Two common American attitudes toward China can be identified from the latest U.S. public opinion surveys published by Gallup and Pew Research Center in the past year.
First, most of the Americans surveyed have unfavorable opinions of China as a whole, but do not view the country as a threat toward the United States at the present time.
Second, most survey respondents expect China to pose an economic and military threat to the United States in the future, with more Americans worried about the perceived economic threat than the military one.
To understand why most Americans appear to have negative feelings about China, analysts interviewed by VOA say a variety of factors should be considered. Primary among them is a lack of familiarity.
"Most Americans do not have a strong interest in foreign affairs, Chinese or otherwise," says , director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Washington-based Wilson Center.
Many of those Americans also have never traveled to China, in part because of the distance and expense. "That means that like most human beings, they take short cuts to understanding China," Daly says.
Rather than make the effort to regularly consume a wide range of U.S. media reports about China, analysts say many Americans base their views on widely-publicized major events in China's recent history.
"The Chinese government's image took a huge hit in the eyes of Americans after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre (of student protesters by Chinese troops), and it has not really recovered since," says David Wertime, senior editor at Foreign Policy magazine.
Daly says American attitudes also have been influenced more recently by Beijing's refusal to release jailed dissident . The human rights advocate won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, but remained imprisoned by China's Communist rulers for perceived subversive activities.
"Americans, by and large, are uncomfortable with authoritarianism," says Daly.
He says many Americans also lack understanding of China's human rights progress in recent decades. "It is nowhere near the level of freedom that Americans enjoy, but there have been enormous gains in the health and well-being of the Chinese people," he says.
U.S. media coverage of China also tends to emphasize conflictual elements in U.S.-China relations, says , a Council on Foreign Relations analyst in New York.
She says these elements include disagreements between the U.S. and Chinese governments in how to resolve international conflicts and economic disputes about cyber security and intellectual property rights.
"In some matters, China acts unilaterally, while in others, it does not act in concert with the United States," Economy says. "(As a result,) there is a sense that the United States does not have much leverage with China."
U.S. opinions on China are more positive when Americans are asked the narrower question of how they characterize Beijing's relationship with Washington.
Polls show that most Americans appear to view China either as friendly to the United States, or as neither a partner nor an enemy.
Analysts say many Americans see little risk of attack or invasion by China, which has never been at war with the United States.
Former U.S. state and defense department official , also a president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, says China is the first major world power in history to fall short of being a global military power.
"China's military power is pretty much restricted to its own borders and shores. The United States is a global military power, and they are just a power in their area," says Gelb.
He notes that China's 2014 defense budget of $132 billion is only about one-quarter of U.S. government spending on defense this year ($496 billion).
"We can put modern aircraft carriers into the (Asia-Pacific) area. They are backwards in the most important naval kind of power," Gelb says.
China's only aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, was commissioned in 2012. The United States has 11 in active service.
Daly of the Wilson Center says another reason for the perception of China as benign is that many Americans are unaware of U.S. interests in Asia, where Beijing has become more assertive in maritime territorial disputes with U.S. allies such as Japan.
One of the disputes involves a group of administered by Japan and claimed by China, which has increased aerial and naval patrols of the surrounding waters in recent years. The islands are known as Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyu in Chinese.