Recent polling conducted by Rasmussen, Pew Research, and Gallup reveals a remarkable, and welcome, turnabout in how most Americans view China: The communist regime running that country is an enemy, not a friend. And its determination to rule the world is finally being taken seriously.
A late-December poll conducted by Rasmussen for Just the News revealed that just seven percent of U.S. voters consider that regime as an “ally” while 89 percent “consider China a competitor or enemy, rather than a partner.”
Rasmussen noted that Americans are incensed over such issues as the Communists’ violation of human rights in China, its authoritarian Communist Party political system, and its stated determination to become the world hegemon by 2050, if not sooner.
In early March, new polling from the Pew Research Center revealed that nearly nine out of every 10 American adults see China as either hostile or a danger to U.S. interests. Those polled also cited the Communists’ actions in Hong Kong, where the government has imposed a virtual police state; and how Beijing is detaining and enslaving more than a million members of the Muslim Uyghur minority in Western China. They also cited China’s growing military power, its technological gains, and its continued cyberattacks on American targets.
The polling revealed that few Americans “put much stock” in Xi Jinping, the president of the ruling Chinese Communist Party. Said Pew: “Only 15% have confidence in Xi to do the right thing regarding world affairs, whereas 82% do not — including 43% who have no confidence in him at all.”
Even the more liberal Gallup confirmed the seismic shift in sentiment. On Tuesday it released the results of its poll, declaring that “forty-five percent of Americans now say china is the greatest enemy of the U.S., more than double the percentage who said so in 2020.”
The shift is extraordinary: In 2020 just 22 percent of Americans polled by Gallup considered China to be America’s greatest enemy. That number today is 45 percent! And, added Gallup, “[our polling] finds favorable views of China among U.S. adults falling for the second straight year, putting the figure at a historically low 20%.”
In 2018, more than half of Americans considered North Korea as their country’s greatest threat. Today, that number is down to less than one in 10.
Pew went one step further, measuring the partisan political divide over the issue: “While 76% of Republicans name China as the [country’s] greatest enemy, 43% of independents and [just] 22% of Democrats do so.”
In addition, Gallup asked respondents: “Which one of the following [countries] do you think is the leading economic power in the world today?” A year ago, half of those polled said the United States. Today, it’s down to 37 percent. In contrast, a year ago 39 percent of Gallup’s respondents said China was the leading economic power in the world. Today, it’s at 50 percent.
Finally, Gallup read “a list of possible threats to the vital interests of the United States in the next 10 years.” Two years ago, 46 percent of those polled named China. Today 63 percent of them named China.
Gallup concluded:
Perceptions of China as the greatest enemy of the U.S. are at a high point … [while] at the same time its favorable rating is at a low point.
Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) summed up the current mindset of Americans toward China revealed and confirmed by the polls conducted by Rasmussen, Pew Research, and Gallup:
They are our adversary. They are intent on global domination.
The human rights violations they are carrying out against the Hong Kong freedom fighters, the Tibetans, and the Taiwanese, the genocide they are conducting against the Uyghurs, the Muslim minority population where they’re putting them into slave labor and internment camps … they want to annihilate that population.
A spokesman for the Communist Chinese Foreign Ministry, Zhao Lijan, ignored the polls and instead told the Biden administration just how Beijing expected to be treated by the new administration:
The United States should treat China and China-US relations in a right mentality and in an objective and rational manner, stop interfering in China’s internal affairs and work with China to focus on cooperation, manage differences, and place China-US relations back on the track of healthy and stable development.
