Make China Great Again? How U.S. Retrenchment Benefits Beijing

China’s global standing has surpassed that of the United States amid tariff tensions

The Trump administration has asserted that tariff-induced pain facing U.S. consumers will ultimately translate into gains for American labor as the U.S. siphons manufacturing jobs back from China and elsewhere, helping to “make America great again.” But as far America’s global standing is concerned, the only country being made great again is China: Per our daily data tracking views of both countries in 41 other markets, global average net favorability of China has now eclipsed that of the United States for the first time since our tracking began.

As shown in the charts below, America’s global standing fell to a tracking low just after Washington’s reciprocal tariff announcements on April 2, 2025, which tipped net favorability of the United States into negative territory for the first time since January 2022 (just after the onset of our 41-country favorability tracking). While the ensuing rebound — which we attribute to the subsequent 90-day tariff pause announced on April 9 — has undone some of the damage, America’s reputation nevertheless continues to hover near a historic low relative to the entire time period covered by our 41-market data.

All of these trends continue to hold when we limit our analysis to a smaller set of 13 “core markets” in which Morning Consult has continuously tracked favorability of both the United States and China since late 2020, marking the tail end of the first Trump administration and the last time America’s reputation was underwater in our data set.

Per the chart above, the main events coinciding with large downswings in U.S. favorability prior to 2024 include the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riots and discontent surrounding the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, while the arrival of the Biden administration was met with a large upswing in positive sentiment toward America. Both China and the United States also saw a boost in favorability in the window surrounding a late 2021 virtual summit between Beijing and Washington — the first such meeting in several years — which was announced on Oct. 6, 2021 and held on Nov. 15. While both sides' attempt to mend fences via that forum appears to have been received favorably, there are likely other factors at play in parallel, including some degree of trend reversion for the United States after the Afghanistan withdrawal, and for China, increased global engagement on various fronts. The drivers of the Aug. 2021 uptick in favorability toward China are more difficult to parse, but could reflect reactionary sentiment to the widely criticized U.S. Afghanistan withdrawal translating into a short-term boost for Beijing.

As alluded to above, Beijing’s newfound fortunes are not entirely of its own making. Global sentiment toward China has been improving slowly but surely over the past several years, marked by a relatively gradual uptrend in net favorability. But to a large degree, its leg up over the United States — which began in early March — is attributable to America’s plummeting reputation throughout 2025, which has seen global favorability of the United States fall far faster than views of China have risen. The reputational damage done by the “Liberation Day” tariff announcements has now sealed the deal.

Country-level assessments tell a similar story

While the U.S. administration has suggested it plans to use tariff negotiations with its trading partners to isolate Beijing economically, the effect on U.S. soft power is meanwhile pointing clearly in the opposite direction, turning global public sentiment to China’s advantage. This becomes particularly clear when we examine country-specific changes in net favorability toward the United States and China from Jan. 1, 2025 — just before President Trump’s return to office — through April 30, 2025, closing out the month of the Liberation Day tariff announcements. 

As seen in the chart below, the large majority of countries tracked via Morning Consult Intelligence simultaneously exhibit worsening views of the United States and improving views of China over this time period. In contrast to the United States — which saw its standing diminish in 38 of 41 markets over 2025/YTD — China meanwhile saw its standing improve in 34 of them. Russia is the only country where views of the United States have improved substantially among the general population this year. Beyond Russia, only Indonesia and Israel shows improving fervor for the United States, and even then, the increases are modest.

An alternative cut of the data focused on Beijing’s and Washington’s relative standing tells a similar story. Specifically, we look at the gap in the relative favorability of each country — defined as the difference between net favorability of China and the United States — where positive values indicate a pro-China stance and negative values indicate a pro-U.S. stance.

Among our 41 daily tracking markets beyond the United States and China, 29 of them were relatively pro-U.S. as of Jan. 1, 2025, with Israel leading the pro-U.S. camp and Russia leading the pro-China contingent. By contrast, as of April 30, 2025, only 13 countries remained in the pro-U.S. camp (Argentina, Australia, the Czech Republic, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Philippines, Poland, South Korea, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam), speaking to the damage to America’s reputation the past few months have wrought and signaling a dramatic reversal of fortunes relative to a similar assessment we conducted in 2022. Among the 13 countries that remain in the pro-U.S. camp, roughly one-third are edge cases.

When assessed country by country, the magnitude of the increase in pro-China sentiment over 2025/YTD is striking for many of them, as seen in the charts below, in which the gray bars report the change in relative favorability toward China from Jan. 1 (light green circles) through April 30 (dark green circles). During this time period, 16 countries switched from exhibiting pro-U.S. to pro-China sentiment, leaving just 13 of 41 countries in the pro-U.S. camp.

A country-by-country comparison of net favorability toward the United States and China at the end of April reveals additional challenges for Washington, as depicted in the chart below, where the color intensity of each dot represents the relative degree of pro-China or pro-U.S. sentiment (corresponding to the intensity of the pink and blue shading, respectively). As can be seen in the right half of the figure, among those countries holding net-positive views of the United States, the majority hold even more positive views of China (reflected by the larger share of dots shaded in pink). Similarly, among the countries holding net-positive views of China (top-left and top-right quadrants of chart), public sentiment in nearly all of them is more favorable toward Beijing than toward Washington (again reflected by the share of dots shaded in pink, where Argentina is the only outlier).

America fares little better in so-called “contested markets” — a term we use to refer to countries where net favorability readings toward China and the United States are simultaneously positive (top-right quadrant) or negative (bottom-left quadrant). Among these markets, the balance of public sentiment again favors China. In contested positive sentiment markets (top-right quadrant of chart), while views of the United States are net-positive, views of China are almost always more so (Argentina is the sole outlier). And in contested negative sentiment markets (bottom-left quadrant), public views of China are less negative than views of the United States in more markets than not (Japan and Korea are the clear outliers, while many others are edge cases).

Rising anti-Americanism could undercut Washington’s ability to project economic and military force abroad

The material risks arising from America’s shifting fortunes on the global stage — economic, political and military — are manifold. As we first documented several years back, public views of the United States tend to be positively correlated with views of inbound U.S. trade and capital flows in the Asia-Pacific region, suggesting that as views of the United States worsen, trade and investment opportunities for American firms doing business overseas may also diminish as consumers shun the products and job opportunities they provide.

Public opinion also matters for military interventions on behalf of U.S. allies. Research has shown that democracies rarely go to war without public backing and that public opinion can be critical in democratic leaders’ choice to intervene on behalf of an ally. America’s sinking standing in the eyes of its treaty allies — a phenomenon we documented in November 2024, with an updated assessment slated for the coming weeks — is therefore of particular concern. 

Nowhere will this be more key than in the event of a conflict over Taiwan that sees Washington and Beijing butt heads. As our prior research has suggested, public sentiment among many of America’s most important Indo-Pacific partners and allies could make political leaders hesitant to commit economic and military support to the U.S. cause — ranging from coordinated restrictions on Chinese imports and investment to providing troops and materiel — should Washington find itself embroiled in such a conflict.

On balance, our view is that declining favorability toward the United States, should it continue, risks giving Beijing a stronger hand than it might otherwise have. To be sure, many of America’s most stalwart partners in the Asia-Pacific — Japan and South Korea, alongside the Philippines — continue to hold far worse views of China than the United States, and they are unlikely to do an about-face in the event of a conflict. But cooperation is a matter of degree, rather than a binary. Public opinion can influence the extent to which countries contribute to collective defense, vote with the United States at the United Nations, and support U.S. security arrangements. All are worth watching for signs of potential U.S. fragility.

Silver linings?

As the above discussion makes clear, global public sentiment broadly disfavors Washington in its competition with Beijing for the world’s hearts and minds. If there is a silver lining visible in our data, it’s that America’s global standing has recently begun to rebound, coinciding with the Trump administration’s 90-day reciprocal tariff pause. This suggests that global views of America remain mutable. And global leaders cannot afford not to work with the United States. Washington’s interests, and those of its allies, also broadly remain the same, and so we expect that cooperation will continue in many respects. 

But other factors may also be at play that could sustain longer-term harm to America’s reputation. These include public discontent with the United States’ retrenchment on the global stage as the country signals its embrace of a more isolationist foreign policy; its perceived insouciance about the territorial integrity of besieged sovereign nations (on display during negotiations to end the war in Ukraine); its decision to dramatically curtail foreign aid, trade ties and diplomatic representation; and its decision to withdraw from multilateral and plurilateral organizations and accords.

Should drivers such as these extend the impact of tariffs on the United States’ global standing, they could ultimately pose non-trivial risks to American soft power that long outlast the trade war.