A majority of Americans until relatively recently? China was seen favorably by most Americans until the last decade. An economic world power that we should strengthen relations with if polls are to be believed.
For example:
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/10/06/unfavorable-vi...
That doest' mean we should praise the CCP (at least not in its current form!), though. Far from it!! Now that people have a decent life standard, they should, and probably will, raise against injustices being committed by the governing party.
Maybe they don't want a democracy modelled on the West, and that's ok!! We need to understand that there may be other ways to govern a country as big as China. But everyone in China definitely wants to be given a fair go to live their lives as best as they can, and to have at least a level of freedom that lets them live a happy life without causing problems to others (after the last few days, even the most avid defender of free speech in the US seems to agree a level of moderation in the public discourse is required, the only point of disagreement seems to be in how much).
It is really painful to see China moving back to authoritarianism in this way after a couple of decades in which it looked like they were embracing, slowly but surely, more freedoms and human rights. Let's hope that they find a way out of this instead of incessantly criticising them as if they were the devil all the time!! I honestly believe that even the CCP highest party members want to see the improvement of the Chinese people's lives, it would be completely irrational to believe otherwise... they are just humans like all of us... the problem cannot that they are evil!! The problem is that they have misguided fears of what may happen if the people is given too much freedom and try to mercilessly prevent their fears from becoming reality (like, you know, a revolutionary government taking power by force, which is the worse that could happen anywhere, even in China).
It's completely rational to, especially now, when Chinese analogue of bolsheviks are now in power in the party.
USSR's elites lived in the most obscene luxuries, and the CPC has beaten that few times over.
Their raison d'etre was to get more of that.
Chinese civil wars (for lack of a better term to capture the sheer scale and complexity) have had body counts that make the American Civil War look like a drunken bar fight.
I'd argue against it on the grounds that the planet doesn't have enough resources for everyone to live a middle class lifestyle.
The only set of charts that matches your description re: Americans viewing China favorably is the first set of charts, which is in response to question 8b, do you view China _unfavorably_, for a worldwide survey broken down by country.
Question framing matters a lot on surveys, particularly for questions outside people's daily concerns. you'll get dramatically different distributions on the questions "do you view china favorably" or "do you view china favorably"
