I feel like "dislike the least" would be more accurate.
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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You'll notice a lot of the "Likes China" nations are consumer economies and a lot of the "Likes US" nations are export economies (particularly those in direct competition with China).
If I was working at Toyota, I wouldn't like the folks exporting BYDs to all my biggest customers, either.
That may be a factor, but Germany is maybe the country in the world with the most auto industry. Possibly tied with Japan.
And while Japan favors USA, which may be in line with your thinking, Japan has always had problematic relations with China. Which is a more likely explanation IMO.
Still Germany favors China, so that speaks against your idea. And what's notable is that most traditional American allies, now doesn't even favor USA over China which has been a strained relation to mostly all those countries for a long time.
I think what pisses people off is that USA is clearly abandoning their allies, friends and core values about international law and both political and trade relations, we've agreed on for more than 80 years.
USA abandoning Ukraine after they promised to protect Ukraine when they gave up their nukes, is a very strong political signal that USA can't be trusted as a friend or ally.
We don't expect much from China, as long as they don't invade Taiwan that's a plus!
With low expectations it's much easier for China to live up to them.
USA on the other hand, is failing completely with Trump threats lies and manipulation, and not only Trump, but the entire administration and MAGA and GOP. So USA is looking more and more as no better than China.
And with China being the more reliable of the two, the favor tilts towards China now!
It's really really sad that USA has fallen so deeply away from decency and respect of human rights, and have so little intention of following any promises previously made in international political agreements. Fuck Trump even abandoned his own trade agreement with Canada for no rational reason! And USA is threatening to invade an allied country!
IMO this has little to do with working in a car factory, but much more to do with Trump creating insecurity, and fucking everybody over, and looking more and more like a Nazi doesn't help either.
Still Germany favors China, so that speaks against your idea.
This is a race to the bottom. Germans blame the US for a host of domestic problems - high cost of energy, repeated large influxes of migrants (particularly from the Middle East), the repeated threat of high tariffs with a big trading partner, escalation with Russia over Ukraine which has cut Germany off from a number of major markets for cheap raw materials - that have eclipsed their nativist disgust for East Asian businesses.
It's for the same reason Canadians hate the US, atm. Could change on a dime if the AfD takes over the German Parliament and Euro-centric white nationalism becomes an axis around which Russia, Germany, and the US can align.
I think what pisses people off is that USA is clearly abandoning their allies, friends and core values about international law
There's a lot of rhetoric around Trump's fickle ham-handedness. But Germans weren't terribly positive about Biden or Bush, either. The Germans (and the French) are trying to corral the rest of Europe into operating as their client states. That's turf the Americans staked out decades ago, and its one they're struggling to hang onto. So there's a natural tension between German and American capital that doesn't exist in the same way with China, as China's not an occupying military in the region.
Chinese imports are, if anything, easing Germany off the US market system and into an Eastern facing market with German banks and German-owned shipping companies at the center. Chinese and German business people are happy to play ball in the same way that American and Chinese business people worked together to undermine the American working class back in the 80s/90s.
It’s really really sad that USA has fallen so deeply away from decency and respect of human rights
The Americans never had any decency or respect for human rights. What they had was advanced technology and an enormous economic surplus to spread around. Now, the US is in an intellectual and economic retreat, having invested too much of their surplus into a hyper-automated AI pipe dream.
Europe has nothing to gain by wedding itself to an economy that only knows how to make advertisements and bombs (and barely remembers how to crank out the latter). So we're seeing a decoupling that was going to happen under any administration. Trump's just dumping lighter fluid on the dumpster fire.
Nobody was positive about Bush, Bush started the slippery slope Trump is on now, for instance the war in Iraq was wildly unpopular, and the comment that if you aren't with us you are against us was disgusting, considering the war was based on false intelligence, which was reveled already at the time.
Biden was at best a mediocre president, and he too made weird comments like USA will always stand by Ukraine at the same time Trump behaved as a Russian asset, and could possibly win the election. Still Trump has taken it to new lows in everything which even Bush didn't, and USA was also very unpopular after Bush. But Trump is breaking agreements left and right and both politically and economically attacking allies for rational reason. Neither Bush nor Biden did anything remotely close to that.
Trump and Maga is really a new low in USA in so many ways, and even if Trump had a foreign policy of business as usual, he is obviously dangerous for his fascist policies, that would 100% eventually flow over to foreign affairs.
But that besides the point I was trying to make above. You claimed it was mostly about being an export economy competing with China, I think I demonstrated that that is too simplistic.
Maybe the simpler point I could have made is that everybody competes with China.
But how you can even think of comparing Trump with Biden is beyond me, those are so different in almost every aspect that it's ridiculous to make that comparison IMO.
I bet if there's a comparable poll from 2 years ago, USA would have much more support back then.
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It's really really sad that USA has fallen so deeply away from decency and respect of human rights,
When were those ever a thing in America?
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I give it 5-10 years, if that, before Brazil flips to China. Especially since Trump is trying to tell them how to run the country and China is proposing a transcontinental railroad.
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Source: 2025 Democracy Perception Index
Dear Americans, think about this one. If you can.
- Canada
Just like to point out for everyone else that, at least when it comes to Canada, the US vs China is a Last vs Second Last situation. Opinions on China haven't improved, the US has just fallen that far.
I imagine that will be the case many places elsewhere also. Certainly that is in line with my own thinking.
Opinions on China haven’t improved, the US has just fallen that far.
Weeelll maybe not entirely, while I think you are right about public opinion not having improved much towards China, and most of it is because USA definitely has fallen.
There is a matter about pragmatic politics of necessity or "real politics" as we call it here, but I don't know if that term means the same in English. But in that regard China has REALLY shot up in popularity, as the option for cooperation to keep our economies afloat while USA is hammering everybody including themselves on the economy, and is causing grat instability.
EU has made many trade deals since Trump became president, Closer ties with UK, new deals with Canada within multiple areas including defense cooperation, and trade deal with Indonesia and Singapore.
Some of these deals have been negotiated over years, but after Trump, they have suddenly become "finalized". Meaning they will be written into law.
In the exact same way talks with China are now way more open about improving trade relations, to compensate for USA being unreliable. So in practical terms, relations with China are actually improving because of Trump!
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Do you like Cyanide or Arsenic?
More like "which country do you dislike slightly less". None of them are in the positives, it is just a choice between two evils.
The caption below the graph in the image states that is how you should interpret the results in some places:
The map compares the popularity of the U.S. and China in each country based on their net perception score (measured as the difference between the share of respondents with a positive perception minus those with a negative perception of each country.) The country with the higher net score is relatively more popular, or less unpopular.
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I mean, if my options are the USA, China, and Russia, I'd rather go live on the moon.
Spoken like someone who has never lived on the moon.
Terran privilege
I think it's at least pretty easy to rule out Russia as the worst of those 3.
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Thanks trump
This result is quite an achievement with the immense global soft power of US cultural institutions like Hollywood buoying it up.
Interesting that two of the few countries that prefer the US to China are China’s fellow BRICS members Brazil and India.
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What do you like most, being kicked in the balls or being hit in the balls with some object?
Hmmmm... they made liking China red and liking the US green.. hmmm call me crazy guys but there might be a bias in this source
That isn't blue?
I swear I thought that this was red and blue.
Is this another dress situation?
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TFW Vietnam likes you more than Canada
Vietnam has a very specific and valid grudge against China. Granted a grudge against the US would also be super valid. I think it falls along the lines of China should have been their ally so from them they felt betrayed. America just gave them what they expected from western imperialism. This is vibes based though so take it with multiple grains of salt
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Didn't read the linked article when i first saw this post, some more interesting (though not surprising) results from the poll:
Trump recorded the worst score among a range of political, cultural and spiritual leaders that includes X owner Elon Musk, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the late Pope Francis, Taylor Swift and Kim Kardashian.
Israel emerged as the country with the worst global reputation of those included in the poll, especially in the Middle East and South Asia. Israel is unpopular even in European countries that have historically been its allies, such as Germany, signaling growing discomfort with its government’s conduct in Gaza and the West Bank.
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I'm a fan of my neighbor Canada. Hope to be a citizen one day.
Well, America isn't producing tons of cheap solar panels to contribute to the energy transition
People like the Belt and Road Initiative better than drone strikes and wealth extraction?
I'm shocked.
We Indians despise the Chinese. Seriously others underestimate how much we hate them. Not to mention they keep trying to steal our borders
To be fair most of my discussions with Indians in Australia, you guys hate all your neighbours. Even other Indians if they're from the wrong state
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Don't hate the people; hate the state ✌️
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Mine isn't on the list.
Australia's choice surprises me. As does Vietnam, of all places.
Vietnam has almost always hated China. Vietnam only suffered under american imperialism for a couple decades, its suffered under chinese imperialism for millennia. There was a sort of alliance of convenience during the Vietnam War but as soon as the Americans left they sided with the soviets when the sino-soviet split happened. This got worse as China ( and the US to a lesser extent) backed Polpot and the khemir rouge while they were genociding Vietnamese in Cambodia and repeatedly starting border skirmishes until the Vietnamese invaded and kicked out polpot.
Even today the Vietnamese have contested borders with China in the south China sea, and the see the US as the only country that can guarantee they're claims.
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