Pew Poll: China Now Viewed More Favorably Than the U.S. in 25 of 36 Countries

Global opinion of the United States has been sliding for years. Pew Research Center's newest survey, released Wednesday and conducted from February through May 2026, shows that slide has now produced a genuine flip: more people view China favorably than the U.S. in 25 of the 36 countries and territories surveyed, according to the Associated Press.

That list includes Canada and Mexico, two of America's closest neighbors and trading partners. Only six countries in the survey still rate the U.S. more positively than China: Israel, Japan, India, South Korea, the Philippines and Poland. Israel leads the way, with about 8 in 10 Israelis viewing the U.S. positively compared with 19% for China. Even in these six countries, views of the U.S. have dimmed in recent years.

Laura Silver, associate director of Pew's Global Attitudes Research and one of the study's authors, told the AP this is the first time in roughly 20 years of Pew tracking that China has scored more favorably than the U.S. Views of the two powers have been close before, she said, but never tilted this clearly toward Beijing.

What's driving it

The survey window overlapped with the U.S. and Israel launching military action against Iran, a period Silver directly ties to the shift. "There was just an actual relationship between the outbreak of the war and the sense that the U.S. is just not contributing to peace and stability and that people have less confidence in Donald Trump," she said.

Silver also pointed to Trump's demands to control Greenland, the U.S. military operation that captured then-Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, and Washington's handling of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza as specific episodes that dragged down approval numbers across multiple countries. "The U.S. has done a lot in terms of global engagement in recent months to years that is not being perceived positively internationally," she said.

The shift is stark in some traditionally friendly countries. In Canada, only 33% now have positive views of the U.S., down from 57% in 2023, while favorable opinions of China there rose from 14% to 44% over the same period. Trump imposed tariffs on Canadian goods last year and suggested Canada could become "the 51st state." Major European countries — including France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Sweden and the Netherlands — have also switched their opinions toward the world's two largest economies. In the U.K., where about 6 in 10 held positive views of the U.S. in 2023 (a 32-point advantage over China), people now view China and the U.S. similarly.

On the leadership question, people in 22 of the 36 countries and territories view Xi Jinping more favorably than Trump, including in Canada, Mexico, France, Germany and the United Kingdom. But Pew's data also shows something both sides of this comparison should sit with: confidence in both leaders personally is low in many countries. This isn't a story of the world falling in love with Xi. It's a story of the U.S. losing ground faster than China is gaining trust on its own merits.

Silver's read is that China has benefited partly by default. "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," she said. Fading memories of the COVID-19 pandemic, which for years anchored negative views of Beijing, have also worked in China's favor.

The fair pushback

A reasonable skeptic would note that foreign-policy approval polling is a snapshot, not a verdict on strategy. Trump's Greenland posture and the Maduro capture reflect a deliberate approach: prioritize hard American interests over global popularity contests. Presidents who take that approach, going back decades, routinely poll worse abroad than presidents who play to multilateral consensus. Being unpopular in a Pew survey is not the same as being wrong on Venezuela's Maduro, Iran, or trade enforcement.

The poll doesn't measure whether respondents think China would act any better in America's position, only whether they currently feel more warmly toward Beijing than Washington. Favorability and trust in Chinese governance, particularly on human rights, Taiwan, or economic coercion, are different questions Pew's topline numbers don't fully resolve here. Notably, the U.S. is still ahead of China when it comes to government respect for personal freedoms, though the gap is shrinking — driven largely by the fact that people in nearly every country surveyed have become less likely to say the U.S. government respects its people's personal freedoms since 2021, when Pew last asked the question.

What's unresolved

Pew's survey doesn't test whether this favorability gap changes actual policy behavior, allied defense spending, trade alignment, or votes at the UN. Canada and Mexico souring on the U.S. in opinion polls hasn't stopped either country from deep economic integration with Washington. Whether this numbers shift translates into diplomatic cost for the U.S., or whether it's a mood reading that fades once the Iran war and Gaza conflict move off the front page, is the open question Pew's next survey cycle will have to answer.