US-China Barometer 2025
Benjamin Leffel & John L. Graham

As the world's two largest economies are clashing in frightening ways, we report the trends in China and the U.S. across economic, environmental, demographic, political and technological subject areas in a user-friendly fashion. Our Harvard Business Review article using previous U.S.-China Barometer data continues to be relevant, as our data-driven approach helps show that trade is not a zero-sum game, and interdependencies can help or hurt both countries.

Our 2025 Barometer is a statistical compendium of U.S.-China relations that is divided into two parts: Comparisons, which observes differences between both countries along a range of attributes, and Interactions, which examines the ways and extent to which both countries are connected to one another. The “Notes” section attached to each slide contains detailed commentary.

A few of the many trends we observe in the 2025 Barometer include:

1. 2024 GDP per capita and unemployment rates continue in good directions.
2. During the last decade, trade growth has flattened and become more volatile, with only minor increases in 2024.
3. Generally, China managed the COVID outbreak better, with longevity in the U.S. declining below that in China for the first time ever. Additionally, homicide rates in the U.S. rose steeply during those years.
4. A look at the 2030 population pyramids portends social upheavals in the coming decades. China’s birthrate crash is particularly alarming.
5. The Environmental Performance Index scores for both countries rose in 2024, at least temporarily halting a multiyear decline in both countries.
6. Renewable energy constitutes an increasing share, and fossil fuel a decreasing share, of total electricity generation in both countries from the previous year, continuing the trend in renewable energy transition.
7. Military spending in the U.S. continues at a breathtaking pace.
8. Chinese holding of U.S. Treasuries continues to decline.
9. Travel in both directions has recovered from COVID, but American undergrads enrolled in Chinese language courses continues to decline.
10. We do see collaborative invention continuing to grow with that in California doing particularly well.

We deliver the Barometer as a powerpoint presentation with interpretive notes and the data sets embedded (right click then choose “edit data”). Users and viewers are most welcome to adapt the presentation to their own purposes.In exchange we ask that you do not change the original data. We expect and seek your criticism so that we might improve the Barometer in future years. Feel free to send comments to Ben Leffel at benjamin.leffel@gmail.com (Twitter: @BenjaminJLeffel) or John L. Graham at jgraham@uci.edu

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Benjamin J. Leffel, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow | Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise
University of Michigan | Web: www.benleffel.com Twitter: @BenjaminJLeffel

Recent Publications

Climate consultants and complementarity: Local procurement, green industry and decarbonization in Australia, Singapore, and the United States in Energy Research & Social Science

Toward global urban climate mitigation: Linking national and polycentric systems of environmental change in Sociology of Development

Metropolitan air pollution abatement & industrial growth: Global urban panel analysis of PM2.5, PM10, SO2 and NO2 in Environmental Sociology