China Now Outranks the United States in Global Favorability. What Happened?

Yanzhong Huang is an expert on Chinese health politics and U.S.-China relations.

For nearly two decades, one finding in Pew Research Center’s global surveys was as reliable as the sunrise: the world viewed the United States more favorably than China. That era has ended. In its July 15 report—based on interviews with more than forty-two thousand people across thirty-six countries—Pew found that China is now viewed more favorably than the United States in most nations surveyed.

The same survey marked a second milestone: across the twenty countries Pew has tracked annually since 2023, median confidence in Chinese President Xi Jinping now exceeds confidence in U.S. President Donald Trump by ten points. The shift appears all the more salient as it comes on the heels of  China’s soft power falling to COVID-19 pandemic-era lows just a few years ago. Given Pew’s stature as the gold standard for tracking global public opinion, the symbolic weight of this reversal is hard to overstate.

A confirmation, not a surprise

Striking as it is, the Pew result is less a bolt from the blue than the confirmation of a trend already visible elsewhere. In Gallup’s global ratings for 2025, China’s median approval rating (36 percent) edged past that of the United States (31 percent) across more than 130 countries—the widest margin in China’s favor that Gallup has recorded in nearly twenty years.

In a May 2025 opinion piece for the South China Morning Post, I observed that the Trump administration’s tariffs, aid cuts, and disdain for allies were actively ceding the soft-power contest to Beijing. Other foreign policy scholars have described the latest Pew results as unsurprising for similar reasons. They noted that the volatility of U.S. policy—including the use of force and the economic damage from tariffs—has hardened international sentiment against the United States, while China now appears as a more reliable entity. 

Pew’s own earlier data had already pointed in this direction: its July 2025 release [PDF] showed views of the United States worsening and opinions of China improving across many countries, with the two trend lines steadily converging. The 2026 report simply records the moment they crossed.

What drove the shift?

Three forces, working in combination, explain the reversal. The first is China’s own investment in attraction. After years of ridicule about its clumsy propaganda, Beijing’s soft-power portfolio is finally producing hits. Culturally, the “Chinamaxxing” phenomenon—a viral social-media trend in which young Westerners embrace Chinese lifestyles, from drinking hot water to riding China’s high-speed rail vicariously through influencer livestreams—has given China the kind of organic, bottom-up cachet long enjoyed by Japan and South Korea, amplified by breakout products like the video game Black Myth: Wukong, the film Ne Zha 2, and Labubu dolls. 

China’s development model has also gained prestige: its dominance in electric vehicles, batteries, and infrastructure has made “the China model” an object of emulation rather than derision—so much so that Washington itself now practices industrial policy that borrows unmistakably from Beijing’s playbook. And diplomatically, Xi has mounted a sustained charm offensive through his Global Development, Global Security, Global Civilization, and artificial intelligence governance initiatives, positioning China as a provider of public goods and a champion of the Global South.

The second force is compositional. Nearly half the countries in Pew’s sample are middle-income, and this is precisely where China enjoys its clearest advantage over the United States. Pew finds favorability toward China markedly higher in the emerging economies of Africa, Latin America, and South and Southeast Asia than in wealthy nations, with record highs this year in Colombia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, and Turkey. Meanwhile, the United States has been hemorrhaging goodwill in the high-income democracies that were once its reservoir of admiration. With China gaining in the Global South and the United States losing its allies’ affection, the two trends compounded—one stepping forward exactly as the other stepped back—and the crossover became almost arithmetically inevitable.

That points to the third and arguably most important force: this is a story driven more by an American decline in soft power than by a Chinese surge. The Gallup numbers make the point starkly: China’s net approval in 2025 was just below zero at negative 1 percent, while the U.S. plunged to a record-low negative 15 percent. Pew’s detailed data tells the same story: the organization itself concludes that China’s lead owes “especially” to deteriorating opinions of the United States. But Washington’s loss does not translate into a commensurate gain for Beijing. 

Nowhere has the collapse been steeper than in Sweden, where the share of people [PDF] viewing the United States as a reliable partner plunged from 83 percent in 2022 to 31 percent today—a fifty-two-point drop. Over the same period, China gained only fifteen points (from 12 percent to 27 percent). The pattern repeats among Washington’s other close allies: in Canada, the share calling the United States a reliable partner cratered from 83 percent in 2022 to 35 percent (a forty-eight-point drop), compared with China’s thirty-point increase (from 14 percent to 44 percent). Even the leadership crossover reflects Trump’s fall more than Xi’s rise: confidence in both men remains generally low, and in Europe—where Xi now outpolls Trump by double digits in seven countries—his best rating is still a modest 37 percent, in the United Kingdom.

The scoreboard changed mostly because one team kept scoring own goals.

A reversal, but not a universal one

The shift is not geographically uniform. It is concentrated among the United States’ Western allies—Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and much of Europe—as well as in parts of Latin America, where several publics that once viewed the United States as the more reliable partner are now evenly split. 

Conspicuously, it has not occurred among China’s neighbors. The United States retains a favorability edge in just six countries, four of them in the Indo-Pacific: India, Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea, along with Israel and Poland. In the Philippines, 81 percent see the United States as a reliable partner compared with 42 percent for China. Proximity to Chinese power, particularly when accompanied by maritime disputes, appears to blunt Beijing’s appeal. Distance makes the heart grow fonder; proximity does not.

How durable is China’s edge?

There are at least two reasons to doubt that this reversal is permanent. First, soft power is far more mercurial than hard power, and public opinion can swing within a single year. The ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute’s annual survey of Southeast Asia illustrates this vividly: in 2024 [PDF], when asked to choose, respondents sided with China for the first time (50.5 to 49.5 percent); in 2025 [PDF], they flipped back to the United States (52.3 to 47.7 percent); in 2026 [PDF], they flipped again to China (52 to 48 percent). Sentiment that oscillates this easily is a weathervane, not a monument.

Second, while China’s favorability ratings have been converging with those of the United States, the underlying foundations of soft power have not. Soft power ultimately derives from credibility rather than propaganda—and solid, credible foundations for China’s appeal have yet to be laid. Inside China, there are no signs of meaningful improvement in rule of law or political freedom—if anything, the trajectory points the other way—and global publics have noticed. In only eleven of the thirty-six countries Pew surveyed do around half or more say the Chinese government respects the personal freedoms of its people.

Trump’s authoritarian tendencies have badly damaged the United States’ image, but so long as American institutions and rule of law endure, respect for U.S. democracy and diplomacy could plausibly recover under a more conventional future administration. Pew Research Center data already demonstrated such a rebound: major indicators of U.S. soft power—overall favorability of the United States and confidence in the U.S. president—rose sharply after Joe Biden took office in January 2021, reversing the steep declines recorded during the first Trump administration. The U.S. soft-power deficit may prove cyclical; China’s may prove structural.

Too soon to declare victory

The 2026 survey marks a genuine and historic shift in global public sentiment. Yet it is better understood as a relative repositioning than as a decisive victory for Chinese soft power. Beijing now looks—in the eyes of many—like the more accessible and predictable partner, especially as Washington’s retrenchment creates a vacuum. But the Pew data does not show a broad transfer of affection or admiration. China has won the comparison; it has not yet won hearts and minds.

For now, the 2026 numbers read less as an unconditional endorsement of Chinese soft power than as a sobering indictment of America’s self-inflicted wounds. And unlike amputations, wounds can still heal—unless we continue to inflict them on ourselves.