Most Americans favour cooperation with China in spite of Washington’s tougher stance on visas, research collaboration and tariffs, according to a new survey by the Committee of 100 (C100) civic group.
The results of the polling, conducted in June 2025 shortly after US President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff onslaught and released this month, found relatively broad support for greater cooperation between Washington and Beijing on “diplomatic issues and policies that affect both countries”.
Support was bipartisan, with 65 per cent of Democrats and 63 per cent of Republicans expressing a desire for reduced tension.
More than half of those surveyed also expressed concern about the rhetoric Trump uses when talking about US-China relations, given the negative impact it can have on those of Chinese descent.
Trump, particularly during the pandemic, used phrases criticised as racist, including “China virus” and “Kung flu”. He has also mocked Asian accents on the campaign trail and said former Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin’s name “sounds Chinese”, although he is not.
“Trump’s language is often rather encompassing, and it’s not necessarily sensitive to downstream effects on how that language could have on how Chinese-Americans are treated by others,” said Sam Collitt, research and data scientist with the organisation and a co-author of the study.
But few believe even the president’s own advisers can keep Trump on message as he delivers stream-of-consciousness speeches and freewheeling commentary, as seen most recently during last week’s 70-minute speech in the Swiss resort of Davos.
“Can we make Trump change his language?” said Cindy Tsai, C100’s executive vice-president and a co-author of the study. “I don’t think C100 has that influence.
“But we can certainly make known to all elected officials the importance of language, past and present.”
The survey, done in concert with the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Centre, focused on non-Chinese to better assess the sympathies and prejudices of majority communities affecting Chinese-American communities – and Asian-Americans more broadly.
Rather concerning for Chinese communities were survey results that found that 27 per cent of respondents believed that Americans of Chinese descent were more loyal to China than to the US, a belief the authors attribute to the news.
“On the loyalty question, because there’s been a lot of noise about Chinese spies, that has influence,” said Tsai.
On the positive side, the survey found that fewer than a quarter of respondents supported a broad ban on Chinese students and researchers entering the US to conduct research.
These results were strongly partisan, however, with more than twice as many Republicans favouring academic restrictions than Democrats.
The survey posited that prejudice and misconceptions would be reduced if politicians, the media, and high-profile figures in society were more precise in their language and less inclined to use populist rhetoric.
The poll attempted to delve into this issue. Randomly selected participants were given a fictitious news article to read about intellectual property theft, with responsibility placed on the “Chinese government” in one version and on “China” in another.
Those who read the “China” is responsible version were twice as likely to express more negative views about legal Chinese immigration and to call the loyalty of Chinese-Americans into question, relative to the “Chinese government” group that was more tolerant.
The average American tends not to think much about foreign policy issues, the study’s authors said, unless something touches their everyday lives.
This happened when the Chinese “spy balloon” drifted across the continental US and was shot down in early 2023, and to a lesser extent, with the spread of foreign land ownership restrictions.
Fuelling some of the latent suspicion among whites and other majority communities towards Asian-Americans is the “forever foreigner” trope, often seen when asked where they are “really from”, even if their families have lived in the US for hundreds of years.
“Among these other groups, if you’re born in the US, you’re very infrequently asked this question,” said Collitt.
“As it becomes more adversarial, increasingly over time towards China, it necessarily lends itself to seeing people of Chinese descent as outsiders.”
Added Tsai: “Physically, it’s easier to tell that we don’t look like your traditional what most people think of as Western Americans. So we can’t move past that.” -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
