“I would never go to America. Everyone there has guns and I don’t want to get shot.” That’s what my young Chinese colleague said to me as we were working at the Beijing Olympics in 2008. To him, the US must be a dystopian hellscape to be avoided at all costs to protect life and limb. This was not the first time I heard Chinese people refer to America as being overrun by crime and lawlessness. Several friends of mine in China voiced similar, if less dramatic, opinions of America’s dangers.

It was very hard for me to argue about this. My friends and colleagues were hard-wired into seeing the US as crime infested and plagued with one mass shooting after another. I attribute this to indoctrination in Chinese schools and the media, seizing on any story of American violence as evidence of how dangerous life there is. Is it “brain washing”? I might not go that far, but it’s definitely something Chinese people learn about when they’re quite young.

Are they wrong? I’ve lived in America for decades, and never saw anyone get shot. But, unfortunately, we do have a real crime problem, and there are too many guns out there. And it’s true, one feels safer walking in Shanghai at night than they might in Chicago. In all my years in China, I never felt unsafe there. Crime in America is worse and more frequent. And brainwashing works both ways; Americans have been led to see China as a totalitarian dictatorship that arrests and persecutes those who raise their voice against tyranny. Just as with the perception of crime in the US, this view of China is not totally wrong; pro-democracy activists have been arrested, and uprisings have been violently quashed. But China has grown far more enlightened in recent years and the CCP is supported by most citizens. So the bottom line is that these perceptions of the US and China tell us there is indoctrination on both sides.

Along similar lines, I read an intriguing article a few weeks ago in the NY Times.

China increasingly casts itself not as a fading civilization trying to catch up to the West but as a superpower poised to surpass it. Chinese nationalists and state-linked commentators say they have Mr. Trump to thank. America under his rule, they say, validates Mr. Xi’s worldview centered on “the rise of the East and decline of the West.”

For decades, many Chinese viewed the United States with a mix of admiration, envy and resentment. America represented wealth, technological sophistication and institutional confidence. Even critics of Washington who reviled the American system often assumed that it worked….

Evidence of this shift is measurable: The use of terms related to “American decline” in official Chinese sources nearly doubled in 2025, according to a study by two Brookings Institution researchers.

The narrative of American decline did not begin with Mr. Trump. For years, Chinese state media and nationalist pundits have highlighted mass shootings, homelessness, political polarization and economic inequality in the United States as evidence of the failures of Western democracy. More recently, official outlets embraced the viral phrase “kill line,” borrowed from video game culture, to describe what they portrayed as the irreversible downward spiral facing America’s working poor. It’s a familiar tactic of the Communist Party to distract the Chinese public from the country’s own issues.

But Mr. Trump’s return to office and his administration’s erratic decision-making in both domestic and foreign policy have supplied the propaganda machine with plentiful fresh material. Images of immigration raids, the Minneapolis shootings and bitter political infighting circulate widely on Chinese social media alongside triumphant commentary about American dysfunction. What once sounded to many educated Chinese like exaggerated propaganda increasingly feels, to some, observational.

I must call out the success of China’s propagandists in painting the image of America as a civilization in decline. This is now status quo: the Chinese see America under Trump as sliding hopelessly backwards, though this conception had roots in China long before Trump came to power. I saw evidence of this 17 years ago when I worked for a Chinese newspaper, where I had countless conversations with the young, ambitious staff about life in the US versus China. I remember feeling frustrated that so many of them were convinced of America’s decay. And now, under Trump, it appears the Chinese are more convinced than ever that the US is a dangerous and lawless place. One of those interviewed in the NYT article

described watching footage of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and finding himself thinking of the Red Guards that Mao Zedong dispatched to tear apart China’s institutions during the Cultural Revolution. That feeling returned more insistently with the immigration raids and the targeting of perceived enemies during Mr. Trump’s second term.

Are these perceptions wrong? I suppose it depends on whom you ask. For me, America right now is tragically wounded; Trump has turned us into a laughingstock and an international pariah. And yes, the MAGA insurrection surely evoked memories of the Cultural Revolution. So maybe it isn’t so hard to understand why the Chinese see us as engulfed in anarchy and self destruction. Trump’s invasion of Iran has exacerbated these perceptions a thousand-fold.

The war in Iran has reinforced the view that China has the upper hand with Mr. Trump. At a conference in late April, [Fudan University scholar] Mr. Wu argued that the war reduced Washington’s leverage against China while increasing Beijing’s by consuming American military and diplomatic attention in the Middle East.

This is not wrong. China is ascending as America gives up all the good will cultivated ever since the end of World War Two. I took a lot of criticism in 2008, when I remarked on this blog that this is “China’s century.” I stand by that conclusion more than ever as I watch us attack our allies and suck up to the likes of Kim Jong Un, Victor Orban and Vladimir Putin. And even when Trump is gone and saner voices are back in power, it will be incredibly difficult to win back that good will, to have our allies trust us again, to bring back institutions Trump has gutted, like the USAID. China has emerged as the global superpower who can get thing done. They will step in where America has retreated.

China is far from perfect (what an understatement). But they have outsmarted and out-maneuvered us. And I don’t know if this can be turned around in our lifetimes. Trump has another two years to wreak havoc on my country and I can only see things as getting worse, at least until we again have a Democratic Congress next year. But the damage has been done, and all we can do for now is sit back and watch while China fills the global leadership gap. As President Xi said recently, we have fallen into “the Thucydides trap,” and for now I see no way out.

Final thought: Trump’s war of choice against Iran makes it far easier for China to engage in a war of choice against Taiwan. How can we object? Trump has fucked us all.