Pew: American attitudes toward China continue to harden

Distrust toward China has increased yet again among Americans, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center. The results published on Wednesday found 83% of the American public held negative views toward China, while 90% of respondents considered China a “competitor or enemy” to the U.S.

The report cites an overwhelming lack of confidence from responders on a variety of China issues that have been in the news recently, including Chinese social media companies lying about how they use personal data (59% were “not confident at all”). The majority of responders also listed China’s human rights policies as “serious or very serious” problems for the U,S. (82%), along with tensions over Taiwan (84%), and China-Russia ties (90%) — these last three all increases from last year’s poll.

The results “have shown China has become America’s archenemy,” said Dr. Yawei Liu, Director of the China Program at the Carter Center. “This popular fear and resentment of China will only make members of the U.S. Congress even more motivated to do more to contain the rise of China.”

This comes after a year of increased tensions and loud headlines: on Taiwan, a surveillance balloon that flew over the U.S., Tiktok’s CEO called to answer questions before Congress, etc.

The survey also saw general skepticism that the two countries could work together on a range of important global issues: 54% believed the two nations could not cooperate to resolve “international conflicts,” and 52% thought the same about climate change. “I don’t know what we could possibly work with them on,” the report quotes a 25-year-old female respondent as saying. “Certainly not the climate.”

Such skepticism isn’t new. The number of respondents who had an “unfavorable” view of China has only increased by 1% from Pew’s survey last year, while those viewing China a “competitor or enemy” increased by just 3%. Recent polls from numerous outlets suggest that since 2018, American attitudes toward China have frequently plumbed new lows.

But it’s also important to note that the American public are not all dyed-in-the-wool China watchers: When asked how much confidence they had in “Chinese President Xi Jinping” to do the right thing regarding world affairs, 27% of 18- to 29-year-olds said they had “never heard of this person.”

A political divide

Pew’s report noted political and age-based divisions. On average, Republican respondents were more likely to tick the extreme negative boxes than Democrats, while young people aged 18 to 29 were more moderate than their elders, more hopeful that the U.S. could cooperate with China in the future, but also more approving of Chinese pop culture. Liu believes that while older Americans grew up during the confrontations of the Cold War, younger Americans are less hostile to China “because they are more open-minded, more Democratic Party-leaning, and more resentful of wars.”

Chinese opinions of the U.S.

It is possible this decline in trust is mirrored among Chinese to the U.S. Official Chinese government data on this is unreliable, but a survey conducted in September 2021 under Liu at the Carter Center and RIWI (an international data-gathering platform) found 62% of Chinese respondents had an “unfavorable” opinion of the U.S., likely due in large part to Chinese state propaganda.

For Liu, this is a serious development. “The U.S. is losing support from what used to be America’s staunchest supporters in China, the middle class,” Liu said. According to him, they are the generation who seized the moment during reform and opening up, benefitting most from the normalization of U.S.-China relations, investing in the U.S. and sending their children to American universities. But in October 2022, The Chronicle for Higher Education reported a 45% decline in Chinese student visa applications for U.S. universities compared to 2021, though of course the pandemic and China’s zero-COVID policy, since dismantled, may have something to do with that.

Cause for concern?

With China-U.S. relations unlikely to improve anytime soon, and politicians motivated to act on polls like these, we can only expect an increasingly vicious circle of public reaction to political actions, and politicians acting to public reaction. “A perfect storm is shaping up in the U.S. that may push Washington further down the road of confrontation with China,” Liu said.