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Philippines stands out for high confidence in both Trump, Xi — Pew poll

June 12, 2019 | 9:42am

Philippines stands out for high confidence in both Trump, Xi â�� Pew poll

This file picture taken on November 9, 2017 shows US President Donald Trump (L) and China's President Xi Jinping leaving a business leaders event at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. President Donald Trump on June 10, 2019 said he still expects to talk with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping at the upcoming G20 summit, warning he will impose new tariffs if there is no meeting."Yes it would," Trump told CNBC television when asked if a failure by Xi to come to the summit later this month in Japan would lead to the huge new tariffs kicking in.

AFP / Nicolas Asfouri

MANILA, Philippines — Among 25 countries surveyed, the Philippines stands out as the only nation with high levels of confidence in both US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, according to Pew Research Center.

In its Spring 2018 Global Attitudes Survey, Pew found that 50% of Filipinos have confidence in both the American and Chinese leader.

Meanwhile, 24% of Filipinos had confidence in Trump, but not Xi, 7% had confidence in Xi, but not Trump, and 9% did not have confidence in both foreign leaders.

The Philippines, along with Nigeria (38%) and Kenya (36%), are the only countries where the majority or plurality have confidence in both Trump and Xi to do the right thing on world affairs.

A plurality of Israelis (38%) had more confidence in Trump but not Xi while a plurality of Tunisians (41%) had more confidence in Xi but not Trump.

Majority or pluralities of 17 countries said they had no confidence in neither American or Chinese leader, including Spain, France, Brazil, Greece, Mexico, Germany, Sweden, Japan, Italy, Netherlands, Argentina, Hungary, Canada, United Kingdom, South Korea and Australia.

The Pew study also revealed that adults in the Philippines have favorable views on both the US and China.

According to the survey, 48% of Filipinos gave positive remarks to both Washington and Beijing, 9% were positive only on the US, 11% were favorable only on China and 7% did not have positive views on either country.

Around half of the respondents in the Philippines, Kenya (54%) and Nigeria (47%) had a positive perception of both the US and China.

Other countries with favorable views on both Washington and Beijing were traditional American allies Israel (45%) and UK (30%), as well as China's Asia-Pacific neighbors Indonesia (32%) and Australia (32%).

The survey in the Philippines was conducted from May 28 to July 7, 2018 using face-to-face interviews among 1,181 adult respondents. The poll has a margin error of 4.2 percentage points.

"The margin of sampling error reported is based on all interviews conducted in a country. The margin of error takes into account the design effect due to clustering and weighting, where applicable," Pew said on its website.