When Air Force One touched down in Beijing this week for Trump's summit with Xi Jinping, the cameras framed it as a meeting of two superpowers across a table. The polling tells a different story. The world has already moved — not toward China out of admiration, but away from the United States out of exhaustion. Trump landed in Beijing to negotiate. The allies whose heft should give that negotiation weight had quietly stepped back.
This week's data assembles a single, uncomfortable picture: America's alliance system, built across eight decades to contain Beijing, now views Washington with more suspicion than it views the country it was designed to balance against. That's a real rupture. The constructive read — and there is one — is that it's a rupture caused by us, which means it can be repaired by us.
Below Russia
Two years ago, global perception of the United States sat at +22%. Today, the Alliance of Democracies Foundation's Democracy Perception Index puts it at −16%. That's a 38-point swing in 24 months — the kind of move you usually only see in the favorability of a single politician, not an entire country.
The comparison that really hurts? The United States now sits below Russia (−11%) and below China (+7%) in net global favorability. The world's largest survey of country perception, conducted across 98 countries with 94,000 respondents, names the U.S. as the third-greatest threat to global peace, behind only Russia and Israel.
Two-year trends accelerating into their third are not statistical artifacts. And while it's tempting to read this as a rebuke of one administration, the more important read is structural: the world has stopped grading America on a curve.
The Quiet Hedge
The Democracy Perception Index tells you the world has moved. Politico and Public First's five-nation survey tells you where it moved to. Across 10,289 respondents in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, the question was simple: forced to pick between Trump's America and China, which do you prefer to rely on?
The results, in our four allied nations:
- Canada: 57% China, 23% US
- United Kingdom: 42% China, 34% US
- Germany: 40% China, 24% US
- France: 34% China, 25% US
Unsurprisingly, inside the United States itself, the question flips cleanly — 63% of Americans pick their own country over China. But the countries that used to amplify American leverage are the ones quietly stepping out of the chorus.
The follow-up question is the one that matters for repair. When Public First asked the pro-China respondents why they were tilting toward Beijing, the dominant answer wasn't admiration. It was disappointment. 60% of Canadians and 60% of Germans cited "the U.S. has become less reliable" as their top reason. In the U.K., 42%. France, 38%. The pivot is reactive, not aspirational — which is good news, because aspirational moves are hard to reverse, and reactive ones aren't.
Allies aren't switching teams. They're hedging because the team captain stopped showing up to practice.
The same poll asked who respondents expect to be the dominant global power in 10 years. They all said China: 51% of Germans, 49% of Canadians, 48% of the French, and 45% of Brits. The U.S. number sat between 33 and 41 across the four countries. Whether or not they're right about the trajectory, that expectation alone will shape how allied governments hedge, invest, and vote at international institutions for a decade.
A second Politico survey of six European publics — Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Spain — finds an even sharper inversion. Asked who poses a greater threat, 36% named the United States and 29% named China. In Spain, 51% described the U.S. as a threat, and only 17% as a close ally. Poland was the outlier in the other direction: just 13% of Poles call the U.S. a threat, which gives very GWB 2004 vibes ("You forgot Poland!"). Of course, this is what an ally on the front line with Russia looks like in polling form.
The same dynamic shows up across the Pacific. The ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute's annual ASEAN survey of 2,008 Southeast Asian elites asked the forced-choice question and got 52% China, 48% US — a reversal from 2025 and a return to China's 2024 advantage. Pessimism about U.S. relations in the region nearly doubled in a single year, from 14% to 30%. And tellingly, the most-trusted external partner in Southeast Asia isn't either superpower — it's Japan at 66%, followed by the EU at 56%.
The throughline across all three datasets: the world isn't picking China. It's picking not the United States. That's a meaningful distinction. Beijing hasn't won a values argument. Washington has lost a credibility argument.
Détente Begins at Home
The domestic polling here in the US on China is the part most foreign-policy commentary skips. It shouldn't. American voters have already moved past the trade-war frame, and they've moved in a direction that gives any president — including this one — a constructive opening.
The buried lede in Gallup's annual country favorability survey is that American favorability toward China has more than doubled in three years, rising from 15% in 2023 to 34% today. Every party group moved. Democrats sit at 42%, independents at 38%, and Republicans at 18% — a tripling from the 6% GOP low in 2023. China remains net-unfavorable, but the trendline is unmistakable, and it does not follow the standard partisan script.
That softening shows up in policy preferences too. A Committee of 100 / NORC survey of 2,000 U.S. adults asked whether the U.S. government should work more closely with China on diplomatic issues. 59% said yes — including 65% of Democrats and 63% of Republicans. This is a bipartisan supermajority for diplomatic cooperation that sits directly opposite the rhetorical posture both parties have used on the campaign trail.
What this means for the summit: Trump arrived with a domestic public meaningfully more open to a constructive deal than Washington's tone would suggest. The political cost of a thin deal is lower than it would have been five years ago. The political cost of no deal — coming home with nothing but rhetoric — has crept up.
The Decoupling That Won't Decouple
For all the political theater, the corporate world has already voted with its checkbook, and the vote is "stay."
AmCham South China's annual survey of 426 firms operating in China found that 69% report negative tariff impact on their 2025 business — the worst reading since 2018 and up 15 points year-over-year. U.S.-headquartered firms reported the highest pain at 78%. By every conventional read, this should be a leaving-the-market moment.
It isn't. 75% of those same firms plan to reinvest in China, to the tune of $13.8 billion over the next 3-5 years. 45% name China their top global investment destination, up six points. Not a single surveyed firm reports plans for a full market exit. Business optimism about U.S.-China relations actually rose to 39%, with respondents reportedly factoring in the possibility of exactly the kind of summit that just happened.
Allianz Trade's global corporate survey of 6,000 companies across 13 markets paints a wider picture. Investment intent toward China fell sharply from 53% to 24%. But here's the part that should make American policymakers wince: investment intent toward the United States as an export growth platform fell from 17% to 13% in the same window. We are now nearly twice as unpopular as China among global investors evaluating where to grow.
The pull-quote from Allianz's research lead: U.S.-China decoupling "has not materialized." Tariffs from 2018 "have never been taken away." What's actually happening is global capital hedging away from both superpowers simultaneously, while supply chain entrenchment in China keeps multinationals committed in practice even when their political posture says otherwise.
For the summit, this was the silent backdrop. Whatever Trump and Xi said, the corporate world has already decided the answer: keep the factories, hedge the politics, and wait this out.
This Week's Shorter Stories
🪧 The Taiwan silence. At the summit Xi stressed to Trump that the Taiwan question is "the most important issue in China-U.S. relations." Funny, because it doesn't seem to be important to US pollsters - since Poll Vault began ingesting polls in January, there have been no polls on Taiwan. That's roughly four and a half months of daily collection, and zero dedicated public polls testing American or allied attitudes toward Taiwan. The window is short, but it's also the window in which the Beijing summit was telegraphed, scheduled and held. That's not a gotcha against the pollsters; it reflects the fact that Taiwan has been treated as an elite-discourse issue rather than a public-opinion issue. What you can't measure, you also can't claim a mandate for.
🌐 The generational hedge. Public First's NATO data shows respondents aged 18–24 across allied nations report markedly more favorable attitudes toward strengthening ties with China than older cohorts. The researchers flagged heavy TikTok use as one likely input to the younger cohort's information environment. If that pattern holds, the U.S.-China rupture in allied opinion will deepen with each electoral cycle, not narrow.
Next Week
- Post-summit favorability. Within 30 days, expect Pew, Gallup, and YouGov to re-field China favorability among U.S. adults. Whether the 34% number ticks up further is the leading indicator on whether Americans are reading the summit as a reset.
- Taiwan polling, finally. With Taiwan now in the news cycle, watch for the first U.S. survey to put the question to American voters cold. The hypothesis worth testing: support for defending Taiwan tracks higher when framed as a democracy question than when framed as a military question.
This week Poll Vault tracked 10 polls touching directly on China and 16 more bearing on the broader alliance picture — see them all →.
What Else We Tracked This Week
- Spaniards Rank Trump as Bigger Threat to World Peace Than Putin or Netanyahu — El País / Cadena SER / 40dB
- Ukrainian Favorability Toward NATO, EU, and U.S. Drops Since Autumn 2025 — Kyiv Security Forum / Razumkov Centre
- Most Asian Americans Seen as Foreign Regardless of Birthplace — Committee of 100 / NORC
- Three-Quarters of Canadians Reject US as Trustworthy Ally Amid Trump Tariffs and Annexation Threats — Nanos Research
- Global Companies Pull Back on US and China Investment as Trade Tensions Mount — Allianz Trade
- Nearly Half of Americans Think World War III Likely Within Five Years — POLITICO
Until next time, Alex Lundry
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