19 May 2016

Quartz: Is China really the most welcoming country for refugees?

What explains the people of China’s remarkable magnanimity? It could be that the Chinese people—or more precisely, the survey respondents, who came from 18 big cities around China—have somehow moved way ahead of their government in the willingness to welcome refugees. (With a few exceptions, the last time the Chinese government accepted largest numbers of refugees was during the Vietnamese refugee crisis in the late 1970s, according to the UN High Commission on Refugees.) [...]

However, there also could be a more mundane reason too: a glitchy translation. The first two questions on the Chinese phone-administered questionnaire specifically mention refugees fleeing “war or persecution.” The third doesn’t; it merely asks what degree of accommodation the respondent would be willing to offer refugees.

In addition, only in the first question—one about whether refugees should be able to flee to other countries to escape conflict and persecution—does the questioner imply anything about refugees fleeing specifically to other countries

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