More people have favourable views of China than the United States in 25 out of 36 countries and territories surveyed, including Canada and Mexico, according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center released on Wednesday. Views were also more favourable of Chinese leader Xi Jinping than US President Donald Trump in 22 of the countries and territories.
The world has largely viewed the US more favourably than China for the past two decades but those opinions flipped in Beijing's favour this year, a remarkable shift driven in part by Trump administration policies and tensions with US allies.
The poll was conducted from February to May, a period when the United States and Israel launched a war against Iran.
In only six countries do people still see the US more positively than China, according to the findings released Wednesday.
Views in 22 out of the 36 countries and territories also are more favourable of Chinese leader Xi Jinping than US President Donald Trump, including in Canada, Mexico and major European powers including France, Germany and the UK.
However, people in many of the countries have low confidence in both men.
It marks the first time in the roughly 20 years Pew has been tracking global opinions that China has been viewed more positively than the US, said Laura Silver, associate director of Pew's Global Attitudes Research and one of the researchers on the study.
Views of Beijing and Washington have been very similar at some points in the past but have not been significantly more favourable for China until now, she said.
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The shift follows the Covid-19 pandemic becoming a distant issue and as global views of the US have soured, Silver said.
“There was just an actual relationship between the outbreak of the war and the sense that the US is just not contributing to peace and stability and that people have less confidence in Donald Trump," she said.
'A more reliable partner'
Trump's demands to control Greenland, the US military raid that captured Venezuela's then-leader Nicolas Maduro, and the US handling of the Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza also have led to low approval in many countries, Silver said.
“The US has done a lot in terms of global engagement in recent months to years that is not being perceived positively internationally,” she said.
Aside from benefiting from the fading memory of the pandemic, China appears to have gained from comparison with the US, Silver said.
“By comparison, we know that China is seen to be a more reliable partner in many places. It’s more likely to be seen to contribute to global peace and stability,” the researcher said.
Notably, those in some US allied countries have drastically shifted their views in recent years, such as Canada. In the new survey, only 33% of Canadians have positive views of the US, down from 57% in 2023. Over the same period, their favourable opinions of China rose from 14% to 44%.
Trump slapped a barrage of tariffs on Canadian goods last year, and even claimed that Canada could be the “the 51st state”.
Major European countries – including France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands and Italy – all have switched their opinions toward the world's two largest economies.
People in the UK, where about six in 10 held positive views of the US in 2023, now view China and the US similarly. Three years ago, the spread was 32 percentage points in Washington's favour.
Of the six countries where people have more favourable views of the US, Israel leads the way. About eight in 10 Israelis view the US positively, compared with 19% for China.
The other five countries are Japan, India, South Korea, the Philippines and Poland. Still, even their views of the US have dimmed over recent years.
The US is still ahead of China when it comes to government respect for personal freedoms, though the gap is shrinking, the Pew report says.
While China's standing has improved somewhat, the narrowed divide is “driven largely by the fact that people in nearly every country surveyed have become less likely to say the US government respects its people’s personal freedoms” since 2021, when Pew last asked the question.
For the new study, Pew surveyed more than 42,000 people across 35 countries plus the West Bank and east Jerusalem, with margins of error ranging from 2.3 to 5.5 percentage points depending on the country.
(FRANCE 24 with AP)
