INFLUENCE OF US AND CHINA
In general, Singaporean respondents were slightly more likely to have perceived China to have been good for Asia and Singapore when compared to the United States.
According to last year’s survey, 34.3 per cent said the US did much more good than harm or somewhat more good than harm, while 50.1 per cent said that this was the case for China.
Singaporean respondents also believed that China will have the most influence in Asia in 10 years’ time, with a 52.2 percentage point difference to a similar question on the United States’ influence in the future.
Upon further analysis to understand the factors that influenced respondents’ perceptions of Chinese influence and US influence on Singapore, only income level explained the difference in responses, said IPS.
Despite that, it was found that Singaporeans with higher-income backgrounds were more likely to have the same view towards each country in terms of its influence.
Researchers also compared the results from Singaporean respondents with those from three other alternative political regimes – Taiwan, Vietnam and the Philippines.
Compared to those in Taiwan, Vietnam and the Philippines who favoured the US more, Singaporeans were more neutral between the two powers.
Factors such as age, gender, education, political interest and their attachment to authoritarianism helped explain how they viewed the quality of each country’s influence, said IPS.
For example, in the Philippines, those aged 56 and above felt that the US had a more positive influence than China.
In Taiwan, women were split in terms of which superpower they favoured.
Similar to Singapore, Vietnamese respondents in the higher income bracket as well as those with higher political interest were more likely to feel that US influence and Chinese influence were the same.
In conducting the latest survey, IPS said that respondents could self-administer their choices on tablets in the presence of the interviewers.
Previously, interviewers would read out questions to respondents and keyed in their answers into tablets. Interviewers could respond to questions respondents might have and they also put “peer pressure” on respondents to give definitive answers, said IPS.
This change in the way data is collected led to a higher proportion of respondents choosing the “Don’t understand/Don’t know/Can’t choose/Decline to answer” options.
This was especially the case for questions on international relations.
“There is a statistically significant relationship between the way people completed the survey and this section of the survey,” said IPS.
Those completing the questions on their own were more likely to choose the “Don’t understand/Don’t know/Can’t choose/Decline to answer” options.
These responses were not taken into account in calculating mean scores for the responses, IPS noted.
