US President Donald Trump is set to travel to Beijing on May 14 and 15 for a high-stakes summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the South China Morning Post reported, as a Pew Research Centre survey released Tuesday found that American positive sentiment toward China has nearly doubled since 2023 — rising to 27% from single-digit levels near the pandemic lows — even as confidence in Trump’s ability to handle the China relationship has slipped to just 39%.
The visit will be Trump’s first trip to China in his second term. It was originally scheduled for March but was pushed back by the American side after the United States and Israel went to war with Iran on February 28 — a delay that placed the most consequential bilateral meeting in global geopolitics on hold while the conflict that closed the Strait of Hormuz, pushed Brent crude above $102 per barrel, and triggered the worst Indian equity market performance since March 2020 consumed Washington’s diplomatic bandwidth entirely.
The Pew survey findings
The Pew Research Centre survey, conducted in January and March 2026 across 12,000 American adults representing a broad cross-section of the population, found that 27% of Americans now hold a positive opinion of China — up six percentage points from the previous year and nearly double the level recorded in 2023. The share of Americans who describe China as an enemy has fallen since 2025, with the competitor characterisation remaining dominant but the adversary framing receding.
Laura Silver, associate director at Pew, attributed the shift primarily to Democrats and younger adults. The share of Democrat voters who see China positively has risen eight percentage points from last year. Republican opinion has remained largely unchanged, though overall favourability across both parties has increased noticeably since the 2023 lows. Approximately one third of Americans under 50 now hold a favourable view of China — a generational data point that has significant implications for the long-term trajectory of US-China public opinion.
Silver noted that the warming trend appears to be international as well as domestic, suggesting something broad-based and temporal rather than purely a domestic American political phenomenon. She pointed to a floor effect — sentiment toward China was so low around the pandemic period that some recovery was mathematically inevitable as that period receded in public memory. She also observed that many countries now see the US as a threat at similar or higher rates to how they view China — a striking finding that reflects how the Iran war and broader American unilateralism under Trump have affected international perceptions of the United States.
The confidence paradox
The most analytically interesting tension in the Pew data is between improving American views of China as a country and declining confidence in Trump’s ability to manage the relationship. Only 39% of respondents said they felt confidence in Trump’s policy decisions toward China — down from 45% in August last year. The gap between liking China more and trusting Trump’s China policy less suggests that Americans are separating their views of the Chinese people and economy from their assessment of how the current administration is managing the bilateral relationship.
The partisan breakdown is stark even by current American standards. 71% of Republicans trust Trump’s China decision-making, compared with just 11% of Democrats — a 60 percentage point gap that reflects the complete polarisation of American political opinion on presidential competence rather than any genuine disagreement about China policy substance. Younger adults across both parties were found to have less confidence in Trump’s China approach, with the trend particularly pronounced among young Republicans — a finding that suggests the intergenerational shift in Republican foreign policy sentiment that analysts have been tracking is continuing.
Why May 14 to 15 and why it matters
The May 14 to 15 Beijing summit arrives at a moment when US-China relations are simultaneously warming in public sentiment and sharpening in geopolitical confrontation. Wang Yi warned on Wednesday that China will respond with countermeasures if the United States proceeds with tariff hikes based on allegations of Chinese military support for Iran — allegations Beijing called purely fabricated. Lavrov had just declared from Beijing that uranium enrichment is Iran’s indisputable right. Xi Jinping had declared the world order is crumbling into disarray.
Into this environment, Trump is heading to Beijing with 39% domestic confidence in his China policy, a warming public sentiment baseline that gives him some political cover for diplomatic engagement, and a bilateral relationship that spans the Iran war accusations, trade tariffs, technology restrictions, Taiwan, the South China Sea, and now the Hormuz energy crisis simultaneously. The summit’s agenda has not been officially disclosed but the range of issues demanding attention — from the Iran conflict’s economic consequences to trade war de-escalation to Taiwan — makes it among the most consequential bilateral meetings since Nixon’s 1972 opening to China.
The India dimension
For India, a Trump-Xi summit in Beijing in May is a development that demands careful attention. India is navigating its own complex triangular relationship with Washington and Beijing while simultaneously absorbing the economic damage of the Iran war that delayed the summit in the first place. A US-China diplomatic rapprochement — or conversely a confrontation that escalates from the Iran military support accusations — would in either direction reshape the geopolitical environment in which India is making its energy security, foreign policy, and economic decisions. The May 14 to 15 dates are now as important for Indian strategic planning as the April 21 ceasefire deadline.
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