Vietnam being 41% China is disgraceful to communists tbh, I know the history but it’s still dogshit.
i’d imagine the polling is bullshit like Luna Oi! has talked about previously, e.g. vietnamese english speakers are far more likely to be hogs.
How the fuck do Laos and Vietnam support the US more the fuck
China being a more noticeable power in the region combined with a massive propaganda campaign by the US designed to get their communist states to collapse like the USSR did.
Though their criteria for this is also very sus:
Like, of course a “private sector representative” would prefer the US, or a “think-tanker” and a lot of academics around the world are unfortunately full of pro-west and pro-US brainworms. And it isn’t “which country is a bigger threat” it is “if you were forced to side with one, which one?” Which I imagine most countries would pick the US. China isn’t likely to do much beyond finger wag at them for siding with the US, the US is likely to bomb them worse than the first time if they sided with China.
This comes from the “State of ASEAN” annual survey, which is done annually by ISEAS, a Singapore government-funded institute.
I’ve been keeping track of their results for the past couple years. Their survey demographic is heavily skewed towards the most liberal and Western comprador-aspirant classes of the surveyed countries (half of the affiliated groups of their respondents in 2023 identified as belonging to “Academia, Think-Tanks, or Research Institutions” or “Civil Society, Non-Government Organisations or Media”).
It’s difficult to say that even with respect to the selected demographics targeted, the data is actually useful since their survey methodology is flawed and peppered with leading questions galore. In this new 2026 survey, they refer to the ongoing Palestinian Genocide as the “Israel-Hamas conflict” and there’s not a single mention of Palestine other than two euphemistic uses of “Gaza conflict.” When asking questions about respondents that favor the US or China, they frame the choices in this language:
“What could worsen your positive impression of the United States? (Choose 1 response)”
- “US’ support for Israel in the Gaza conflict”
“What could potentially worsen your positive impression of China? (Choose 1 response)”
- “China’s mistreatment of its minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang and its handling of Hong Kong”
In asking the exact same question about foreign interference, for China, they helpfully add a fifth column bait to color the respondents’ impressions:
- “China’s interference in my country’s domestic affairs (including through social media and influence over the ethnic Chinese citizens of my country)”
while the US’ is just:
- US’ interference in my country’s domestic affairs
This all coming from the same survey that makes the rounds each year throughout the media and gets relied on to characterize what “Southeast Asia thinks” supposedly.
Respondents include people in academia, think-tankers, or researchers, private sector representatives, civil society, NGO, or media representatives, government officials, and regional or international organizations personnel.
they surveyed the absolute weirdest freaks in these countries and still couldn’t get the numbers to be decidedly pro US lol. cooked empire
Exactly. I tend to think the numbers would look more in favor for China, if they had large, representative, random samples instead of biased ones.
The fact that four of the countries at the bottom are ones that we did a bunch of war crimes in never ceases to amaze me. Those people really don’t like China lol
it’s interesting how Vietnam and Laos has way more of a negative view of China than I would’ve assumed
Is there anything to read on this?
Laos being 50-50 is unbelievable
The empire that covered your whole country in cluster bombs and still refuse to do anything about it vs the country that helped build high speed rail and make up like half of the tourism income
Vietnam is slightly more reasonable, with Deng’s war against Vietnam, and more recent South China Sea issues, but still
Vietnam is slightly more reasonable, with Deng’s war against Vietnam, and more recent South China Sea issues
It’s still hard to believe a month-long border war (that Vietnam won) and maritime boundary disputes are really a more painful memory than the Vietnam War.
it might be a flawed census (for example, only taking them from the capital where there may be more people that speak English and have better connections with the west than China, thus leading to more syncretic beliefs), the people may be critical of the current government thus may reflect to their affiliations with china, or it might be a case of them sympathising with fellow SEA people’s, who generally are more pro-american, and may look at instances like the incidents in south china sea or china supporting a reactionary junta in Myanmar as cases for not supporting China (rather than simply supporting USA)
We have to remember the period following the American cluster bombing of their region, china also supported Pol Pot’s Cambodia, as well as skirmishes with Vietnam, while this is not exactly the case now, their current realpolitik that also still involves selling weapons to UAE because it would be America otherwise does not help, even if it is materially consistent and potentially the right move to make
Besides, we could consider the fact that a large portion of Vietnam’s growth actually came from foreign investment along with a socialist market economy, rather than directly from china, which would reflect as wanting a continued domestic growth versus potential moral or ideological alliances with china, which wouldn’t be an insane idea, though why would this be the case in Laos, unless the people themselves want something akin to what Vietnam went through?
It says in the survey that it is across people who have influence over foreign policy, it is not a survey of average citizens.
ughhh that 61% on Myanmar is sadly not surprising but no less worrying. China’s involvement in the civil war is going to cause so much trouble even if said civil war dies down in the future. I can only hope the US empire falls quickly before it can even think to sink its fangs even further here.
The numbers for Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia are such a profound indictment of local and Chinese communism, like wtf is going on?
Honestly, at this point the global lead poisoning theory is the only holistic explanation, because there’s no way a country that lost 3 million people to US imperialism hates China more because of a border skirmish 50 years ago. Cambodia makes slightly more sense, except the US also supported Pol Pot and to a greater extent soooo?
Like don’t any of these people have family that perished in the war? It only makes sense if these numbers come from boomers who are mentally compromised by lead and US military toxins since childhood, destroying their ability to reason and empathize
… or the survey is flawed, as they often are and as someone else has pointed out.
