Aside from benefiting from the fading memory of the pandemic, China appears to have gained from comparison with the US, Silver said.
“By comparison, we know that China is seen to be a more reliable partner in many places. It’s more likely to be seen to contribute to global peace and stability,” the researcher said.
Notably, those in some US-allied countries have drastically shifted their views in recent years, such as Canada. In the new survey, only 33 per cent of Canadians have positive views of the US, down from 57 per cent in 2023. Over the same period, their favourable opinions of China rose from 14 per cent to 44 per cent.
Trump slapped a barrage of tariffs on Canadian goods last year, and even claimed that Canada could be the “51st state”.
Major European countries — including France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands and Italy — all have switched their opinions toward the world’s two largest economies.
People in the UK, where about six in 10 held positive views of the US in 2023, now view China and the US similarly. Three years ago, the spread was 32 percentage points in Washington’s favour.
Of the six countries where people have more favourable views of the US, Israel leads the way. About eight in 10 Israelis view the US positively, compared with 19 per cent for China.
The other five countries are Japan, India, South Korea, the Philippines and Poland. Still, even their views of the US have dimmed over recent years.
The US is still ahead of China when it comes to government respect for personal freedoms, though the gap is shrinking, the Pew report says.
While China’s standing has improved somewhat, the narrowed divide is “driven largely by the fact that people in nearly every country surveyed have become less likely to say the US government respects its people’s personal freedoms” since 2021, when Pew last asked the question.
For the new study, Pew surveyed more than 42,000 people across 35 countries plus the West Bank and east Jerusalem, with margins of error ranging from 2.3 to 5.5 percentage points depending on the country.