The Global Times could not help itself. Two days after the Pew Research Center published its annual audit of global opinion, the English-language megaphone of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ran an editorial with all the restraint of a victory parade. “When 27 of the 36 countries and regions surveyed ‘chose China,’” it announced, “it was not simply that China had ‘won.’”
Actually, the number is 25. The other two are countries where the gap is too small to mean anything. The editorial writer counted them anyway. But the rest of the Pew report is where the interesting material lives—and where the parade runs out of road.
There is no gainsaying the fact that the headline findings are startling. In 25 out of 36 countries, more people now view China more favorably than the United States. (In 22, more express more confidence in Xi Jinping than in Donald Trump.) The United States leads in six: India, Israel, Japan, the Philippines, Poland, and South Korea. Canadians and Mexicans, America’s closest neighbors, were not among them.
Pew has asked versions of this question since 2002 and never gotten results like these. The resulting coverage has been breathless and not just in the CCP’s own press. Bloomberg, among many others, described it as a soft-power win.
So, has China finally beaten the United States in the fight for global public opinion? Has the country that has spent two decades and untold billions of dollars trying to make the world love it succeeded at last?
The answer is no, and the survey itself says so, three chapters deep.
But before we get to that, it’s useful to revisit the definition of “soft power,” since everyone invoking the phrase this week seems to have skipped it. Political scientist Joseph Nye, who coined the term in this magazine 36 years ago, was pretty clear: Soft power, he said, is the ability to get the outcomes you want through attraction rather than coercion or payment. (Italics mine.)
Beijing’s cheerleaders keep letting that final clause drop because it inconveniences their narrative.
Consider where China’s numbers are strong. Per Pew’s breakdown, three-quarters or more respondents view China favorably in Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Seven in 10 or more view it unfavorably in Israel, Japan, South Korea, Sweden, and the United States. Plot favorability against per capita GDP, and the line slopes down. China does best where it lends, builds, and buys. Nye’s payment clause disqualifies that as soft power.
Now drill down into those numbers further. In only 11 of 37 countries (the 36 above plus the United States) do around half or more respondents say the Chinese government respects its people’s personal freedoms. Across North America, nearly all of Europe, Australia, Japan, and South Korea, roughly three-quarters or more say it does not. So people haven’t really changed their opinion of what China is.
Which brings me to the finding, buried in Pew’s Asia-Pacific chapter, that seems to have gone largely unnoticed.
Pew asked people, with no list in an open-ended question, to name the country that is the greatest threat to their own. Seventy-six percent of Filipinos picked China—as did 53 percent of Japanese and 52 percent of Australians. In South Korea, China placed second behind North Korea; in India, second behind Pakistan. Yet in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, respondents ranked China as less of a threat than the United States.
Set the two groups side by side, and the pattern is unmissable: China is welcome wherever it arrives with money and feared wherever it arrives with power. Bridges, loans, and shipping containers buy affection; soldiers on borders and coast guard cutters in contested waters raise anxieties.
It’s easy for Kenyans and South Africans, at a safe remove, to think better of Beijing’s contribution to global peace. Among China’s neighbors, the numbers go the other way.
Pakistan is an interesting exception: It shares a border with China but rates it more warmly than any country Pew surveyed, at 90 percent favorable. Three-quarters of Pakistanis name China as their country’s top ally. But Pakistan is unusual among China’s neighbors in that the two have no border dispute. Pakistan’s quarrel is with India, and China is its hedge.
The numbers from Thailand, too, merit closer inspection. Overall, Thais name China a threat nearly as rarely as Pakistanis do—yet Thai concern about Chinese territorial conduct has climbed from 38 percent in 2024 to 52 percent this year, and Thailand is one of the very few countries where China’s favorability actually fell, by 11 points. Other polls have captured growing anxiety in Bangkok about Beijing’s ambitions in Southeast Asia.
Now to reckon with the American side of the report, where the collapse is close to total. In 2022, 83 percent of Canadians viewed the United States as a reliable partner; today, it is 35 percent. Ask Germans whether Washington considers the interests of countries like theirs, and 23 percent say yes, down from 60 percent three years ago—a more negative reading than during the Iraq War. Favorable views of the United States fell significantly in 15 of the 24 countries with year-on-year data. Confidence in Trump dropped in 16 of 24 and rose in none.
On the other hand, China’s median favorability across 37 countries is 51 percent against 39 unfavorable, which is nothing to sneeze at. In Italy, favorable views of China sit at 51 percent, up 20 points since 2022—this is the first time in nearly two decades of polling that half of Italians have looked kindly on China. Spain, at 54 percent, is net positive for the first time since 2011.
The U.S. standing has cratered before—in 2008, as George W. Bush limped out of office, and again in 2017, as Trump swaggered in. Neither time did China get past it: Jonathan Schulman, one of the Pew researchers, told the BBC that even at those low points, favorable views of China ran level with America’s or slightly behind. Which makes this year a genuine departure, and Beijing is entitled to say so.
What Beijing cannot claim is agency. Research suggests that expressions of pro-China sentiment often serve as a way for global audiences to register anger at the United States. Now, China has overtaken the United States not by dint of its own efforts but as a result of a U.S. collapse. (Pew was in the field from Feb. 8 to May 13, straddling the war with Iran, and its own regression analysis found opinion of the United States sinking week by week as the fieldwork rolled on.)
And collapses, even on this scale, can be reversed: German approval of the United States hit historic lows under Bush and then recovered almost overnight when Barack Obama took the oath. Hendrik Ohnesorge, whose study of the phenomenon I reviewed this year, calls it the “soft power pendulum.” It has swung with every U.S. election for three decades.
That Global Times editorial, as it happens, cited Gallup and others as proof that the Pew findings were “anything but an ‘accident.’” It should have read those reports more carefully, too. Gallup did find China overtaking the United States in global approval last year, by the widest margin in almost 20 years. But Gallup’s own reading was that this preference reflects “deep negativity toward the U.S. more than strong enthusiasm for China.” The Asia Society Policy Institute, running its own annual survey of global opinion on China, finds that Beijing’s standing has only recovered slightly from its pandemic-era slump.
A closer reading of the Pew report shows that claims of China’s soft-power success are, at best, overwrought. A survey in which China’s numbers improved during a year when it did nothing new should be cause for reflection in Beijing, rather than celebration.
