Republicans in the United States increasingly oppose friendly cooperation with China, according to a new survey released on Wednesday, marking a major break with past decades.
The report titled “The Growing Partisan Divide on US Foreign Policy”, published by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and drawing on 50 years of comparative data, found that respondents in the increasingly partisan US are sharply split on how Washington should deal with Beijing.
Bipartisan agreement on the topic has sharply declined, the analysis found, with a 16-point gap now separating Republicans and Democrats when asked to rate their feelings toward China, the largest in half a century.
However, there has also been a softening in opinions toward China, 53 per cent of Americans want friendly cooperation – although heavily tilted toward Democrats and Independents, up from 40 per cent in 2024.
“This is the first time since 2019 that a majority of Americans have preferred a policy of cooperation and engagement with China,” said Dina Smeltz, the council’s managing director of public opinion and foreign policy. “This shift is primarily driven by Democrats’ change in opinion.”
In addition to being asked to rate their feelings on China and on wanting friendly cooperation, respondents were also asked whether they viewed the country as a critical threat to the US.
Republicans, Democrats and Independents had similar views on China until the mid to late 2010s, but since then, opinions have increasingly diverged.
“Attitudes became more negative around the time of Covid, when support for friendly cooperation dropped from 68 per cent in 2019 overall to 47 per cent in 2020,” Smetlz said.
“Although Republicans and Democrats moved in the same direction on this question, they really started to divide around 2020, when there was a 20 percentage point difference.”
The most recent results found that 66 per cent of Democrats favoured friendly cooperation with Beijing, compared with just 33 per cent of Republicans. Support from all parties had hovered around 60 per cent in previous decades.
Smeltz attributes much of this to the tariff regime imposed by US President Donald Trump, “that has resulted in perceptions that prices will rise for consumers and a sense that this administration is going too far in this approach”.
Some two-thirds of Republicans were also more likely to view China as a critical threat, compared with 44 per cent of Democrats and Independents, reflected in the parties’ preferred strategies for engaging with China.
When asked about critical threats to the US’ interests over the next 10 years, the development of China as a world power ranked third among Republicans, but didn’t make the top five among the other two parties.
The two major parties shared the same core priorities for US foreign policy in the council’s Cold War surveys during the 1970s and 1980s, such as protecting jobs, securing adequate energy supplies, maintaining the dollar’s value and containing the spread of communism.
“While there were certainly disagreements between partisans about the specifics of US foreign policy in those years, the public was nevertheless settled on a core set of objectives,” the report said.
In 2025, Americans were found to only agree on the importance of protecting jobs and preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. They were less unified on other priorities, including limiting China’s influence worldwide.
Where 58 per cent of Republicans see limiting China as a fundamental goal, only 31 per cent of Democrats do, making it the bottom of the list of 11 priorities, which included nuclear weapons, developing renewable energy sources, maintaining superior military power worldwide and strengthening the United Nations.
“When the Chicago Council began polling in 1974, the United States had yet to establish official diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China,” the report said, finding that “at present, overall opinion of China is another clear example of the growing partisan polarisation in US-China issues”.
The report found Americans are also split on immigration, globalisation and US-Israel relations.
The most recent data was collected from a sample of 2,148 adults across the US, living in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, between July 18 and July 30, 2025, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.2 percentage points. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
