For the first time in roughly 20 years of Pew Research Center polling, China is favored over the United States in 25 of 36 major countries surveyed. The data is unambiguous: US median favorability fell from 58% to 36% across 20 tracked countries between 2023 and 2026, while China’s rose from 32% to 46%. Chinese President Xi Jinping is viewed more favorably than Donald Trump in 22 of those 36 countries. If you limit your account of what happened to these numbers alone, you miss the actual story. The story is not that China surged. It is that the United States cratered.

The collapse is self-inflicted

The US government is the sole causal engine behind this reversal. The three actions that define the decline — the demand to annex Greenland from Denmark, the January 2026 removal of Venezuela’s then-leader Nicolás Maduro, and the joint US–Israel war on Iran — are unilateral American decisions. None were responses to Chinese provocation. The 22-point median drop across 20 countries is steeper than most comparable single-event shocks in Pew’s history, and it stems from multiple discrete, highly visible acts that reinforced the perception of a superpower operating without regard for allies or international norms.

The geographic pattern confirms the diagnosis. Views of China were substantially more positive in Latin America, Africa, and parts of south and southeast Asia than in wealthier European and east Asian countries. This is the profile of a country benefiting from the wreckage of another’s credibility, not the profile of a rising power winning over America’s core security partners. Traditional US allies — Canada, Mexico, and Australia — now rate the US no more favorably than China. They treat US cooperation as contingent, negotiable, and subject to the whims of the latest administration. That is not a dip. It is a structural breach.

The interference gap exposes the contradiction

The data expose the contradiction at the heart of American foreign-policy rhetoric. In nearly every country surveyed, more respondents believe the United States interferes in other countries’ affairs than believe China does. This is not a new perception — US interventionism has shaped global opinion for decades — but its current manifestation creates a foundation for the decline that no single policy reversal can erase.

The structural irony is sharp. The same administration that accused China of interfering in the 2020 US election without providing evidence offered a $20 billion US Treasury currency swap line to Argentina, explicitly tied to supporting its preferred candidate in the country’s October election. Both are instances of one state engaging in another’s political process. The perception gap the data document does not depend on this single parallel, but the parallel crystallizes why the gap exists. The US has no credibility on the interference question because its actions contradict its accusations.

China’s gains are parasites on US collapse

China did not engineer this shift. It exploited it. Beijing runs influence operations that work with or amplify local social media content creators producing lifestyle content about Chinese food and technology, alongside state-funded travelogues designed to erase concerns about the persecution of Uyghurs. These operations project an image of cyberpunk modernity in deliberate contrast to a West perceived as struggling with declining living standards. The same narrative serves a dual function: externally, it wins favorable opinion; internally, it manages domestic disillusionment among Chinese citizens who might otherwise question the system’s trajectory.

The Uyghur dimension is the most revealing. The governance structure that produces the unfavorable perception — the persecution of Uyghurs — simultaneously produces the tools designed to suppress it. State-funded travelogues are engineered to erase international attention to ongoing human rights abuses. The same government that causes the concern funds the propaganda to bury it. This is not soft power. It is an aggressive narrative assault that feeds directly on US credibility collapse: the less the world trusts America, the less space exists for scrutiny of China’s own conduct.

These operations constitute a structural headwind against US recovery. Even if a future administration reversed every action that contributed to the decline, China’s perception-management infrastructure would remain in place. Beijing benefits from every American misstep and faces no pressure to change course while the world’s attention is consumed by US unilateralism.

The forecast: a decline current policy makes nearly irreversible

Historical precedent offers the only reference class for recovery. After the Iraq war dropped US standing sharply, it partially rebounded in roughly 30 percent of affected-country cases within 24 months. That precedent is the most structurally comparable: a discrete set of US foreign-policy actions generating measurable global backlash, measured by the same Pew instrument.

But the current decline is worse than Iraq by every structural measure. It is steeper — 22 points in three years. It stems from multiple discrete actions rather than a single prolonged conflict. It extends to 25 of 36 countries, including traditional US allies that were largely insulated from the Iraq-era backlash. The administration’s confrontational posture shows no signs of reversal — the Iran war continues, the Greenland demand stands, the Argentina intervention recurs. And China’s influence operations represent a sustained structural headwind that did not exist in 2003.

A probabilistic forecast anchored to the Iraq-war recovery precedent estimates a 15–45% probability that the US regains its favorability advantage over China by the next major Pew survey, with the 20–30% band the most defensible reading under current policy. The 45% upper bound requires conditions that do not exist under the current administration: a significant foreign-policy reversal, visible alliance-rebuilding, and likely a change in leadership. Only a complete policy reversal could stem the decline, and the probability of such a reversal before the next Pew survey is low.

One factor pushes the estimate upward: the November 2028 US presidential election creates the possibility of a foreign-policy reset, contingent on leadership change rather than the electoral cycle itself. But that is a conditional positive — it depends on an outcome that has not occurred and may not occur. Under current policy, the trajectory is downward.

Who absorbs the damage

The decline’s consequences radiate far beyond the US–China bilateral. In Latin America, Africa, and parts of south and southeast Asia, US cooperation is now less attractive than it was three years ago, while Chinese investment and engagement appear relatively more stable and predictable. The risk for these countries is not that they choose China over the US — it is that the perception of US unreliability narrows their negotiating position with both superpowers.

For traditional US allies, the damage runs deeper. European publics balance US security dependence against Chinese market access, hedging against American unpredictability rather than choosing sides. East Asian publics are caught between US security dependence and Chinese economic interdependence, with forced decoupling from either side as the downside.

The parties most affected are the ones with the least voice. Iranian civilians — not surveyed by Pew, since Iran is not among the 36 countries — bear the material consequences of the war that contributed to the decline. The Uyghurs, whose persecution is the governance condition that drives China’s influence-operations machinery, are absent from both the poll and the analysis. Their absence is itself the finding. China’s overseas influence operations are designed explicitly to erase concerns about their situation. The parties whose interests are most shaped by the superpower competition are the ones rendered invisible by it.

What the data foreclose

The Pew data are cross-sectional: a snapshot, not a trajectory. Defenders of the current posture will cite the Iraq-war rebound and the pandemic-era China decline as proof that the shift will self-correct. They are wrong. The specific features of the 2026 decline — its steepness, its geographic breadth across previously insulated allies, its grounding in multiple discrete policy actions rather than a single conflict, and its coincidence with sustained Chinese influence operations — give it a structural quality the Iraq precedent did not have. The geographic spread among allies is the clearest signal: this is not a temporary backlash but a reassessment of US reliability as a partner.

Whether concerns about Uyghur persecution and the surveillance state eventually cap China’s favorability does not rescue the US position. Even if China’s numbers decline, the US would need its own positive story to regain the advantage, and current policy produces the opposite. The perception that China is more stable and predictable than the US — a comparative judgment produced by the same policy choices that drove the decline — will reshape diplomatic alignments in ways that outlast the next survey cycle. The US has squandered its global standing through its own actions. Nothing short of a complete policy reversal will change that trajectory.

Analytical techniques used in this piece

This analysis applies the methods below. Each links to a short, plain-English explainer you can read and reuse.

Probabilistic Forecasting
Puts calibrated probabilities on what happens next.
Relationship Mapping
Extracts the network of ties among people, institutions, and entities.
Stakeholder Mapping
Charts the parties to a situation — their interests, power, and alignments.