China’s trajectory couldn’t be more different.
It already leads global production in multiple industries — steel, aluminum, shipbuilding, batteries, solar power, electric vehicles, wind turbines, drones, 5G equipment, consumer electronics, active pharmaceutical ingredients and bullet trains. It is projected to account for 45 percent — nearly half — of global manufacturing by 2030. Beijing is also laser-focused on winning the future: In March it announced a $138 billion national venture capital fund that will make long-term investments in cutting-edge technologies such as quantum computing and robotics, and increased its budget for public research and development.
The results of China’s approach have been stunning.
When the Chinese start-up DeepSeek launched its artificial intelligence chatbot in January, many Americans suddenly realized that China could compete in A.I. But there have been a series of Sputnik moments like that.
The Chinese electric carmaker BYD, which Mr. Trump’s political ally Elon Musk once laughed off as a joke, overtook Tesla last year in global sales, is building new factories around the world and in March reached a market value greater than that of Ford, GM and Volkswagen combined. China is charging ahead in drug discoveries, especially cancer treatments, and installed more industrial robots in 2023 than the rest of the world combined. In semiconductors, the vital commodity of this century and a longtime weak point for China, it is building a self-reliant supply chain led by recent breakthroughs by Huawei. Critically, Chinese strength across these and other overlapping technologies is creating a virtuous cycle in which advances in multiple interlocking sectors reinforce and elevate one another.
Yet Mr. Trump remains fixated on tariffs. He doesn’t even seem to grasp the scale of the threat posed by China. Before the two countries’ announcement last Monday that they had agreed to slash trade tariffs, Mr. Trump dismissed concerns that his previous sky-high tariffs on Chinese goods would leave shelves empty in American stores. He said Americans could just get by with buying fewer dolls for their children — a characterization of China as a factory for toys and other cheap junk that is wildly out of date.
The United States needs to realize that neither tariffs nor other trade pressure will get China to abandon the state-driven economic playbook that has worked so well for it and suddenly adopt industrial and trade policies that Americans consider fair. If anything, Beijing is doubling down on its state-led approach, bringing a Manhattan Project-style focus to achieving dominance in high-tech industries.
