Pew map shows Xi outpacing Trump in global favourability, with neighbours tilting Beijing's way

A new Pew Research Center poll, reported by France 24 on 15 July 2026, finds that more people hold favourable views of China than of the United States in 25 of 36 countries and territories surveyed, a margin that includes traditional US partners such as Canada and Mexico. The data lands at a moment when Beijing is investing heavily in the diplomatic machinery of the Global South, and when the Trump administration's second term has produced a string of tariff fights, aid retrenchments and public confrontations with longtime allies.

The headline number is less a surprise than a confirmation of a trend Pew has tracked for several years. What matters is the geography. Favourability toward China is now running ahead of favourability toward the United States in two of Washington's nearest neighbours, an inversion of the alignment that defined the post-1991 order, and in a thick band of countries across Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia where Beijing's footprint in infrastructure, lending and commodity off-take has been growing for two decades. The reading is straightforward: when respondents are asked which of the two great powers they view more positively, the answer is no longer reflexively Washington.

What the map actually shows

The 36-country sweep is wide rather than deep: it samples national opinion, not sub-national or elite opinion, and Pew weights responses to be nationally representative. The headline finding is binary and sharp. In 25 of 36 jurisdictions, the share of respondents expressing a favourable view of China exceeds the share expressing a favourable view of the United States. In the remaining 11, the United States leads. Two of the American leads sit on the US border itself: the survey reports that Canada and Mexico both register higher favourability for China than for the United States, a finding that would have been politically unthinkable in most polling cycles of the previous two decades. Pew does not, in the wire summary, publish individual country-level point estimates; what France 24's dispatch surfaces is the aggregate count and the named outliers.

The relevant comparison is Xi Jinping versus Donald Trump as personal symbols of state, not abstract "China" versus abstract "America." Pew's framing puts the two leaders at the centre of the question, and the response pattern tracks closely with how each leader is read in domestic media: Xi as a steady steward presiding over a long industrial-policy programme, Trump as a volatile trade combatant whose tariffs have hit friends as hard as rivals.

The Global South is doing the tilting

The structural story sits in the Global South. Beijing has spent fifteen years building trade relationships, port concessions, fibre-optic backbones and currency-swap lines across Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America. Chinese development financing, even after the 2021 retrenchment of the Belt and Road balance sheet, remains a larger share of external infrastructure funding than any single Western institution in much of sub-Saharan Africa. The diplomatic return on that spending is now showing up in survey data.

Pew's reading reinforces what analysts have been arguing for several years: when a population is asked to choose between the system organised around Washington and the system organised around Beijing, the choice is increasingly contingent, not ideological. In many of the 25 countries where China leads, the United States is not disliked in absolute terms. It is simply preferred less than it used to be, because Beijing now offers a credible alternative on trade, hardware and, in some sectors, technology. The map is not a referendum on American decline. It is a referendum on the assumption that American primacy is the default.

The American counter-narrative, taken seriously

There is a defensible Western counter-narrative to the Pew headline, and it deserves airtime. First, favourability is a soft measure. It does not predict trade flows, alliance choices, or behaviour in a crisis. Several of the countries in which China now leads in Pew's tally remain treaty allies of the United States, host US bases, or vote with Washington in UN bodies; the relationship between public mood and state behaviour is loose at best. Second, the survey captures a moment of acute irritation with Trump-era trade policy in particular: tariffs on Canadian steel, Mexican auto-parts, and a wide swathe of European goods have hit the very publics polled. A different administration could plausibly recover ground quickly; the gap measures the Trump brand as much as it measures the American project. Third, China's favourability ratings in several advanced democracies, Japan, South Korea, Australia, remain materially below its global average; the 25-country lead is concentrated, not uniform.

The Chinese position, articulated in MFA briefings and in the pages of outlets like the Global Times and Xinhua, treats the Pew result as vindication of a long-running argument: that Beijing's model of state-led development and non-interference is attractive to countries tired of conditional aid and regime-change rhetoric. That framing has real force, but it also has a ceiling. Chinese favourability in countries bordering China, including India, Vietnam and the Philippines, is not in the 25-country lead group, and Beijing's recent diplomatic clashes with Japan over the discharge of treated nuclear water and with the Philippines over South China Sea incidents have produced sharp local pushback. Soft power is downstream of behaviour, not independent of it.

What it means for the next twelve months

Three things to watch. First, whether the Trump administration treats the Pew data as a strategic warning or as a polling artefact; the early read from Washington is mixed, with some officials dismissing the survey as captured by anti-American media environments in the Global South and others quietly acknowledging that aid and trade-reputation work needs to be rebuilt from the country up. Second, whether Beijing can convert favourable opinion into durable institutional weight, particularly in the African Union, ASEAN and CELAC, where Beijing has been pushing for expanded voting blocs and currency arrangements. Third, how the European Union positions itself in the gap: Europe was not the subject of this particular question, but several EU members are themselves tilting toward more transactional relationships with Beijing, and the Pew finding sharpens the question of whether Europe ends up closer to Washington's or Beijing's pole.

The honest reading of the Pew number is that the soft-power map is no longer monochrome. It is not yet a multipolar world in the sense of equal influence. It is a world in which the default assumption, that Washington's preferences will be the world's, has stopped being a safe assumption. That is the change the data registers, and it is the change that will define the next decade of Asian diplomacy whether or not any individual respondent in Lagos, Jakarta or Mexico City remembers being polled.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/france24_en