Americans grow a bit friendlier toward China

Apr 15, 2026Center Left

Data: Pew; Chart: Axios VisualsThe percentage of Americans holding favorable views of China rose for the third straight year, according to an annual Pew survey, and has nearly doubled since 2023.Meanwhile, the share of Americans who view China as an "enemy" has fallen significantly over that time.Why it matters: Distrust of China hardened into a bipartisan consensus beginning in Trump's first term. It's now softening somewhat during Trump 2.0.The U.S. and China are the world's two superpowers, locked in a competition for technological dominance and global influence. How their citizens see one another could have some bearing on that competition.By the numbers: China's favorability among Americans bottomed out in 2023, with 14% approving and 83% disapproving.In the most recent survey, conducted in late March, 27% saw China favorably and 71% unfavorably.The increase was driven by Democrats (34% approval), who were nearly twice as likely as Republicans (18%) to view China favorably.Democrats are also far less likely than Republicans to see China as an "enemy," at 14% and 44% respectively. The overall percentage of Americans viewing China as an enemy dropped from 42% in 2024 to 28% now.However, Americans are still much more likely to label China a "competitor" than a "partner." And while confidence in President Xi Jinping to "do the right thing regarding world affairs" has doubled since 2023, it's still only at 17%.Americans don't much trust Trump's handling of the relationship with China either, with 60% lacking confidence in the president's approach.What's next: Trump is scheduled to visit China next month. He has sought warmer relations with Xi since agreeing to a trade truce last November, though tensions have risen over the war in Iran.What to watch: China's global favorability has risen as America's has fallen in Trump's second term.Methodology: Data in this report comes from Pew Research Center's nationally representative panel of randomly selected U.S. adults. The survey was conducted from March 23 to March 29, 2026. A total of 3,507 panelists responded out of 4,046 who were sampled, for a survey-level response rate of 87%. The margin of error is plus or minus 1.9 percentage points.

Growing surveillance state under Trump admin sparks nationwide backlash

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Growing surveillance state under Trump admin sparks nationwide backlash

Resistance is mounting across the United States against the increasing use of surveillance tech company Flock Safety’s cameras, with a growing number of cities canceling contracts as the artificial intelligence-powered license plate readers are quietly being installed in thousands of locations nationwide.State and local police departments first used the Atlanta-based company’s automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems for standard law enforcement purposes, but they are now being employed for a much broader range of uses, including immigration-related searches and other actions supporting US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during the Trump administration’s deadly anti-immigrant crackdown.“We have cameras that are used for everything from illegal dumping to drug houses to hotels that are just big problems,” Flock Safety engineer Kevin Cox told prospective customers during a demonstration of the company’s Condor Camera, according to a Thursday report in The Washington Times.“There are endless, endless uses for what we can do with these things,” Cox added.Those uses include spying on constitutionally protected protest activity and enforcing abortion bans by tracking pregnant people’s travel across states—even ones in which the medical procedure is legal.The ACLU—which recently launched a “Get the Flock Out” campaign to “fight creepy ALPR cameras”—says there are currently between 80,000 and 100,000 Flock devices installed nationwide that conduct more than 20 billion scans per month. More than 5,000 law enforcement agencies use the cameras, and some of them keep their locations a secret.“Flock’s ALPR cameras aren’t like your normal traffic cameras,” the ACLU explained. “This surveillance technology records and tracks every car that comes into view, and then an AI algorithm catalogs the make, model, color, license plate number, bumper stickers, and even scratches. This personal information is then uploaded into a nationwide database that any law enforcement agency with a Flock contract can search—with few regulations or oversight on how they use what they find.”The backlash against creeping state surveillance has even transcended the partisan divide.“I think our country is in a kind of uniquely anti-surveillance environment right now, which is to say that, in a time where it seems there is nothing that is not partisan, opposition to government surveillance is nonpartisan,” ACLU privacy and surveillance attorney Chad Marlow told The Washington Times on Thursday.There is growing action—both legal and otherwise—to end the use of ALPRs across the country.According to the public information project Ban Flock Cameras, 82 Flock contracts were terminated across 28 states between August 2021 and May 2026, with 39 of those cancellations occurring in the first five months of 2026 alone.Even Amazon-owned Ring announced earlier this year that it would stop doing business with Flock Safety.Susie O’Hara, a member of Santa Cruz, California’s nominally nonpartisan City Council, told WBUR earlier this year that she grew increasingly concerned about local use of eight Flock cameras last year after learning that police were sharing data gleaned from the cameras with the company’s national network without city officials’ knowledge, a violation of state laws banning the practice.O’Hara became increasingly convinced that Santa Cruz should cancel its Flock contract after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good, a US citizen, in Minneapolis in January.“I have goose bumps on my arms thinking about the absolute chaos that was happening in Minneapolis,” she said. “And just the absolute insanity of what we were seeing... It was totally clear to me that we should in no way consciously be in this system at all—just no way.”Less than a week after Good’s killing, the Santa Cruz City Council voted to terminate the city’s Flock contract, becoming the first municipality in California to do so.“For us, the threat to our civil liberties was greater than any benefit we could get from the flawed product,” Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley told KQED at the time.Chad Kemp, who represents District 32 on the nonpartisan Dane County Board of Supervisors in Wisconsin—which in April voted to stop funding two dozen cameras leased from Flock—told The Washington Times that “there’s a public safety issue here, but there is also a privacy issue.”“There are serious concerns about individuals who can be monitored without their knowledge, or if it is even constitutional or ethical to track people without a warrant,” he added.At the national level, US Reps. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) last year launched an investigation into the use of Flock cameras to track pregnant people across state lines for abortion care and to conduct unauthorized immigration enforcement operations.Krishnamoorthi and Sen.

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Americans grow a bit friendlier toward China

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Americans grow a bit friendlier toward China

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