Anna Linford Imagine a long-time market leader that has spent years being undercut on price alone — only to discover that price was never the whole contest. Reputation, distribution and product quality mattered just as much, and a sharp rival attacks all three at once rather than winning one battle before starting the next. That is roughly the pattern suggested by four pieces of research published over the past two weeks about the relationship between Washington and Beijing: China is contesting American primacy on how the world feels about each power, on trade, on the biotechnology that will define the next decades of medicine, and on how a war over Taiwan might actually be fought — simultaneously, not in sequence.
Perception: the favor tips
The clearest single number comes from the Pew Research Center, which interviewed more than 42,000 people across 36 countries and found, in a report published on 15 July 2026, that China is now viewed more favorably than the United States in most nations surveyed (per the Council on Foreign Relations). Gallup's global tracking tells a similar story: across more than 130 countries in 2025, China's median approval rating reached 36 percent against 31 percent for the United States — the widest gap in China's favor Gallup has recorded in nearly twenty years, with net approval at -1 percent for China versus -15 percent for the United States (CFR). Confidence in Xi Jinping now exceeds confidence in Donald Trump by ten points across the twenty countries Pew has tracked annually since 2023.
The swings are sharpest among traditional US allies. In Sweden, the share of respondents calling the United States a reliable partner fell from 83 percent in 2022 to 31 percent in 2026, while China's equivalent figure rose from 12 to 27 percent; Canada shows an almost identical pattern, with US reliability dropping from 83 to 35 percent and China's climbing from 14 to 44 percent (CFR). Not every region is moving the same way — the Philippines, India, Japan, South Korea, Israel and Poland still rate the United States more reliable than China. CFR's Yanzhong Huang is careful to note the data shows a retreat of American soft power more than a surge of genuine affection for Beijing: China has won the comparison without yet winning hearts and minds.
Economics: a surplus that keeps climbing
Trade tells a subtler version of the same story. Where The Economist had argued China's trade surplus had peaked, CFR's Brad W. Setser countered on 27 July that the real, price-adjusted surplus is still rising once one strips out an unusual factor: gold (CFR). China imported $146 billion in gold in the first half of 2026, nearly $100 billion more than in the same period of 2025 — a surge that occurred even as gold prices fell, implying genuine demand rather than price inflation. Strip gold out of the figures, Setser finds, and China's underlying surplus rose by more than $80 billion in the first half of 2026, with the goods surplus (excluding gold) approaching 7 percent of GDP in the second quarter and net exports adding 0.8 to 0.9 percentage points to quarterly growth. Auto exports, he notes, are "booming" while imports stay flat — evidence China's export machine has not lost momentum even as tariff barriers rise, at the same time the US deficit widens on AI data-centre investment and a large fiscal shortfall.
Technology: closing, and in places overtaking, the biotech gap
In biotechnology, Washington's worry is no longer hypothetical parity but an emerging deficit. China's share of global clinical-trial starts rose from 1 percent in 2009 to 30 percent in 2024, and its trials now run three to five times faster and cost a third to a half as much as equivalent US trials (CFR). Chinese firms already hold 32 of 55 monoclonal-antibody programmes worldwide — a drug class worth an estimated $380 billion — and the congressionally mandated National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology projects China could account for roughly a third of US FDA drug approvals by 2040. Discussing the same trend at a CFR event titled "Can the United States Win the Biotech Race?", ARPA-H director Alicia Jackson called the sector "a five-alarm fire right now" (CFR), while panelists pointed to Beijing's two-decade-old strategy of tax holidays, low-interest loans and dedicated biotech hubs under the Made-in-China 2025 programme as the deliberate state investment behind the shift.
The battlefield: cognitive effects become doctrine
The most striking of the four threads concerns not commerce or opinion polling but war planning. A concept published in the Chinese military's restricted journal Military Art in March 2025, and analysed by RAND researchers in a piece carried by War on the Rocks, describes what its authors call "all-domain megacity incapacitation warfare" — a plan to force an unnamed but clearly identifiable Taipei's capitulation through three combined lines of effort: blockade, precision strikes and cognitive attack (RAND, via War on the Rocks). The cognitive line of effort is the newest addition, built around propaganda that manufactures "information bubbles and echo chambers" and what the authors term "information munitions" — disinformation and AI-generated deepfakes distributed through platforms such as Meta and TikTok, meant to break Taiwan's will to resist rather than destroy its military outright. Authored by three officers from China's Academy of Military Science and the People's Armed Police Command College, the concept folds into two broader doctrinal shifts: "national total war," a whole-of-nation mobilisation model in which "all citizens are soldiers," and "cognitive domain operations," the PLA's formal category for operations that target how people and institutions perceive and decide.
Why simultaneity is the story
None of these four developments is new on its own: analysts have tracked China's rising favorability, its resilient trade surplus, its biotech investment and its interest in information warfare for years, each as a separate beat. What stands out this month is the coincidence of timing across domains that Washington has historically treated as separate portfolios — public diplomacy at the State Department, trade policy at USTR and Treasury, biotech research funding split between HHS and the Pentagon's research arms, and Taiwan contingency planning inside the Defense Department.
Hypothesis: this is not four unrelated trends converging by accident but a genuinely integrated Chinese approach, in which the same broader aim — displacing the United States as the default power in other countries' calculations — is now pursued across perception, economics and warfighting in parallel rather than in sequence. Supporting this: the RAND-analysed concept explicitly treats cognitive-domain operations as inseparable from blockade and strike planning, meaning Beijing's own military theorists already think in cross-domain terms; the "national total war" framework is built by design to fold civilian, economic and informational capacity into one wartime system. Against this: the four data points come from unrelated institutions — Pew, Gallup, PLA officers writing in an internal journal, Chinese customs statistics — with no evidence of central coordination behind this particular week's publication timing, and China's favorability gains, on Huang's own reading for CFR, look more like a byproduct of retreating US soft power than a deliberately executed charm offensive.
A siloed Washington
Taiwan is the nearest live test of this asymmetry. If Beijing's newest military thinking treats blockade, precision strikes and information operations as one integrated campaign, and if it can pursue that alongside a trade surplus that keeps funding its shipbuilding and missile programmes and a biotech sector racing to out-produce American drug pipelines, then Washington's habit of routing each threat to a different agency risks answering one connected challenge with four uncoordinated ones.
What to watch next
- Whether the Pentagon's next Taiwan-related planning documents explicitly reference disinformation and platform-based "cognitive attack" alongside kinetic contingencies, signalling the cross-domain framing has been absorbed.
- The next Pew Global Attitudes wave, to see whether the favorability gap CFR describes widens further or proves a one-year artefact of tariff and aid-cut announcements.
- Whether China's second-half 2026 trade data confirm Setser's gold-adjusted surplus trend once fuller import breakdowns are published.
- Whether Congress acts on the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology's recommendations — including a White House biotech coordinator and expanded ARPA-H funding — before its projected one-third Chinese share of FDA approvals by 2040 becomes harder to reverse.
