Global Favourability Tilts Toward China Over the US for the First Time, Pew Research Finds

A Historic Reversal in Global Opinion

For roughly two decades, Pew Research Center’s tracking of global attitudes consistently placed the United States ahead of China in international favourability. That long-standing pattern has now broken. In its latest survey, conducted between February and May 2025 and covering more than 42,000 respondents across 35 countries plus the West Bank and east Jerusalem, Pew found that people in 25 of the 36 surveyed nations and territories now hold more favourable views of China than of the United States — a result the organisation describes as unprecedented in its history of measuring these attitudes.

Laura Silver, associate director of Pew’s Global Attitudes Research and one of the study’s lead researchers, was precise about the significance of the finding. Views of Beijing and Washington had converged at certain moments in the past, she noted, but China had never before registered a meaningfully higher favourability score than the US across this breadth of countries. The shift, she said, is not incidental — it reflects a confluence of specific, traceable events.

The Weight of Recent American Policy

The survey period itself was consequential. Between February and May 2025, the United States and Israel launched military operations against Iran, a development that Silver directly linked to deteriorating perceptions of American reliability. “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,” she said, “and that people have less confidence in Donald Trump.”

That erosion of confidence extended well beyond the Iran conflict. Trump’s repeated assertions of American interest in controlling Greenland, the US military operation that resulted in the capture of Venezuela’s then-leader Nicolás Maduro, and the administration’s conduct during the Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza each contributed to unfavourable impressions in multiple countries. Silver summarised the dynamic plainly: “The US has done a lot in terms of global engagement in recent months to years that is not being perceived positively internationally.”

China, meanwhile, appears to have benefited less from any dramatic improvement in its own standing than from the contrast it now presents. Silver noted that China is increasingly perceived as a more reliable partner and more likely to be seen as contributing to global peace and stability — a framing that would have seemed counterintuitive to many Western analysts even five years ago.

The Fading Shadow of COVID-19

One structural factor Silver identified is the receding salience of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the years immediately following the outbreak, China’s global image suffered considerably, weighed down by questions over transparency and the origins of the virus. As that issue has faded from the centre of public discourse, the reputational drag it imposed on Beijing has correspondingly diminished, clearing space for the comparative reassessment now visible in Pew’s data.

The timing matters analytically. China’s improvement in these surveys is not primarily a story of Beijing winning new admirers through positive diplomacy or soft power; it is, in significant part, a story of Washington losing ground it had long held, with China the residual beneficiary. The distinction is worth preserving, because it shapes how durable this shift is likely to be.

Canada and Europe: The Sharpest Swings

Nowhere is the reversal more dramatic than in Canada. In 2023, 57 per cent of Canadians held positive views of the United States; by the time of this survey, that figure had collapsed to 33 per cent. Over the same period, favourable views of China among Canadians rose from 14 per cent to 44 per cent — a near-inversion of sentiment that maps directly onto the Trump administration’s imposition of sweeping tariffs on Canadian goods and the president’s repeated suggestion that Canada might become the “51st state.” These were not abstractions to Canadian respondents; they were lived political provocations.

The pattern repeated across major European nations. France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands — all registered a shift in the balance of opinion between the world’s two largest economies, moving away from the US and toward China. The United Kingdom, where approximately six in ten people held positive views of the US as recently as 2023, now views the two powers roughly equally; three years ago, Washington led Beijing by 32 percentage points in British public opinion. The speed of that compression is striking.

Where the US Still Leads — and Why It Matters

Six countries in the survey still regard the United States more favourably than China: Israel, Japan, India, South Korea, the Philippines, and Poland. Israel leads the group emphatically, with roughly eight in ten Israelis holding positive views of the US against just 19 per cent for China. The other five countries reflect longstanding strategic alignments — Indo-Pacific security partnerships, NATO membership in Poland’s case — though even within this group, American favourability has softened from earlier highs.

The picture on personal freedoms is similarly qualified. The US retains an advantage over China when respondents are asked which government respects its citizens’ personal freedoms, but the gap has narrowed — and Pew’s own analysis attributes this narrowing primarily to declining confidence in American institutions rather than to any improvement in perceptions of China’s domestic governance. Since 2021, when Pew last posed the question, people in nearly every surveyed country have become less likely to say the US government respects personal freedoms.

What the Data Does and Does Not Show

The leadership comparison reinforces the country-level findings. In 22 of the 36 surveyed nations and territories, respondents express more confidence in Xi Jinping than in Donald Trump — including in Canada, Mexico, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Silver was careful to note, however, that many respondents hold low confidence in both leaders; this is not, in most countries, a story of Xi commanding genuine popular admiration so much as one of Trump generating active distrust.

The survey carries standard methodological caveats: margins of error range from 2.3 to 5.5 percentage points depending on the country, and the February-to-May fieldwork period means the data captures a specific, turbulent moment rather than a settled equilibrium. Whether this represents a durable realignment or a cyclical trough for American soft power remains an open question — one that the trajectory of US foreign policy in the months ahead will do much to answer.