China and Xi Jinping seen more favourably than the US and Trump in poll of major countries

The world has largely viewed the US more favourably than China for years, but those opinions have flipped in Beijing’s favour this year, according to a new poll from the Pew Research Center, a remarkable shift driven in part by tensions between the Trump administration and US allies.

More people have favourable views of China than the US in 25 out of the 36 countries and territories that were surveyed, including Canada and Mexico. The poll was conducted from February to May, a period when the United States and Israel were engaged in a war against Iran.

In only six countries – Poland, the Philippines, South Korea, India, Japan and Israel – 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.

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.

Trump’s demands to control Greenland, the American military raid that captured Venezuela’s then-leader Nicolás Maduro, and the US handling of the Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza also have led to low approval in many countries, Silver 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.

The Chinese embassy in Washington said the latest poll “demonstrates that China’s governance achievements and development progress are widely recognised.” The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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 on the world’s two largest economies.

People in the US, where about 6 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.

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.

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.