Over the past few months, three separate polls have confirmed what many observers in the Global South long predicted: that China is emerging as the preferred partner across the developing world, while the United States is losing favor. Although some of these surveys show that respondents would prefer to engage with both powers (and that they reject the zero-sum logic underlying the U.S.-versus-China narrative currently in vogue in both Washington and Beijing), they also clearly demonstrate that China currently enjoys more positive perceptions in capitals around the world. 

Of the three, the Pew Research Center’s mid-July survey of 36 countries was the only one to poll both developed and developing countries.[1] It showed an improvement of perceptions of China across the board, except for a few countries with strong historical ties to the United States (like Israel) or with specific disputes with China (such as Japan). Notably, the study shows that the gap between perceptions of the U.S. and China is particularly significant among respondents in Asia-Pacific and Middle Eastern states. 

The Pew study’s broad North-South view is echoed in two recent quantitative polls that focus specifically on Africa. The first is Afrobarometer African Insights 2026, a survey of 38 countries on the continent, which found 62 percent of respondents approving of China’s engagement with the continent, compared with 53 percent approval for the United States.[2] The second is the Ichikowitz Family Foundation’s biannual African Youth Survey, which documents 95 percent of respondents across 36 countries viewing China as an ally, as compared with 88 percent feeling the same about the U.S.[3]

Those findings are worth unpacking because they speak volumes about China’s popularity in the developing world, and specifically in Africa. There, China has established itself as ubiquitous to everyday life—a presence that outstrips formal soft power mechanisms. Moreover, Beijing’s standing is reinforced by its integration into African development plans and its role in projecting an image of future society. These features underlie Chinese soft power toward the continent and the growing appeal of the PRC to populations there.

Chinese Ubiquity in Kenya

One of the key takeaways from recent focus group research conducted in Kenya by my organization, the China-Global South Project, was that respondents view China as a partner with unique capabilities that make it indispensable. Indeed, as became clear through a series of interviews we conducted, China is now ubiquitous at virtually all levels of Kenyan life. 

One of the principal drivers of this sense of ubiquity is infrastructure. China is a key funder of African infrastructure; according to the Boston University Global Development Policy Center, Chinese funders allocated an estimated $180.87 billion to the continent between 2000 and 2024.[4] At the peak of this trend, during the 2010s, China was lending at similar levels as the World Bank. Much of this financing, in turn, drove the rapid construction of the infrastructure upon which Kenyan society now depends.

Relatedly, Chinese engineering, procurement, and contracting companies have built significant amounts of crucial infrastructure on the continent. For example, during the same era, Chinese companies erected one fifth of Sub-Saharan Africa’s total electricity generation capacity.[5] This role arguably expands China’s sway even farther, because its companies also frequently work on African-financed and World Bank projects. Since populations often find it challenging to differentiate between different project funders, this means a Chinese contractor’s logo at a worksite can lead to assumptions that all these different projects are Chinese-led. Moreover, infrastructure occupies a prominent place in the physical landscape and plays an outsized role in visually communicating the attainment of national development goals, thereby compounding perceptions of China as an irreplaceable provider of development. 

A second key vector of China’s presence is consumer goods. When we began tracking discourse about China in Africa in the 2010s, the dominant view of Chinese-made consumer products in African countries was that they were low-quality or counterfeit, and traces of these attitudes still lingered in our 2026 focus group discussions. Some respondents saw Chinese-made goods as cheap and European products as preferable. However, the conversation has shifted in two key ways. First, while frequently praised, European products are now almost universally framed as inaccessible, either because they are expensive or because they are simply not available in Kenya at all. Second, the perception of Chinese-made consumer goods has improved markedly. Respondents of all ages praised Chinese firms for making a broader range of products available, with mobile phones being mentioned frequently. That represents a significant shift; while perceptions of Chinese products being low quality used to dominate such conversations, their utility to those same consumers has now become the most frequent framing. 

This, in turn, helps to explain the success of Chinese firms in key African sectors. For example, the Chinese telecom company Transsion now controls about 50 percent of the African mobile phone market via brands like Tecno and Infinix.[6] The market used to be dominated by European brands such as Nokia and Ericsson—albeit as an offset region for older models that had fallen out of favor in richer markets. By contrast, Transsion worked hard to localize itself and its products, with equipment that is able to respond to local capacity (for instance, phones that can function on 2G networks) and at a much lower price point than its competitors. 

Soft Power Mechanisms

The resulting sense of ubiquity, highlighted by focus group respondents, adds to perceptions of China as irreplaceable. It also contrasts with the relatively low uptake of formal Chinese soft power mechanisms. 

China has followed the lead of more established powers in using media and educational outreach as a form of soft power. Chinese state media like CGTN and Xinhua rapidly expanded their formal presence in Kenya in the early 2010s, including through the expansion of studio facilities and the hiring of prominent local journalists. Similarly, Chinese government-supported Confucius Institutes have been established at four Kenyan universities. Akin to Western counterparts like the Alliance Française, these facilities combine language teaching and cultural education, strengthening connections to China through global Mandarin language competitions, facilitating local participation in standardized language testing, and study tours to China. 

These formal vectors of influence have received considerable attention in discussions of Chinese soft power on the continent.[7] However, our focus group showed very low uptake and awareness of these services. Almost no respondents reported attending a Confucius Institute course, despite the presence of students in the cohort. Similarly, very few reported regular consumption of Chinese state media (or consuming it at all). This echoes earlier research showing generally low uptake of Chinese state media, despite its presence on satellite TV services readily available on the continent.[8]

This state of affairs, of course, may slowly change due to the expansion of media content sharing agreements with African publications, which are expanding access to Xinhua content at a moment when African newsrooms frequently cannot afford to maintain access to Western news agencies. For the moment, however, the impact is limited; few respondents reported getting their knowledge of China-Kenya relations from such sources. 

That, in turn, suggests that the importance of such formal soft power vectors may need to be rethought. Chinese soft power in Africa seems less targeted and formal, and more pervasive and omnidirectional. And while Chinese influence in education and media still lags, in other arenas it is thriving. Indeed, at a moment when aid relationships are coming under stress, the ubiquity of Chinese brands, and the relative absence of Western competitors, has given Beijing a definitive leg up on the continent.

China’s Emerging Role as an Industrial Power

Another key insight encapsulated in both the Afrobarometer and African Youth surveys is that, for African nations, the popularity of external partners increasingly depends on perceptions of whether they bring tangible development benefits. 

This forms a key axis of Chinese influence, which can most clearly be seen in the wider context of the continent’s growing resource nationalism. That trend has been sparked by global anxieties about access to critical and rare earth minerals. Nevertheless, China’s vast lead in the processing and refining of these minerals has given it unique leverage in its dealings with other global powers.

Chinese companies have used mergers and acquisitions to cement a robust foothold in some African critical mineral economies, for example in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s cobalt and copper sectors. In response, the European Union, Japan, India, and the United States have all pursued deals with different African countries to try and edge out Chinese influence. 

At the same time, African countries have become more determined to avoid the exploitation that characterized earlier commodity super-cycles driven by African minerals. Partly influenced by continent-wide plans for using mineral resources to drive industrialization and economic integration, African countries have become more assertive in compelling external partners to increase local value-addition to raw ores.[9] This includes locating processing and refining facilities in the minerals’ country of origin and using this refining capacity as a driver of local employment and ancillary industrialization.

Indonesia provides a good precedent. The Southeast Asian state drew heavy Chinese investment in its nickel sector and then used export bans of raw nickel to compel these investors to localize refining in the country, which frequently involved building power generation facilities to power this work. 

Zimbabwe similarly has used export bans in the context of heavy Chinese investment to drive increased local lithium refining. While the Zimbabwean government has not yet achieved its goal of getting Chinese companies to produce battery-grade lithium locally, its export bans and related pressure have nonetheless improved the quality of refining there. 

Morocco likewise has attracted about $6 billion in Chinese investment into special economic zones focusing on electric vehicles. This not only includes the assembly of such vehicles, but manufacturing across the EV value chain, including the production of tires and windshields. Notably, the country also negotiated stringent local employment stipulations, addressing one of the long-term sticking points in Africa-China relations: the importation of Chinese workers. 

This trend is significant in the context of Chinese influence because Beijing is clearly deriving influence by being responsive to African plans for industrialization. This role dovetails with the Chinese provision of infrastructure and consumer goods outlined above to make Beijing an indispensable partner to industrializing African countries, even if China itself may not be that popular. 

Visualizing Modernity

Finally, China’s influence in Africa is significantly increased by the way it has articulated the future for the rest of the world. An underexamined aspect of China’s massive domestic buildout of industrial capacity, especially in the sectors of renewable energy, high-speed rail, electric mobilities and robotics, has been the way that global visions of the future are increasingly dominated by Chinese imagery. 

This is especially so in Africa and elsewhere in the Global South. Images of robot soccer matches and synchronized mass drone displays have been widely disseminated, together with more quotidian examples of Chinese futurism like high-speed rail networks. Such images don’t simply portray a far-off future. Rather, they function much like Hollywood did in the past. In the 1920s and 1930s, American cinema helped to disseminate images of everyday modernity throughout the world. Images of automobiles and traffic systems, indoor plumbing, and kitchen appliances not only established the United States as a modern country; it also provided a set of template images for what modernity could look like locally in other countries. These merged with local production capacity to create a series of products, ideas and designs that signaled modernity in slightly different (but distinctly U.S.-infused) ways. 

Today, images of Chinese futurism disseminated via social media inform local thinking in similar ways. Rather than imposing Chinese technologies on local contexts, they offer images of how the local context might evolve. These images, in turn, dovetail with the ubiquity of Chinese infrastructure and consumer goods in powerful ways. In other words, Chinese tech is increasingly revealing a Chinese-inflected view of the future to youth populations across the developing world.

This is particularly true in Africa, which has long been characterized in Western discourse as a “hopeless continent” incapable of development. In this context, the Chinese provision of financing, consumer goods, and infrastructure to the continent creates a powerful argument for the Chinese “model,” especially among the continent’s large population of young people.

Mixed Feelings

As outlined above, polling and focus group data show that views of China are strongly shaped by perceptions of China as a unique force boosting African development at a time when the continent’s other external relations have proved lacking. In quantitative polling, these perceptions simply register as approval of China as one of several external partners. However, the focus group survey conducted by The China-Global South Project provided a much more complex view of this presence. 

What became clear in our conversations is that the pervasive presence of China in respondents’ everyday lives represents something more complex than simple popularity. Instead, China’s ubiquity, while broadly seen as being crucial to Kenya’s developmental arc, is also a source of anxiety. 

This was particularly clear in discussions surrounding two issues. First, while many respondents cited China’s provision of infrastructure as a key example of its developmental impact, they also repeatedly raised worries about the long-term financial impact of the debt related to high-profile projects like the Standard Gauge Railway. (Notably, the respondents also worried about things like undue British influence on their government and the influence created by UK military bases in Kenya, for example.) In this sense, China’s ubiquity as a development partner seems to trigger larger anxieties emerging from a serious lack of trust between elites and populations in Kenya—a trend that can be extrapolated to other African countries as well.

Second, the conversations also revealed the impact of several high-profile instances of worker abuse and discrimination at Chinese worksites and businesses. Many respondents cited these incidents as examples of Chinese racism. Men in older cohorts were particularly critical, raising examples of workplace discrimination and low wages at Chinese worksites. As one respondent put it to us: “China is friendly from far away but unfriendly up close.”[10]

Rethinking Soft Power

One of the key assumptions underlying classical formulations of soft power is a close correlation between it and popularity.[11] Our findings suggest that a rethink is in order.

A closer look at Chinese influence in Africa raises doubts about the importance of formal soft power vectors such as language instruction, cultural promotion, and state media outreach. China has largely followed the lead of countries like the UK in deploying these institutions. But our findings suggest there has been very little uptake of these mechanisms among ordinary Kenyans (and others). Yet, despite this reality, China’s influence has only grown. 

In this context, U.S.-Africa relations find themselves at an inflection point. Data from the three polling studies cited above suggest that the sudden dismantlement of U.S. development and health assistance to Africa solidified perceptions that China is a more crucial external partner to Africa. At the same time, the focus group research raised questions as to the long-term effect of aid as a vector for soft power. Unlike the hard infrastructure facilitated by Chinese entities, the “soft infrastructure” of institution-building and democratization championed in the latter days of USAID has proven relatively ephemeral. This is arguably also true for U.S. pop culture influence. While U.S. pop stars and other celebrities remain influential, they are being displaced by Africa’s own, in turn boosted by Chinese platforms like Boomplay.

Both the studies and the focus group discussions outlined here suggest that results matter. That is, tangible development outcomes count for more than cultural influence or other metrics of popularity. In turn, boosting America’s competitiveness in Africa requires being more responsive to African demands for skills transfer and local industrialization, increasing investment, and a rollback of the travel barriers the Trump administration has imposed on some African countries. For Washington, these are lessons worth heeding.