China and Xi favored over U.S. and Trump in many nations: Survey
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- Pew Research Center surveyed more than 42,000 people across 35 countries plus the West Bank and east Jerusalem from February to May, finding favorable views of China outpaced those of the United States in 25 of 36 countries, with margins of error ranging from 2.3 to 5.5 percentage points.
- Xi Jinping outpolls Donald Trump on personal favorability in 22 of 36 countries, including Canada, Mexico, France, Germany and the UK, though Pew noted confidence remains low in both leaders.
- Laura Silver, Pew's associate director of global attitudes research, called the flip the first time in roughly 20 years of tracking that China has been viewed more positively than the US, attributing it to fading COVID-19 fallout and to specific Trump administration actions alienating allies.
- In Canada, favorable views of the US collapsed from 57% in 2023 to 33%, while favorable views of China surged from 14% to 44% — a swing Pew tied to Trump's tariffs and comments about Canada becoming "the 51st state."
- Israel remains the strongest US holdout, with about 8 in 10 Israelis viewing the US positively versus 19% for China; Japan, India, South Korea, the Philippines and Poland round out the six countries still favoring Washington.
- Silver singled out Trump's demands to control Greenland, the US military raid that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, and US handling of the Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza as specific factors driving the slide in global US favorability.
- On personal freedoms, the narrowing US-China gap is "driven largely" by declining US scores since 2021 rather than improved ratings for Beijing, according to the Pew report.
Why it matters: For two decades of Pew tracking, the United States enjoyed a consistent global favorability edge over China — so a 25-country flip in a single survey year marks a structural soft-power shift. Researchers attribute the change less to China's own gains than to specific Trump-era actions (Greenland threats, the Venezuela raid that captured Maduro, Gaza policy) that alienated traditional allies like Canada, where US favorability fell 24 points in two years while China's rose 30 points.
