A recent Gallup poll showed that most Americans view the Chinese economy as more powerful than America’s. The media regularly reports that China’s currency value is set to damage its trade equality with the U.S. And there is also fairly regular coverage of how Chinese hackers break into sensitive websites of both the U.S. government and industry. None of those things have badly hurt the impression of China as friendly to the U.S., as the likely new top leader of the People’s Republic, Xi Jinping, starts a five-day trip to America.

A new Gallup poll reports:

Two-thirds of the American public and a sample of U.S. opinion leaders consider China to be friendly or an ally of the U.S. About one in four of each group considers China to be either unfriendly or an enemy.

There is no easy explanation for the opinion. The same poll shows:

Despite relatively positive perceptions of relations between China and the U.S., the American public is just as likely to have an unfavorable opinion of China as it is to have a favorable one. About 4 in 10 Americans (42%) say they have a favorable opinion of China, and 44% say they have an unfavorable opinion. Opinion leaders surveyed are slightly more likely, at 49%, to have a favorable opinion of China; 40% have an unfavorable opinion.

The two impressions seem almost impossible to reconcile. How can China be considered unfavorably and friendly at the same time?

It may be that Americans have started to understand that trade with China is essential to the U.S., even if the Chinese set an uneven playing field. With trouble in Europe, China’s middle class is among the largest consumers of U.S. goods and services. Companies that  include McDonald’s (NYSE: MCD) and Walmart (NYSE: WMT) do well in the People’s Republic, and many large U.S. corporations say that China’s markets are absolutely essential to their growth. That, in turn, makes them essential to U.S. jobs.

Another reason for the impression among people of the “friendliness” of the Chinese is the possibility that Americans separate the leaders from the citizens of the world’s most populous nation. China’s factories often employ harsh labor practices on workers who would likely be without jobs if they protested. There is agitation in China’s central regions over worker pay. The Chinese are blocked from open use of the internet and information from the freer parts of the world. The Chinese, in other words, are the victims of their government’s repression and not the cause of it.

Perhaps the impression of Xi Jinping is poor, while the impression of the people he rules is more benign.

Methodology: In the first wave of a new research partnership between China Daily USA and Gallup, 2,007 Americans were interviewed in English only from Nov. 30 to Dec. 18, 2011. Gallup surveyed a random sample of adults, aged 18 and older, residing in landline-telephone households, cell phone-only households, and cell phone-user households. The data set was statistically adjusted (weighted) using the following variables: race/ethnicity, gender, education and age as defined by the most recent data from the Current Population Survey, conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. The final overall results are representative of the U.S. adult population. For results based on the total sample size of 2,007 adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the margin of error attributable to sampling and other random effects is ±2.68 percentage points. The opinion leader survey included a nonprobability sample of 250 opinion leaders, drawn from the ranks of business executives (n=50), government officials (n=50), think tank leaders (n=50), university faculty (n=50) and the media (n=50). The opinion leaders sample was collected from Dec. 1 to 22, 2011.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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