China's Quiet Mastery of Global Trust

For most of the post-war era, whatever people thought of Washington, they thought a little better of it than they thought of Beijing. That assumption no longer holds, and the reversal has been remarkably fast. As recently as 2024, Pew’s own 35-country survey put the US comfortably ahead on the same measure, a median 54% favourable against just 35% for China, a gap wide enough that few analysts thought it would close soon, let alone flip. Pew Research Centre’s newly released 36-country survey (Feb�"May 2026) finds people in most surveyed nations now view China more favourably than the US, and more trust Xi Jinping to do right by world affairs than trust Donald Trump �" a full reversal of Pew's 2025 findings, where the US still led China 49% to 37% on median favourability.

But it is worth separating two distinct questions that this data tends to blur together - why has America’s standing fallen, and why has China’s risen? These are not the same story, and treating them as one lets China’s rise coast on America’s mistakes rather than being credited on its own terms. Washington’s decline is comparatively easy to explain. Decades of wars and interventions across the Middle East �" Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and now the unconditional backing of Israel’s campaign in Gaza �" have left a trail of resentment across the Muslim world and the wider Global South that outlasts any single administration. Donald Trump’s second-term posture, marked by transactional bullying of allies, tariff threats, and an open contempt for multilateralism, has compounded that resentment rather than repaired it. Pew’s own data captures this, which is a story about American conduct, not about Chinese appeal.

Pew Research Centre’s newly released 36-country survey (Feb�"May 2026) finds people in most surveyed nations now view China more favourably than the US, and more trust Xi Jinping to do right by world affairs than trust Donald Trump

Bangladesh sits inside this story in a particularly telling way. It is one of the places where more respondents say Beijing, not Washington, respects the personal freedoms of its own people. This finding would have seemed unthinkable a decade ago given how the “authoritarian China” narrative has dominated Western commentary. Paired with earlier Pew findings on economic reliability, where middle-income countries increasingly describe China as the less interfering, more dependable partner, the pattern in Dhaka looks less like an anomaly and more like the regional norm across South and Southeast Asia.

There is a third factor behind these numbers that goes beyond both American missteps and Chinese doctrine, and it deserves to be the headline it rarely gets. How China is perceived is a study that has been ongoing across the world for roughly sixty years for various reasons, mostly being trying to create an unfavourable view of China by the vested quarters. But China has almost certainly used what it learns from these studies.

A recent academic study on the emotional perception of China in Bangladesh traces this global perception-tracking back to Gallup’s first “feeling thermometer” question about China in 1966-67, followed by the German Marshall Fund’s Transatlantic Trends surveys, Japan’s Tokyo-Beijing Forum polling, Australia’s Lowy Institute barometer, and Pew’s own global attitudes tracking. Layered onto these are dozens of country-specific studies cited in the same literature review, spanning Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, and Bangladesh’s own National Image of China surveys. This is very likely only the visible fraction of a much larger, decades-long body of feedback conducted by a variety of organizations and most certainly educating China on itself, market by market, continent by continent. No rival power, not the Soviet Union at its height, not the US despite its own extensive polling infrastructure, appears to have sustained anything comparable in scope, geography, or duration.

That distinction matters because perception research, done consistently, stops being academic and starts being operational. A government that knows, decade after decade, precisely which anxieties, hopes, and grievances different publics hold toward it is a government that can adjust. The Bangladesh case illustrates the mechanism directly; focus-group participants in the underlying study repeatedly flagged concrete, practical wants - more university exchange programs, scholarships, joint ventures in energy exploration, technical training, rather than abstract goodwill. Where Beijing has moved to meet those specific asks, through expanded scholarships, Confucius Institute programming, or energy-sector partnerships, the same focus groups reported rising trust in return. This author has separately noted, in earlier commentary on China's image in Bangladesh, how requests channelled through such surveys, including for deeper cooperation on health-sector development, have tended to be followed, with a lag, by exactly that kind of Chinese engagement. A partner that visibly listens earns more credit than one that spends or dictates, and it teaches the surveyed public that expressing a preference to China is not a wasted exercise.

There is also a less measurable driver behind the numbers, and it deserves a place here even though it resists a footnote. Positive sentiment towards China in the Global South is not solely a function of loans, ports, and stadiums; it also reflects how Chinese individuals, businesspeople, engineers, students, tourists, actually behave as guests in someone else’s country. A recurring complaint aired informally across Asia, Africa, and Latin America is that many Western visitors, American ones especially, arrive with an instinct to measure the host society against their own norms and find it wanting, a posture that curdles further among men who treat travel abroad as license for conduct that is sometimes despicable. Chinese visitors and workers are, by the same widely shared impression, markedly less prone to either failing. Any broad claim about millions of individuals has exceptions, but the perception circulates and compounds; dignity reads as respect, and respect, compounded over years of everyday contact, becomes soft power no advertising budget can buy.

None of this means China’s image is uncomplicated in Bangladesh. The same focus-group participants in Bangladesh who praised its infrastructure investment and hands-off political style also raised real grievances like cost overruns on Chinese-financed projects, discomfort with Beijing's treatment of the Uighur minority, and unease over the Rohingya crisis. Sixty years of listening does not erase these tensions or amount to uncritical popularity; it simply gives Chinese policymakers an unusually clear map of where the goodwill is fragile and where it is durable.

Read together, the two Pew reports and the Bangladesh study point to the same conclusion from different directions. America’s slide reflects decades of war and a leader many now distrust; China’s rise reflects a doctrine of restraint and mutual development that publics have come to notice and reward, sharpened further by the most sustained perception-tracking effort any major power has witnessed. For Bangladesh specifically, the implication is straightforward. Beijing is not simply outspending Washington in the region; it is out-listening it, and converting that advantage into exactly the goodwill the numbers now confirm.

It would be a mistake, however, to read all of this as pure calculation, as though China runs the numbers and recalibrates its conduct accordingly. Six decades of listening explain why Beijing knows what the world wants; they do not fully explain why its default posture, even before the polling comes back, tends toward restraint rather than dictation, toward building alongside rather than extracting from. Much of that instinct looks less like strategy and more like habit, a diplomatic bearing so consistently exercised across so many unrelated relationships that it reads as closer to disposition than doctrine. The feedback loop sharpens China’s soft power at the margins; it is the underlying character, the part that would likely persist even without a single survey in hand, that makes the goodwill durable rather than performative.