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The Global Times could not help itself. Two days after the Pew Research Center published its annual audit of global opinion, the English-language megaphone of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ran an editorial with all the restraint of a victory parade. “When 27 of the 36 countries and regions surveyed ‘chose China,’” it announced, “it was not simply that China had ‘won.’”

Actually, the number is 25. The other two are countries where the gap is too small to mean anything. The editorial writer counted them anyway. But the rest of the Pew report is where the interesting material lives—and where the parade runs out of road.

The Global Times could not help itself. Two days after the Pew Research Center published its annual audit of global opinion, the English-language megaphone of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ran an editorial with all the restraint of a victory parade. “When 27 of the 36 countries and regions surveyed ‘chose China,’” it announced, “it was not simply that China had ‘won.’”

Actually, the number is 25. The other two are countries where the gap is too small to mean anything. The editorial writer counted them anyway. But the rest of the Pew report is where the interesting material lives—and where the parade runs out of road.

There is no gainsaying the fact that the headline findings are startling. In 25 out of 36 countries, more people now view China more favorably than the United States. (In 22, more express more confidence in Xi Jinping than in Donald Trump.) The United States leads in six: India, Israel, Japan, the Philippines, Poland, and South Korea. Canadians and Mexicans, America’s closest neighbors, were not among them.

Pew has asked versions of this question since 2002 and never gotten results like these. The resulting coverage has been breathless and not just in the CCP’s own press. Bloomberg, among many others, described it as a soft-power win.

So, has China finally beaten the United States in........

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