudes and behavior, including voting in the 2012 presidential election