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.