Working Paper 22-10: Public Responses to Foreign Protectionism

The amount and content of Chinese media coverage of the trade war that survey respondents received differed greatly between the three periods.7 As shown in appendix A, the number of articles in the People’s Daily, the national Communist Party–run newspaper, about trade was far higher at the time of the second survey than during the other two periods. [...] We found that while news consumption significantly increases a protectionist response to the targeted protection treatment in our second experiment, the amount of news that individuals consume is not a statistically significant moderator for the other two treatments in the second experiment or for the main protectionist treatment condition in the first or third experiments. [...] If direct reciprocity fully accounts for the shift in trade attitudes, then the US trade attitudes variable will fully mediate the relationship between the treatment and overall trade attitudes—that is, the mediation effect would be equal to the total effect of the treatment. [...] On the other hand, the size of the effect (−0.17) is quite small—a fraction of the size of the effect of the treatment on overall trade attitudes (≈−0.9). [...] It is calculated as the product of two coefficients: (i) the estimated effect of the treatment on support for trade with the United States from column (1) in the upper portion of the table, and (ii) the estimated effect of the mediator variable (support for trade with the United States specifically) on the outcome variable (support for trade in general) from column (2).