When President Trump visited China in late 2017, Xi Jinping welcomed him with a grand display of Chinese history and culture: a four-hour private tour of the Forbidden City, culminating in a performance of Peking Opera.
Eight years, a pandemic and two trade wars later, Mr. Trump back to Beijing, where the theme of future dominance, not ancient majesty, has filled national and international headlines with articles about dancing robots, swarms of drones and the quiet hum of electric vehicles.
China increasingly appears not as a fading civilization trying to catch up with 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 the decline of the West.”
For decades, many Chinese viewed the United States with a mixture of admiration, envy and resentment. America represented wealth, technological sophistication, and institutional confidence. Even critics of Washington who vilified the American system often assumed it worked.
Mr. Trump’s ascension and his fleeting second term shattered this image.
In January, a Beijing nationalist think tank affiliated with Renmin University published a triumphant report on Mr. Trump’s first year back in office. The report argued that his tariffs, attacks on allies, anti-immigration policies and attacks on the US political establishment had inadvertently strengthened China while weakening the US. Its title: “Thank you Trump.”
The report called Mr. Trump an “accelerator of American political decay,” with the United States sliding toward polarization, institutional dysfunction and even “Latin American-style instability.” His hostility to China, the authors argued, was a “reverse booster” that united the country and helped create its strategic self-reliance.
“At this turning point in history,” the authors wrote, “what we hear is the heavy and enchanting sound of an empire’s evening bell.”
Such language, once largely confined to nationalist corners of the Chinese internet, has increasingly entered mainstream political discourse.
Evidence of this shift is measurable: The use of terms related to “American decline” in official Chinese sources nearly doubled by 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. 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 is a familiar tactic of the Communist Party to distract the Chinese public from the country’s own problems.
But Mr. Trump’s return to office and his administration’s erratic decision-making in both domestic and foreign policy have provided the propaganda machine with plenty of fresh material. Images of immigration raids, the Minneapolis shootings and bitter political battles circulate widely on Chinese social media alongside triumphant commentary about American dysfunction. What once sounded to many educated Chinese as excessive propaganda feels increasingly observational to some.
A 31-year-old education consultant in northern China who advises families on overseas studies told me that parents who had once aspired to get Ivy League degrees for their children now saw America as “too chaotic.” A decade ago, more than 80 percent of his students were considering the United States to study abroad, said the consultant, who asked that I use only his last name, Wang, for fear of government retaliation. Now he estimated that the figure has fallen to 45 percent.
Wang described watching footage of the January 6, 2021 attack on the US capitol and finding himself thinking of the Red Guards that Mao Zedong sent to tear apart China’s institutions during the Cultural Revolution. That sentiment returned more insistently with the immigration raids and targeting of perceived enemies under Mr. Trump’s second term.
“The America that represented wealth, freedom and institutional trust feels like it belonged to another era,” Wang said.
Among China’s foreign policy analysts, the conversation has turned to what Beijing can get out of the bilateral relationship, which has become more transactional under Mr. Trump than under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“Only China can save Trump,” Huang Jing, a professor at Shanghai International Studies University, said during a media event live-streamed in late 2025. With the US midterm elections approaching, he argued, Mr Trump needed visible victories such as Chinese purchases of US soybeans, corn and natural gas that could play well in swing states.
“Since Trump,” Mr. Huang said at the event, “the United States has become more and more willing to compromise.”
Wu Xinbo, a leading American study researcher at Fudan University, offered a similar assessment. If Republicans lose control of the House in the fall, he said at the same event that Mr. Trump is likely to turn against his foreign policy legacy and make room for a greater accommodation with Beijing.
China, he said, “should make good use of this opportunity.”
The war in Iran has reinforced the perception that China has taken over with Mr Trump. At a conference in late April, Mr. Wu that the war reduced Washington’s influence against China while increasing Beijing’s by consuming American military and diplomatic attention in the Middle East.
The logic helps explain why China’s official language about Mr. Trump has often been less hostile than it was with regard to Mr. Biden. According to a project by the Tracking People’s Daily newsletter, which used artificial intelligence to analyze nearly 7,000 Chinese official statements since 2021, Mr. Biden presented as a more systemic threat – so serious that Mr. Xi accused Washington of “encirclement and suppression,” unusually confrontational language for a Chinese leader.
In contrast, the study noted, “Trump’s transactionalism is something Beijing understands and can work with.”
Yet the belief in American decline has not translated into aggressive Chinese foreign policy, at least not the kind of overt geopolitical gambit that Russia made before invading Ukraine.
China has become more assertive, putting pressure on US allies, expanding military activity around Taiwan and limiting exports of rare earths in response to Mr. Trump’s tariffs. But while Beijing promotes the idea of the decline of American power, it appears wary of directly confronting what many Chinese analysts describe as a still-dangerous superpower.
Two factors play into this caution. First, many Chinese strategists believe Beijing can do better by sitting back while the Trump administration fumbles. Second, an unstable and distracted US may also be more unpredictable.
Beijing’s export-dependent economy needs a stable international order to function. An erratic United States threatens that stability in ways that a confident, predictable America never did, Zongyuan Zoe Liu, an economist at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me.
Mr. Xi “gets the America he always wanted,” she said, “and the America he feared most at the same time.”
