The United States has changed a great deal since the outbreak of COVID-19. One aspect of this change is a dramatic shift in the way Americans view China, the country where the novel coronavirus originated.
According to the latest nationwide polling by the Economist and YouGov, seven in 10 Americans (70%) view China as an enemy in late August. Since YouGov first started asking this question in 2017, this perception of China as an enemy is currently at its highest in the last three years.
The relationship between China and the United States was uneasy in the first year of President Donald Trump taking office. When the countries began imposing tariffs and retaliatory tariffs on each other’s imports in 2018 — effectively launching a trade war — American perception of China shifted more decidedly towards being more of an enemy than an ally.
Enter the start of the coronavirus pandemic at the end of 2019, 58 percent of Americans view China as an enemy and 21 percent view the country as an ally. Eight months later, the share that view China as an enemy increased by 12-points to 70 percent. Just 15 percent of Americans view China is an ally in August.
This perception hold true across party lines as well. A majority of Democrats (68%), Independents (65%) and Republicans (80%) view China as an enemy in August.
The increase among Americans who view China as an enemy in recent months also comes as President Trump sets to ban the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok. Separate data from YouGov BrandIndex — which tracks the perception of brands on a daily basis — shows that since the president announced his plans to ban the app in July, Americans have increasingly had a negative impression of the viral app, TikTok.
See the toplines and tables from this week's Economist/YouGov poll
Methodology: The Economist survey was conducted by YouGov using a nationally representative sample of 1,500 U.S. adult citizens interviewed online between August 23 - 25, 2020. This sample was weighted according to gender, age, race, and education based on the American Community Survey, conducted by the US Bureau of the Census, as well as 2016 Presidential vote, registration status, geographic region, and news interest. Respondents were selected from YouGov’s opt-in panel to be representative of all US citizens. The margin of error is approximately 3.6% for the overall sample.
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