Attitudes Towards China Before and After the Beijing Olympics

The purpose of this study is to explore the changes attitudes towards China and the Chinese after being exposed to information connected to the Beijing Olympics and its news reports through the mass media. We focused on 'decoding' the Beijing Olympics, a different approach to that taken in most of the other studies in this part. The first survey began in mid May 2008 and was completed at the end of July 2008, covering two months of the pre-Olympic period, with target audience on university students worldwide and the second one, which covered the early August to early September period, aims to explore the changes in Japanese attitudes toward China and the Chinese just before and after the Beijing Olympic Games. Although the overall results come from two very different samples collected over different periods, they do represent a reference point for more in-depth understanding of international communication during the Beijing Olympic Games. © 2010 Taylor & Francis.