President Trump’s shift to a friendlier stance on China mirrors a startling change in public opinion. Across the political spectrum, more Americans are seeing China in a positive light.
Surveys from leading pollsters, including two released this week, show that China’s image in the United States has improved markedly in recent years. People are still skeptical about China, but as Mr. Trump prepares to give the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, a warm welcome in Washington this week, his accommodation echoes what some experts see as a desire among Americans for a more stable relationship with Beijing.
“There really is this warming toward China, even if on balance views still remain fairly negative,” said Laura Silver, an associate director at the Pew Research Center, which published survey data on Wednesday showing that 54 percent of Americans now have a “cold” view of China, compared to 68 percent in 2021.
The surveys do not pinpoint the reasons for the shift, which appears to be more pronounced among younger Americans. But experts point to fading memories of the coronavirus pandemic, awareness of China’s tech innovations and disaffection with Mr. Trump’s trade wars as contributing to a changing mood that could affect how U.S. politicians approach China.
The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a think tank that has long studied the country’s foreign policy views, has picked up a reversal over just the last two years. By 2024, the share of Americans who favored “friendly cooperation and engagement with China” had declined to just 40 percent. But when the organization asked the question again this July, that number had risen to 57 percent, including 68 percent of Democrats and 43 percent of Republicans, according to data published this week.
“The attitudes toward China have been really surprising,” said Dina Smeltz, a former State Department official who oversees the Chicago Council’s polling. “They’ve shifted from a majority wanting to limit the rise of China and limit its influence to now a majority of Americans wanting to engage cooperatively with China.”
The research organization Gallup found earlier this year that the share of Americans with a favorable view of China had risen to 34 percent, more than double the low point in 2023.
The surveys all point to a changed national mood compared to a decade ago, when Mr. Trump’s harsh anti-China rhetoric helped define his winning presidential campaign. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. largely maintained and expanded Mr. Trump’s tough policies, including tariffs and export controls, cementing what appeared to be a bipartisan consensus that the United States needed to push back hard against China’s rise.
Now that consensus has weakened, as made plain by Mr. Trump himself. He stepped back last year from tariffs as high as 145 percent to pursue what has looked like an effort of reconciliation with China. It was on display in his deferential visit to Beijing in April and what is expected to be a lavish welcome for Mr. Xi this week — all without Beijing making major concessions on longstanding U.S. demands on trade or security issues.
The polls show that Republicans remain more hawkish on China than Democrats, though Republicans’ views of China have grown more positive as well — perhaps a reflection of Mr. Trump’s own shift. Despite the country’s polarization, Democrats have also moved in the same direction.
Just a year or two ago, politicians could “propose almost any kind of tough policy against China and the public would be behind it,” said Bruce Stokes, an expert on foreign policy polling at the German Marshall Fund, a think tank. “This public opinion data seems to suggest that support for a tough-on-China policy has weakened a little bit.”
Americans’ views of China, of course, could quickly shift again, especially amid fears of its artificial intelligence prowess and the risk of armed conflict over Taiwan. Pollsters note that Americans generally spend little time thinking about foreign policy and rarely let international issues determine how they vote.
But people who study the U.S. relationship with China see the polling figures as reflective of a changing geopolitical dynamic and, perhaps, angst over the United States’ place in the world. In the Pew and Chicago Council polls, younger adults are significantly more positively disposed toward China, evidence of a generational shift.
“Younger people have known China as a superpower,” Ms. Silver, the Pew researcher, said. Older generations, by contrast, are more likely to associate China with the developing world, Communism and the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, she said.
Younger people may also be more aware of China’s technological innovations and cultural exports, as evidenced by the “Chinamaxxing” trends ricocheting around the internet. That awareness comes in contrast to a sense of a decline in the United States’ global standing: 62 percent of Americans say the country is respected less in the world today than it was 10 years ago, according to the Chicago Council.
“You see fears of what’s happening to America be refracted through assessments of China,” said Nick Zeller, a scholar at the Carter Center in Atlanta who tracks how China and the United States perceive each other. “This positive assessment toward China has more to do with American political tumult domestically than it does China itself.”
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