WASHINGTON - Americans’ views of China, already negative, have turned sharply more so, a new Pew Research Centre survey shows.

About eight in 10 American adults – or 83 per cent – have negative views of China. That is up 1 percentage point from 2022. And those with very unfavourable views have increased by four percentage points since 2022, from 40 to 44 per cent, the survey says.

Around four in 10 Americans now describe China as an enemy of the United States, rather than as a competitor or a partner – up 13 points from 2022.

Pew Research Centre surveyed 3,576 adults over March 20-26. The survey report also included information from four US-based focus groups held in December 2022, on how young people view international engagement and multilateralism.

The survey found broad concern about China’s role in the world, both geopolitically and in terms of specific issues.

In the wake of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Moscow to meet his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, 62 per cent of Americans see the China-Russia partnership as a very serious problem for the US.

That is back to the high levels seen in the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022, Pew noted.

President Xi’s visit to Moscow was during March 20-22, the start of the survey period. Contrary to expectations, no diplomatic effort emerged to end the Ukraine war.

The survey results also show that 47 per cent of respondents say tensions between mainland China and Taiwan pose a very serious problem for the US.

That is up four percentage points since October 2022 and 19 points since February 2021.

Pew Research also found that “more than twice as many Americans support the US government banning TikTok as oppose it” – or 50 per cent versus 22 per cent. A sizeable 28 per cent, however, were not sure.

The video-sharing platform, which has more than 150 million US users, is facing fierce opposition from Republican and Democratic lawmakers concerned about data privacy and national security, particularly whether its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, would be compelled to hand over user data to the Chinese government.

In terms of China’s role on the world stage, a majority of Americans say that the country does not take the interests of other nations like the US into account; it interferes in the affairs of others and does not contribute to peace and stability.

And while negative perceptions of China’s role in the world prevail across the political spectrum, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents tend to see the country’s role in more negative terms.

Republicans are around twice as likely as Democrats to say China does not contribute to peace and stability at all (40 per cent versus 21 per cent).

Speaking to The Straits Times, Dr Laura Silver, associate director at Pew Research Centre, said: “We’ve seen increasing negativity towards China on almost every one of our surveys, especially in recent years.

“So to continue seeing that trend, especially in the wake of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s cancelled trip and the spy balloon and the Xi-Putin summit and the TikTok hearings, it’s definitely consistent with past findings and kind of the tenor of the day – that Americans have a deepening negativity towards China.”

In February, Mr Blinken cancelled a trip to China at the last minute when a Chinese balloon – which Washington said was for surveillance while Beijing maintained was a weather balloon – drifted over the US. It was eventually shot down, but the incident marked a new low in China-US relations.

And on March 23, Tiktok’s Singaporean chief executive officer Chew Shou Zi was subjected to a 4½-hour grilling in Congress as he sought to convince congressmen that the app did not pose a national security threat to the US.

Dr Silver said: “Our most comparable trends go back to 2020, and this is the highest point estimate we’ve had, with 83 per cent saying that they have a negative view of China.”

At the time, a 14-country survey showed historically high levels of disapproval of China on the back of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Particularly interesting in the latest survey, Dr Silver noted, was the response to a new question on whether the US and China can cooperate on certain issues like health or climate change.

“We found that more Americans on balance tend to say the US and China can’t cooperate on issues like climate change policy or dealing with the spread of infectious disease or resolving international conflicts,” she said.

“At least around half of Americans think that there isn’t very much, period, that the two superpowers can work on,” she said.

There are some exceptions such as student exchange programmes and, to some extent, trade and economic policy, Dr Silver said. But even then, Americans are also “particularly likely to think that China is getting more out of the current trade relationship with the US than the US is”.

Dr Robert Manning, distinguished senior fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy project at the Stimson Centre, a Washington think-tank, told ST: “I would be surprised if Americans’ views of China were not increasingly negative.

“The information environment over the past several years has been saturated with stories of all the terrible things Beijing is doing… (and) if you look at polls over the past decade, you can see the progression of negative views as the downward spiral of US-China relations has deepened.”

There are few nuanced sources of information for the average American with regard to understanding China, he said. And of late, there has been “an almost fevered anti-China mood”.

“It is an intimidating situation,” he said, adding that it was also President Xi’s “aggression and overreach” that has contributed to the lack of nuance in views of China.

“Another factor is lack of personal interaction,” Dr Manning noted. “The flow of people in both directions was slowing even before the Covid pandemic, but the lack of any personal contact has only reinforced stereotypes.

“The same is true of Chinese views of the US,” he said. “It is mirror-imaging.”