There are many reasons why China's image abroad is so bad. The first reason is that over the past few decades, China has grown rapidly to become the world's second-largest economy, and such growth was achieved neither through colonial plunder nor by capturing profits and achieving the primitive accumulation of capital by occupying the top of the global value chain. Such an economic miracle is difficult to explain by the usual Western economic theories. In contrast to the limited liability governments of the West, the Chinese government is a government of unlimited responsibility, with a natural obligation and responsibility to focus on economic development and raising the standard of living of its people. This has led to a significant difference between the Western and Chinese systems. The West's ambiguous perception of China's future development has led to frequent misjudgments and conclusions about China in its media coverage, academic research, and policy formulation and implementation.
The second reason for the West's negative perception of China in the long history of information errors that have led to cognitive biases among Western audiences. During the "honeymoon period" in the 1980s, the U.S. media often romanticized China, portraying it as a mysterious, ancient, and primitive country. But after the 1990s, China's modernization process accelerated and deepened, producing many of the "modern diseases" familiar to Western countries, such as environmental degradation and the widening gap between rich and poor, along with geopolitical reasons, the so-called "Tibetan issue," The "Taiwan issue", "South China Sea issue", and "Xinjiang issue" have gradually surfaced, and the West's original imagination of China has been shattered and can only reconstruct its understanding of China based on China's problems.
The third reason is the West's fear of China's rapid development. The West fears that China's rapid development will lead to a redistribution of global resources, that China will become powerful and establish a hierarchical world order centered on itself, and that the West will lose its voice in the world order and become a subordinate of the "Chinese system". They tend to construct their imaginary "Chinese hegemony" based on the characteristics of China's ancient "tribute system" and their own colonial historical perceptions, forming irrational judgments.