A Pew Research Center survey released on July 15, 2026, found that people in 25 of the 36 countries and territories surveyed hold a more favorable view of China than of the United States, and that Chinese leader Xi Jinping is viewed more favorably than President Donald Trump in 22 of those countries. Chinese state media and several mainstream outlets have framed the findings as a victory for Xi and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and a setback for the United States.
However, that conclusion is based on a single survey. Across a range of measurable indicators, the United States continues to prove more popular than China, including in higher education, tourism, defense partnerships, intelligence sharing, overseas educational infrastructure, and migration and asylum patterns.
Interviews were conducted from Feb. 8 to May 13, 2026, among 42,151 respondents across 36 countries and territories. The United States retained a favorability advantage over China in Japan, India, South Korea, the Philippines, and Poland. The United States also maintained an advantage on one measure—perceptions that its government respects personal freedoms—although that gap has narrowed since 2021 as those ratings declined in nearly every country surveyed.
A separate but related measure comes from the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute’s State of Southeast Asia 2026 report. In a forced-choice question asking ASEAN respondents to pick between the two powers, 52 percent chose China and 48 percent chose the United States, reversing the 2025 result in which the United States held the lead.
Despite the findings of an opinion survey, the measurable reality is that countries trust the United States and are more willing to invest in the United States, partner with the United States, or send their children to study in the United States than China.
In tourism, the United States recorded 68.3 million international visitors in 2025, compared with 35.17 million foreign tourists in China. The CCP cites 154.5 million “inbound tourists,” but that figure includes travelers from Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan and is therefore not directly comparable.
When it comes to education, the United States remains the world’s preferred destination, including for Chinese students. The United States hosted nearly 1.2 million international students in the 2024–2025 academic year, including 265,919 from China. China’s Ministry of Education reported about 380,000 foreign students in China that same year, of which only 205,000 were pursuing degrees, while the rest were enrolled in language courses of various lengths. By contrast, about three-quarters of Chinese students in the United States are pursuing a bachelor’s degree or higher.
The same asymmetry appears in overseas educational infrastructure. According to an April 2026 update from the Cross-Border Education Research Team, American institutions operate 97 branch campuses abroad, more than those of any other country. China, by contrast, hosts 51 foreign branch campuses on its own soil, including 16 operated by U.S. institutions, making it primarily an importer rather than an exporter of degree-granting campuses.
USC students on their way to attend a memorial service on April 18, 2012 in Los Angeles, California. Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images
The pattern extends to secondary education. For the 2025–2026 school year, the U.S. State Department assists 192 American schools abroad that award U.S.-accredited high school diplomas. No comparable Chinese government-backed network of overseas schools awarding Chinese diplomas to host-country students could be found. Most Chinese international schools are located inside China and serve expatriate families or Chinese students preparing to study abroad, which seems to support the conclusion that the United States, rather than China, is the preferred destination for education.
China’s only significant attempt to export educational institutions is the Confucius Institute network, Chinese government-funded centers that offer Chinese language instruction and cultural programming on foreign university campuses. It has followed the opposite trajectory. U.S. host institutions peaked at 118 in 2017, but only 10 remained open as of March 2026.
Other countries are also pushing back. Apart from the United States, 10 countries, including Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, and Switzerland, have closed some or all of their Confucius Institutes over concerns about academic freedom and foreign influence. Sweden closed its last institute in 2019, becoming the first European country to eliminate the program entirely. By 2025, six Australian universities had closed theirs or allowed their agreements to expire.
On defense partnerships, the United States maintains formal, Senate-ratified mutual defense treaties with more than 50 countries, including NATO’s 32 members, five bilateral Indo-Pacific treaty allies, and parties to the Rio Treaty. It also designates 19 countries as Major Non-NATO Allies. By contrast, China’s only formal mutual defense treaty is its 1961 pact with North Korea. Countries also continue to trust the United States with intelligence sharing. The U.S. anchors the Five Eyes alliance with the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand and maintains bilateral intelligence-sharing arrangements with dozens of other partner nations. China has no comparable multilateral intelligence-sharing framework.
Migration patterns further belie the claim that China is now more popular than the United States. As of January 2025, about 13 million people held green cards in the United States, including roughly 800,000 born in China, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s regional breakdown. By contrast, fewer than 20,000 foreigners hold permanent residency in China.
Asylum patterns tell a similar story. An estimated 178,725 people applied for asylum worldwide in 2025, with 147,909, more than 80 percent, filing in the United States. China received just 49 asylum applications from all nationalities combined in 2024, while 20,261 Chinese nationals applied for asylum in other countries. No record could be found of an American ever applying for asylum in China.
Claims that China is more popular than the United States appear to be an emotional reaction to some of Trump’s policies rather than a logical rejection of the United States or a well-thought-out embrace of the Chinese Communist Party.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
