To many observers’ surprise, American views of China have softened slightly in 2026. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in March found that 27 percent of Americans now hold a favorable view of China, nearly double the share in 2023, while fewer Americans see China as benefiting from trade at the expense of the United States. But polling shifts do not necessarily tell us how durable changes in perception really are. To understand whether such shifts are durable, it is worth looking beyond Washington to the local communities where Chinese investment is actually experienced rather than merely debated.
In Dayton, Ohio, that local story is evident at Fuyao Glass America. Despite the controversy surrounding American Factory (2019) and the 2024 federal investigation into labor-related allegations, many local residents still describe the company as a positive force in the region. My own field visit in October 2024, and my subsequent study of Dayton-area media coverage, suggest that Chinese investment can produce a local perception markedly different from the adversarial narrative found in national politics. One worker told me his supervisors treated him well and that taking sick leave was not difficult. More tellingly, local residents pointed to the company’s upward mobility: one employee who started as a temporary worker was eventually promoted through four ranks to become a workshop manager overseeing 230 people. Hotel owners and other local service workers also described Fuyao as a major contributor to the regional economy. Their comments were practical rather than ideological. They reflected everyday experience, not Washington’s geopolitical vocabulary.
Drawing on my research on Dayton Daily News coverage from 2010 to 2025, I found that Fuyao related reporting was consistently more positive than both local coverage of China and nationally sourced China reporting carried in the same media environment. This suggests that Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) can create a distinctive micro-level perception environment around China. Over time, coverage of Fuyao also shifted away from a narrowly economic frame toward a more socially embedded one, in which the company was portrayed not only as a foreign investor but also as a local actor and participant in community life. Even after major controversies, trust-related signals in local reporting persisted.
This phenomenon matters because debates about U.S.-China relations often swing between two oversimplified assumptions. One is that securitization now dominates everything. The other is that economic exchange automatically hedges political hostility. The Fuyao case suggests some mechanisms that are more conditional and more grounded. Chinese investment does not erase distrust on its own. But when a firm becomes embedded in local labor markets, civic networks, and everyday routines, it can generate a more granular and less adversarial local perception than national political discourse would predict.
What matters here is the changing basis on which a Chinese firm is judged. In Dayton, Fuyao was not seen only as an abstract symbol of a strategic competitor. It was also encountered in daily life: as an employer, a workplace, a source of promotion, and a participant in local economic recovery. As former Ohio House member Niraj Antani has argued, Fuyao’s contribution reaches far beyond Dayton itself. The benefits extend to Montgomery County and the state of Ohio through job creation, tax revenue, and the household spending generated by the company’s presence.
Fuyao’s local embeddedness can be seen in several ways. Economically, the company provides jobs, wages, supplier ties, and a role in regional development. Socially, repeated contact makes the firm more familiar and predictable to workers and residents. Culturally, the company has tried to present itself not simply as a Chinese outpost but as part of the community. Institutionally, local officials, colleges, chambers of commerce, and community organizations have become stakeholders in the company’s continued operation. Together, these layers of contact can generate a limited but meaningful form of trust: the sense that a company is competent, responsive, and broadly aligned with local expectations.
That trust can act as a kind of shield. It does not prevent backlash, but it can make local perceptions more durable when a company faces scandals or political pressure. That seems to have happened in Dayton. Fuyao remained controversial, but it was not reduced to a local “China threat” image. Many people still viewed it through the three practical dimensions: employment, community support, and local revival. My analysis suggests that this difference was visible in the media environment as well: local coverage associated with Fuyao remained significantly more positive than broader national reporting on China.
This local buffer is not permanent. It can be broken when economic competition is recast through a national security lens. The Fuyao story itself shows how easily economic competition can be reframed as national security, sometimes in overstretched ways. A recent Wall Street Journal report described how Fuyao’s commercial success in U.S. auto glass has triggered backlash from rivals and China hawks, who now argue that Chinese firms can weaken American industry from within. The logic is revealing. Even when a Chinese investment wins support from workers, local officials, and regional suppliers, those who lose in local competition may still turn to national security language to attack it.
That is why Fuyao matters beyond one Ohio factory. The central question is not whether Chinese investment can “win over” the United States. The more useful question is whether local embeddedness can still preserve pockets of legitimacy in a relationship increasingly dominated by suspicion. The answer, for now, appears to be yes, but only under specific conditions and probably not forever.
Trump’s occasional openness to job-creating Chinese investment has added another layer of ambiguity to this picture. But the real question is larger than one president’s tactical rhetoric. Can Chinese investment still survive in the United States under intensifying strategic competition? Can Rust Belt revival still include foreign capital from America’s principal rival? And can such local contact create any durable basis for a future stabilization in U.S.-China relations?
Those questions may not be settled by one summit or mid-term election. But part of the answer is already visible in places like Dayton, where geopolitics remains powerful but does not fully determine how China is understood.
Yichao Hou studies International Political Economy at Nanyang Technological University and is a former media professional focusing on U.S.-China relations.