Pew survey finds a historic flip: in 25 of 36 countries, China is now seen more favorably than America. The reason is not what Washington expected.
The world has preferred the United States over China for as long as pollsters have asked the question. That run is over.
A Pew Research Center survey released July 15 found that China is now viewed more favorably than the United States in 25 out of 36 countries and territories surveyed. Xi Jinping is viewed more favorably than Donald Trump in 22 countries, including Canada, Mexico, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. It is the first time in the roughly 20 years Pew has tracked global opinion that China has led the US in favorability.
The numbers are stark. In Canada, favorable views of the US collapsed from 57 percent in 2023 to 33 percent today. Over the same period, favorable views of China rose from 14 percent to 44 percent. Every major European country that Pew surveyed, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, has switched its preference from Washington to Beijing.
“If you want to be the global leader, you have to be liked. Or at least respected,” said one analyst. “Under Trump, the US is neither.”
The survey was conducted from February to May 2026, a period that included the US-Israel war against Iran, Trump’s demands to control Greenland, the American military raid that captured Venezuela’s leader, and the handling of the Gaza war. The cumulative effect, said Pew researcher Laura Silver, is that people in nearly every country surveyed became less likely to say the US government respects personal freedoms.
“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,” Silver said.
The numbers tell a story about what the world actually values. When asked about reliability as a partner, China scored higher. When asked about contributing to global peace and stability, China scored higher. A country that runs a global security alliance, stations troops on every continent, and spends more on its military than the next ten nations combined is seen as less stable and less reliable than a country governed by a single-party dictatorship.
The six countries that still favor the US, Israel, Japan, India, South Korea, the Philippines, and Poland, are either treaty allies facing a proximate threat from China or, in Israel’s case, a direct beneficiary of US military backing. In Israel, roughly 8 in 10 have a positive view of the US. In Japan, the US still leads, but even there, views have dimmed.
Trump’s tariff war with allies has done enormous damage. He slapped tariffs on Canadian goods and floated the idea of Canada as the “51st state.” He upended the NATO alliance by questioning whether the US would defend its allies. He withdrew from international agreements and trade deals. All of this was done in the name of putting America first. The rest of the world drew its own conclusion: an America that treats its friends this way is not a reliable partner.
Meanwhile, China offered something the US no longer does: predictability. Beijing does not threaten its trading partners with tariffs. It does not demand that allies pay more or face abandonment. It invests in infrastructure, signs trade deals, and presents itself as a stable partner, even as it locks down Xinjiang, crushes dissent, and builds the world’s largest surveillance state.
The Trump administration sees this as a propaganda problem. It is not. It is a reality problem. The world is not misreading America. It is watching what America does and making a judgment. When the choice is between a country that starts trade wars and a country that signs trade deals, between a country that threatens allies and a country that offers them investment, between fame and reliability, the world is choosing reliability.
That should worry Washington far more than any military balance. You can bomb a country into submission. You cannot bomb it into liking you.