Americans are souring on one key Trump policy. It could cause an issue.
And now a shocking new poll spells trouble for Donald Trump’s GOP.
Just as President Trump was warning Chinese President Xi Jinping to his face about Beijing’s dangerous support for Iran, a new Pew Research Center survey dropped some troubling news about the American public’s own attitudes: nearly one in five Americans now say they have a warm view of Communist China. That’s a number worth sitting with, especially given everything the Chinese Communist Party has been up to lately.
According to the Pew survey, conducted September 14-20, the share of American adults with a warm view of China has grown from just 11 percent in 2021 to 19 percent today. Meanwhile, the share of Americans expressing a cold, negative view of China has actually fallen substantially, from 68 percent in 2021 down to 54 percent now. Neutral views, meanwhile, have climbed from 20 percent to 27 percent. Put simply: America’s collective wariness toward its most formidable geopolitical rival is eroding, even as the underlying reasons for that wariness haven’t gone anywhere.
The timing here is almost surreal. This survey landed the same week Xi Jinping made his first state visit to Washington in over a decade, and the same week U.S. Ambassador to China David Perdue confirmed that President Trump personally warned Xi that Chinese support for Iran, whether military, intelligence, or economic, was “totally unacceptable.” China remains Iran’s most important trading partner and has reportedly supplied drone parts, motors, and dual-use chemicals that have aided Tehran’s missile program. This is the same Beijing that a growing share of Americans are apparently softening toward.
The partisan breakdown tells its own story. Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are driving most of this warming trend, with 26 percent now expressing a warm view of China compared to just 15 percent back in 2021. Republicans have warmed too, though far more modestly, moving from 5 percent to 10 percent. Still, that means Democrats are now more than two and a half times as likely as Republicans to view Beijing favorably, a gap that should concern anyone hoping for durable, bipartisan resolve on China policy heading into an uncertain geopolitical future.
A separate Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey released around the same time reinforces this trend, finding that American sentiment toward China has warmed considerably since hitting a record low back in 2024. Americans rated China an average of 39 on a 100-point scale in the new survey, up from just 26 two years earlier. The Chicago Council survey also found that Americans are now less likely to view China as an outright threat and more inclined to favor cooperation over containment, though sentiment still runs cooler than it did back in the 2010s.
Here’s the encouraging wrinkle in an otherwise concerning trend: grassroots conservatives haven’t lost the plot. The Chicago Council survey found that a striking 63 percent of self-identified MAGA Republicans still favor containing China’s rise rather than pursuing cooperation, compared to just 43 percent of non-MAGA Republicans who share that instinct. MAGA-aligned Republicans were also considerably more likely to support higher tariffs on Chinese imports, tighter restrictions on U.S.-China trade even at some cost to American consumers, and limits on Chinese international students studying at American universities.
That gap matters enormously. It suggests the softening in public opinion toward China isn’t a uniform, across-the-board phenomenon so much as it’s being driven disproportionately by Democratic voters and non-MAGA-aligned Republicans, while the America First wing of the conservative movement remains appropriately clear-eyed about the nature of the Chinese Communist Party’s ambitions. That’s precisely the kind of vigilance the moment calls for.
It’s worth asking what’s actually driving this warming trend among the broader public. Some of it likely traces back to genuine diplomatic progress, including Trump’s own outreach to Xi and a series of trade agreements aimed at stabilizing the economic relationship between the two countries. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced this week that the U.S. and China have reached new understandings on tariffs, with Beijing agreeing to suspend certain export controls on rare earth metals critical to American manufacturing and defense industries. Diplomatic engagement and economic stabilization are not inherently bad things, and a less hostile day-to-day relationship with Beijing can serve legitimate American interests.
But warming public sentiment shouldn’t be confused with naivety about what China actually is: a one-party authoritarian state that surveils and represses its own population, that has spent years aggressively expanding its military footprint in the Indo-Pacific, that continues to threaten Taiwan’s sovereignty, and that, according to Trump’s own administration, has provided material support to Iran even as American forces remain engaged in an active conflict with Tehran. None of those realities have changed just because trade talks have improved or a state dinner went smoothly.
Taiwan remains perhaps the single most consequential flashpoint in the entire U.S.-China relationship, and it’s one where American resolve genuinely matters. Foundation for Defense of Democracies executive director Jonathan Schanzer has warned that Taiwan is “clearly the main target” of the Chinese Communist Party’s long-term ambitions, and that the United States has enormous strategic and economic interests tied up in keeping the island secure, not least through Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s central role in the global chip supply chain that underpins America’s ability to compete in the AI race.
There’s nothing wrong with hoping for a more stable, less confrontational relationship with China, and diplomatic engagement between Trump and Xi has produced some tangible benefits on trade and other fronts. But the American public’s growing warmth toward Beijing shouldn’t translate into complacency about the Chinese Communist Party’s continued support for hostile regimes like Iran, its territorial ambitions toward Taiwan, or its broader strategic competition with the United States for global influence. Grassroots conservatives who remain skeptical of Beijing’s intentions, even amid warmer diplomatic optics, are reading the situation correctly. The rest of the country would do well to catch up.
