"Obamania" in China and Its Yielding to Nationalism: Quantitative Responses from Elitist Chinese Students in Beijing toward the 2008 U.S. Election and Structural Analysis

By drawing upon firsthand empirical sources, this article aims to discuss the various responses of elitist Chinese students in Beijing who might have a direct future role to play in shaping China's perception of the United States toward the 2008 U.S. presidential election, including questions like which candidate Chinese youth favored and why, what impact they saw the election having on future Sino U. S. relations, and how they evaluated the American political system overall. The article uses these sources to illustrate the real essence of Obama's global popularity from the perspective of soft power and to evaluate the intrinsic limitations to "Obamania" being spread in China by assessing the response when U.S. values and Chinese nationalist sentiment are juxtaposed. Most importantly, the article finds that despite "Obamania," U.S. values are found to lose out to nationalist sentiment in the minds of young Chinese, who seem to have a gradual tendency to favor the "China model" over its Western counterpart.