South Korean Public Cognition On The Rise Of China And Its Influnce Upon Foreign Policy

With the rise of China, East Asia is increasingly showing China as the center of the economic order and America as the center of the security order. There is bet-hedging behavior that Neighboring countries’economy depend on China and security rely on the U.S.. South Korea is an important neighbor around China.It has a close economic relationship with China and at the same time it choose to strengthen the US-ROK security alliance, showing the typical behavior of hedging their bets. Academic research of foreign policy at home and abroad tends to regard the state as a rational actor, ignoring explore personal and public decision-makers cognitive factors. In this paper, I take the path of cognitive psychology research to analysis and explain South Korean people’s cognition on China’s rise, and to further explore the inherent relationship between public cognition and foreign policy. This article first defines the core concepts, clears the meaning of cognition and foreign policy and tries to construct the generation mechanism of foreign policy making from the perspective of cognitive theory. Then, the paper describes the Korean people’s awareness on China’s overall image and all aspects of China’s rise, finding that the Chinese image of the Korean people is negative and the cognition on the rise of China is very complicated. They affirm the achievements and prospects of China’s economy development, but they also hold a negative attitude toward China’s political system and China’s military force growth, while the evaluation of Chinese culture is somewhat neutral. Theoretical study of cognitive psychology suggests that the formation of cognition is affected by subjective factors, objective factors and their interaction. Specifically, the subjective factor expressed as "hate" the national psychology and the mistrust of China’s rise intent. Objective factors are social development problems in recent China, the Korean peninsula split reality and the interaction between Chinese and Korean culture. Objective and subjective factors interact under the influence of stereotype, historical analogy, attribution theory and cognitive consistency. Public cognition through the presidential election, nationalism, public pressure are three ways to influence the development of Korea’s foreign policy. Meanwhile, the thought on national interest as a special public cognition is also profoundly shaping the foreign policy of South Korea. The national interest ranked first is national security interests which lead to the strengthening and continuation of US-ROK military alliance. The economy development interest made Korea strengthen economic and trade relations with China. Some conflicting interests troubled South Korean foreign policy’s stability. Strong demand for culture and the dominant position of the nation brought more radical foreign policy. After2012’s South Korea presidential election, the new president took office began repairing the Sino-ROK relations damaged during President Lee. Currently, South Korea people’s cognition on the rise of China is showing a positive trend. Overall, the South Korea people’s public cognition is now in "transition period" which means their emotions on China are not only dependently but also full of resentment and fear. The public cognition changes a lot during this period. China need to focus more on cognitive psychology of the Korean public, adjust the foreign policy toward South Korea, improve South Korean people’s impression of China, reduce their wary of China’s rise and boot their cognition of China’s rise to a positive direction.