I have to produce a paper on why UK attitudes toward China are more favourable than those in the rest of Europe. As any statistician will tell you, this tendency has a solid basis in the fact that Britons consistently give more optimistic answers in surveys, whatever the topic.

For the puproses of debate on international relations, however, this is the Wrong Answer.

So I have to basically come up with plausible-sounding political reasons instead, and I'm all out of ideas. Europeans do more trade with China and our shared history mostly involves us trying to kill/exploit/turn them into smackheads.

FML.

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Free market ideology is more deeply ingrained in Britons than in Europeans and so is the (unproven) idea that capitalism lead to democracy.

Furthermore, while, usually, trading with someone means getting to know them better and accept them more, trading with China, given how much China cheats, may have the reverse effect - The more you trade with them, the more you despise them.

Finally - and that's kind of linked to the free market ideology, Europeans are more sensitive to threats to their social democratic welfare model. Inchoately maybe, Europeans realise that a big increase in worldwide Labour supply without corresponding increase in demand, is a massive threat to all other workers around the globe.

In general, I suspect that the belief in capitalism/free markets might indeed the source of Britons' statistical optimism. After all, classical economic thinking can summarised by "in the long run, all will be well"...

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Well I suppose if I preface it with "hermaneutically speaking" no one'll have a clue what I'm talking about anyway so they might just swallow it.

Got to call the bloke this morning. I'm going to try and talk him out of it.

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Yay, got the go-ahead to write about whether public diplomacy actually has any effect on public opinion or not, which is far more in line with the statistics. I'll have to brush up on my methodology and I don't think a whole lot of papers exist to back up my theories, but I'll manage something.

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