Dem
51
GOP
49
There have been plenty of polls about what Americans think of China, but what about the other way? What do Chinese people think about America? Morning Consult has been running polls there asking if people see America as an ally (friendly) or an enemy (unfriendly). The results are somewhat surprising:
18 months ago, by a three-to-one margin, Chinese people saw America as an enemy. Now, it is almost tied. That's a big shift. Most Americans see China as an enemy, not an ally (hence the GOP debate; see above). It's not clear what caused Chinese opinion to change. One possibility is that when he was president, Donald Trump constantly attacked China verbally and did things like put tariffs on Chinese products. Many Chinese people probably saw this as aggressively anti-Chinese.
Joe Biden, by contrast, has cut the rhetoric, but quietly done things that actually could hurt China much more in the long run than a 10% tariff on T-shirts. He got Intel to start building a $100-billion semiconductor plant in Ohio and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to start building a $40-billion semiconductor plant in Arizona. These will make America much less dependent on China in the long-run for advanced chips and will actually hurt China, but the average Chinese citizen doesn't understand this (unfortunately for Biden, neither does the average American citizen). Biden also got the Netherlands to ban ASML from selling chip-making machines to China. In other words, with Trump, it was all bark and no bite. With Biden, it is all bite and no bark. Chinese people don't realize that Biden is actually quietly taking steps to undermine China and is actually a bigger threat to China than Trump was. (V)